Cloud & AI Platforms — Designed, Built and Run
Scroll to find out moreHi, I'm Prashant — a hands-on Cloud & AI Architect based in the UAE. I design, build and run the platforms that drive business growth, balancing technical depth with business acumen to deliver solutions that fit how organizations actually work.
I've spent my career designing secure, cost-effective multi-cloud infrastructure for regulated industries. Today I bring that same discipline to agentic AI solutions integrated through MCP, the AI platforms they run on, and the governance that keeps it all safe.
Fifteen years in, I've built and run platforms for a national cultural authority, a greenfield digital bank, a luxury retail group, one of the region's largest mall and leisure operators, and a global shipping company — starting out in IT services and managed services in Mumbai, India, and working across the UAE since 2018. Across all of them, the technical design was rarely the hardest part. Meeting regulatory requirements, staying inside a budget, and handing over something the operations team can actually run — that is where most of the work sits.
I keep architecture simple, and build security, governance and automation in from the first diagram rather than adding them before go-live. Anything done more than once should be code.
Lately I've been focused on agentic AI — agents in production rather than in a slide deck. I design and build single and multi-agent solutions on Copilot Studio, OpenAI and Claude that take over manual, repetitive processes, connected through MCP servers to the business systems people already use. I also own the platform underneath: I design, build and govern Copilot Studio, the OpenAI Platform, Claude, Microsoft Foundry and the wider AI environment — from tenant setup, identity and access management (IAM) and API keys for developers and applications, to usage limits and token efficiency, with model and MCP traffic routed through an Azure AI gateway for visibility and control.
Great architecture isn't about choosing the newest technology. It's about making the right decisions that balance business value, security, scalability, operational excellence, and long-term sustainability.
Technology exists to create business value, not technical complexity. Every architectural decision should improve scalability, security, operational efficiency, customer experience or cost.
A successful architecture is measured by business outcomes, not by the number of services it uses.
Security is never an afterthought. It is built into every layer of the architecture, from identity through to data at rest.
Security should accelerate innovation, not slow it down.
Good architecture is easy to understand. Great architecture is difficult to misuse. Where several solutions exist, choose the simplest one that satisfies the requirement.
Complexity is a cost someone pays every day after you leave.
Anything performed more than once should be automated. Infrastructure is software, and everything eventually becomes code.
If it only exists in someone's head, it isn't architecture yet.
Failures are inevitable. Downtime is optional. Every solution assumes something will break and stays available when it does.
Hope is not a disaster recovery strategy.
Governance should never block engineering teams. It should provide safe guardrails that let them move faster than they could without it.
Guardrails on a mountain road let you drive faster, not slower.
The cheapest solution today often becomes the most expensive tomorrow. Cloud is about value, not just a lower bill.
A design that saves 10% and needs three more engineers to run has cost you money.
Technology changes and architecture should evolve with it. Every design gets reviewed again rather than defended forever.
The best architecture is never finished.
Designing the system is half of it. The other half is the program around it — the people, the budget, and the case you make to the people who sign it off.
DCT Abu Dhabi · 2025 – Present
Architected a mission-critical, multi-tenant platform on Azure and Microsoft 365 serving three national institutions — Zayed National Museum, Natural History Museum and Al Ain Museum — from a single governed estate. Scope ran across ticketing, visitor services, exhibits, digital content, finance, security, marketing and education programs, with tenant isolation that lets each museum operate independently.
DCT Abu Dhabi · 2025 – Present
Built an enterprise generative AI platform on Azure OpenAI, delivering a multilingual visitor chatbot and AI-driven collection cataloging. The harder half was compliance: UAE data sovereignty rules and GDPR were met through native encryption, Key Vault integration and role-based access control rather than bolted on afterward.
DCT Abu Dhabi · 2025 – Present
Designed and deployed an AI-powered computer vision system on Red Hat OpenShift with NVIDIA GPUs, providing real-time visitor movement tracking, behavioral analytics and predictive security alerting across the museum estates.
DCT Abu Dhabi · 2025 – Present
Layered an AIOps framework over Azure Monitor and Dynatrace for anomaly detection, predictive alerting and self-healing workflows, run in parallel with a cost program of rightsizing, reserved capacity and automated scaling — proving the two goals are not in tension.
Al Tayer Group · 2023 – 2025
Designed an AWS Landing Zone that pulled nine separate accounts under one governance framework, centralizing management, standardizing resource allocation and enforcing best practice across all of them. Defined the operating processes and procedures behind AWS cloud operations to speed up issue resolution across the team.
Al Tayer Group · 2023 – 2025
Designed Joiner–Mover–Leaver identity lifecycle automation on Entra ID covering secure provisioning, deprovisioning and periodic access reviews, then moved application authentication onto Entra ID (formerly Azure AD) across SAML, OAuth and OpenID Connect. Rolled Microsoft Intune out across Windows, macOS, iOS and Android, with Defender for Endpoint deployed alongside it.
Zand Bank PJSC · 2019 – 2023
Joined the core build team standing up a fully digital UAE bank from nothing. Planned and implemented the entire Azure infrastructure and security estate end to end — Enterprise Agreement setup and tenant provisioning, networking, compute, data and security services — working alongside application architects, DevOps and data teams to keep every solution cloud-native, cloud-agnostic and aligned to 12-factor and microservices principles. Held PCI-DSS, SWIFT and NESA compliance with the CISO team throughout.
Zand Bank PJSC · 2019 – 2023
Contributed to the bank's Infrastructure as Code program using Terraform and Python automation across both Azure and Google Cloud, covering the full core banking stack — retail and corporate banking, payments, middleware, CRM, loans, KYC/AML, cards and notifications. Worked with Microsoft's Azure FastTrack and Enterprise Unified teams to keep the estate aligned to the Well-Architected Framework.
Scorpio Marine & MAF Group · 2014 – 2019
Two large migration programs. At Scorpio Marine I led the move from on-premises to Azure end to end — design, sizing, capacity planning and workload placement across IaaS, PaaS and SaaS — migrating 900+ VMs using ASR. At Majid Al Futtaim (MAF Group) I managed a hybrid estate of 1,500+ servers across AWS, Azure and VMware while setting each application's migration path: rehost, rebuild, replatform, refactor or replace.