Hardening IT operations for a B2B travel platform
At one of India's B2B travel distribution platforms, I led IT across multiple offices — infrastructure, security, business continuity and a team — where downtime directly interrupts bookings and revenue.
Role — Manager — Digital & IT
- Platform environments run (Linux, VMware, Windows)
- 3Platform environments run (Linux, VMware, Windows)
- Estate under one operating model
- Multi-officeEstate under one operating model
Context
Travel distribution is an availability business. When the platform is down, agents cannot book, and a booking not made in the moment is usually a booking made somewhere else. That gives infrastructure work a directness it lacks in many industries: uptime is not an IT metric, it is a revenue metric.
The remit covered IT operations across multiple offices — infrastructure, systems, security and the team running them.
What the work involved
Infrastructure and virtualization. Hands-on responsibility across Linux, VMware and Windows environments, including virtual infrastructure and endpoint detection and response.
Security and access. Enforcing security policy compliance, managing user access, and protecting organizational data — with Google Workspace administered directly, including email security.
Business continuity. Strategic IT solutions aimed at network efficiency, security and continuity, with incident management structured so that problems were resolved rather than repeatedly rediscovered.
Commercial. Vendor contract negotiation and comprehensive IT asset management — the unglamorous discipline that determines whether an estate stays supportable as it grows.
People. Mentoring the IT team, with professional development and knowledge sharing treated as part of the job rather than an extra.
The through-line
This role sits between the franchise-scale application work that preceded it and the enterprise architecture work that followed. It is the infrastructure layer of the same story: systems that stay up, are governed, and can be handed to a team that knows how to run them.
Architecture that ignores operations produces designs that cannot be operated. Having run the estate directly is what makes the architecture practical.