Darren Clarke

Experience

• 

  Royal Air Force

  Nov 1993 - Sept 2014

  Responsible for the effective management, planning and delivery of improvements in Communication Security ensuring guidance and support is available to Station personnel. Plan, manage and expedite the movement of sensitive items for UK Typhoon aircraft based at RAF Leuchars, to other UK locations or overseas, ensuring all involved external Agencies are continuously appraised of all aspects of movement until successful delivery is attained.Secondary responsibilities include that of Local Security Officer required to rectify user account faults on station. Where necessary pass faults that cannot be remedied locally to an external 2nd Line Support team and act as liaison between the User and 2nd Line support team accordingly. Additionally responsible for ensuring all mobile IT assets are fully functional with necessary accounts and user profiles cached, all anti-virus updates applied and all WAN cards and RSA encryption keys are configured and subscribed accordingly. Show less Primary role involved providing assistance to the Deployment Manager responsible for Air Combat Service Support underpinning Network enabled Air Operations.Main duties included:Maintaining and operating network equipment carrying out implementation and testing of all IP and network configurations on layer 1 and layer 2 devices, rear-link communications and User devices prior to deployment to various theatres of operation. This involved varied 1st and 2nd line responsibilities throughout.Management of resources and identification of any shortfall's in equipment serviceability as preventative action to ensure minimal impact on services provided across various networks to multiple locations.Identifying and evaluating the training needs of junior team members to attain training objectives and ensuring skill sets were concurrent at all times Show less Initial responsibilities were that of 1st Line Incident Team fault reporting responsible for recording all faults raised by Users on a closed military network. The network comprised of servers running Solaris 10 UNIX OS and clients running Windows XP OS. Utilised remote network monitoring software to observe network connectivity and proactively escalate faults and liaise with remote System Administrators where necessary.Moved to 2nd Line Incident Team Fault Rectification responsible for working on all Layer 1 and Layer 2 faults identified on the network. Carried out fault rectification on the UNIX OS at command line level using BASH scripting and network interrogation on the Joint Communication Processor which handled the network gateway, Cyberguard Firewalls, Apache and IIS web framework, Microsoft Message Transfer Agents, Microsoft Exchange Server and associated Global address book updates as well as IOS scripting on Cisco products.Secondary responsibilities included Change Management for the recovery, rebuild and re-deployment of mobile assets ensuring sustainable network connectivity for deployed users. Responsible for pre-empting a system wide client OS upgrade, from Windows XP to Windows Vista, by ensuring that all mobile deployed users received an individual replacement laptop hard drive configured with the OS upgrade in advance. This vastly reduced the remote downtime and impact on network connectivity for the mobile deployed users. Show less

  • Communications Security Assistant

    Jan 2011 - Sept 2014

  • Information Technology Support Specialist

    Jun 2007 - Jan 2011

  • Information Technology Support Specialist

    May 2003 - Jun 2007

  • Computer Operator

    Jan 2001 - May 2003

  • Radio Operator

    Feb 1998 - Jan 2001

  • Radio Operator

    Nov 1993 - Feb 1998
• 

  KINGDOM HOUSING ASSOCIATION LIMITED

  Nov 2014 - now

  Digital Support Officer

  Provide support on cloud based IaaS, PaaS and SaaS products across the Kingdom domain allowing Kingdom Group Users to complete core business.Providing support within the Digital Team assisting the migration between Microsoft and Google Platforms inline with departmental strategy to achieve a cloud-first environment.Daily administration of the VMware virtualised server environment, cloud environment and bespoke off the shelf products enabling the Group to function across several key areas including Housing, Finance and Customer ServiceAssist with overseeing and managing multiple projects within the Group to bring online new products, services and ways of working. Show less