Cloud Architect
Scroll to find out moreHi, I'm Prashant — a Cloud Architect based in Dubai, UAE. I design and implement cloud-agnostic, cost-effective infrastructure that drives business growth, balancing technical depth with business acumen to deliver solutions that fit how organizations actually work.
Fifteen years in, I've built 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 spending the last decade across the UAE. 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.
Industries
My work sits across multi-cloud platforms — Azure, AWS, GCP and OCI — enterprise identity, Microsoft 365, cloud security, and the automation that holds all of it together. Cloud-agnostic by default, because the design that only works on one provider is a commercial decision disguised as a technical one.
I'd rather ship the simplest thing that satisfies the requirement than the most interesting thing I could justify — good architecture is easy to understand, great architecture is difficult to misuse. Security and governance belong in the design from the first diagram, and anything done more than once should be code. I've yet to see a case where guardrails genuinely slowed a capable engineering team down; mostly they let them move faster without asking permission. My eight working principles are set out in full further down this page.
Lately I've been focused on AI infrastructure and Azure OpenAI architecture — generative AI in production rather than in a slide deck, plus the AI-driven automation and intelligent workflows that make operations measurably more efficient and modern workplaces genuinely smarter. Copilot and Copilot Studio, computer vision on GPU, AIOps that closes its own incidents.
Increasingly the work is as much programme as platform. I lead transformation efforts spanning engineering, security, finance and business stakeholders, translate them for the executives who fund them, and sit across vendor contracts and licensing where the commercial detail decides whether a design is actually affordable. Alongside that I define the standards and mentor the teams who build against them — the part of the job with the longest half-life, because a standard outlives whatever I personally deployed.
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 programme 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 programmes, 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 afterwards.
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, behavioural 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 programme 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, centralising management, standardising 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 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 one of the UAE's fully digital banks 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
Led the bank's Infrastructure as Code programme 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 programmes. 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 and BFS. At Majid Al Futtaim 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.
Architecting Azure and Microsoft 365 infrastructure for a multi-tenant national museum platform, spanning AI/ML platforms, computer vision, AIOps, Zero Trust identity, and cloud cost governance across the wider estate.
Owned enterprise cloud infrastructure across AWS and Azure — landing zone governance, identity lifecycle automation, endpoint modernization, and the cloud operations standards the wider IT estate runs on.
Core build team member standing up one of the UAE's fully digital banks — owned Azure infrastructure, security, and Infrastructure as Code end to end, holding PCI-DSS, SWIFT, and NESA compliance throughout.
Supported Majid Al Futtaim Group's on-premises to AWS migration, managed a large hybrid server estate across AWS, Azure, and VMware, and provided Level 3 support for Office 365 and core Microsoft infrastructure.
Led Scorpio Marine's on-premises to Azure transformation — infrastructure design, sizing, and workload placement across IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS — alongside vendor management and cost reduction.
Built a systems and infrastructure foundation across three roles — Server Engineer, System Engineer, and System Administrator — working hands-on with server administration and enterprise IT operations.
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