About

Rami Hammouri

IT infrastructure and operations leader in the United States. Twenty-five years in enterprise systems — infrastructure and network management, cloud hybridization, security operations and digital transformation — most of it spent in high-growth organizations where the systems had to keep working while they changed underneath.

Now

Most recently Director of IT Infrastructure at Alera Group. I am between roles and looking for the next enterprise-scale problem worth solving — ideally one where infrastructure, delivery pressure and a real business constraint all meet.

Early life

My father worked as a Refugee Placement Officer for the United Nations and my mother was a teacher. Between the two of them I grew up around people starting over and around people learning, which is a reasonable description of most of the work I have done since.

I have been an avid outdoorsman for as long as I can remember.

Education

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Information Systems.

Experience

Jul 2024—Jul 2025

Director, IT Infrastructure

Alera Group · Remote

Standardized IT infrastructure across newly acquired entities at a $1.3 billion insurance, wealth management and benefits broker, consolidating services, retiring redundant MSPs and moving the group onto a single service model. Led a distributed team across cloud and on-premises systems in a multi-business-unit structure.

Strengthened the security posture by removing legacy systems and introducing zero-trust methods, and led the IT organization through a cyber event with Palo Alto’s Unit 42. Drove the move to Nutanix and Cohesity in place of HyperV and VMware, SD-WAN with Meraki and Palo Alto, Microsoft Teams Voice in place of legacy telephony, and Cortex XSIAM as the SIEM. Acted as subject-matter expert on ITIL asset, incident, change, knowledge and problem management.

$15M annual cost savings
220 sites on SD-WAN
$1.3B group revenue

Feb 2022—May 2024

Executive Director of Information Technology Services

Shentel · Columbus, Ohio

Led a multifunctional IT team through a period of rapid growth, matching expanded service offerings with new systems, functions and roles. Created the IT security team and built out a Security Operations Center, running the workstreams that deployed incident response, vulnerability detection, threat intelligence and risk compliance capability, and wrote the enterprise security policies and standards behind them.

Introduced service management, configuration management and asset management, relaunched Salesforce across the enterprise, and built the roadmap for customer, account and inventory management platforms to carry large-scale growth. Chaired committees on regulatory and audit concerns, including successful reviews by the Department of Justice.

$180K monthly cost reduction
−60% vulnerability response time
−30% incident response time
+50% help desk tickets addressed

Nov 2018—Sep 2021

Director of IT Operations

Arhaus

Ran IT operations for the retailer across a large annual budget — Citrix and Microsoft VDI, Mitel, VMware, Salesforce Sales and Service Cloud, data center operations and product information management — leading a team of more than twenty engineers, administrators, support technicians and project managers.

Served as program and portfolio manager for cloud migrations and ERP upgrades, and delivered new Citrix Cloud, Salesforce and PIM implementations. Helped develop the modern Citrix Cloud solution with Citrix, Microsoft, an SME partner and a proof-of-concept customer, and spoke on it at Citrix Synergy 2020. Established KPIs, SLAs and metric-based reporting, and put ITIL incident and change management in place.

$4.8M project performance improvement
−66% monthly IT work volume
+20% IT capacity through automation

Sep 2011—Jun 2018

IT Operations Manager

Life Line Screening · Austin, Texas

Modernized IT systems and infrastructure on a new strategic roadmap, managing an operations team of thirty-five spanning network and systems engineering, desktop support, telephony, web and SQL development, and database administration. Developed IT KPIs on ITIL v3 and negotiated SLAs with departments across the business.

Delivered a new Mitel Communications Director phone system, migrated SQL Server from on-premises 2008 to 2016 in Azure using failover clustering, moved Exchange to Office 365, and designed and ran a mass migration from a collocated physical data center to a private virtual cloud — virtualizing firewalls and load balancers along the way. Built the disaster recovery, high availability and business continuity plans behind it.

$200K annual savings, telephony
+7.5% conversion rate
+3.6% revenue
35person operations team

Standards

Work delivered against HIPAA, PCI, FDA, ISO 9001 and SOX requirements, across industries and alongside near-shore and offshore development and operations teams in Europe, Australia, Asia and South America.

Setting priorities

Through alignment and clarity. I define what success looks like, which deadlines are genuinely hard, and what constraints exist — then I check how the goal connects to the wider operational or business objective.

From there I separate what is merely urgent from what is high impact, so business-critical operations go first and non-essential enhancements move to later phases without piling pressure on the team. Long-term objectives get broken into short operational milestones with clear ownership and visible tracking, and I build in check-ins to re-evaluate as business needs shift.

Under pressure

I separate the immediate emotional reaction, or the self-doubt, from the actual facts. Then I execute the next logical step rather than worrying about the entire finished product — and I reach out to peers, mentors and technical experts when the problem calls for it.

On one major process update we hit an unexpected compatibility issue between an old system and a new tool, which threatened to stall progress for weeks. Rather than wait for an external patch I worked through the workflow detail with the technical leads, drafted a temporary workaround to keep data moving securely, and put a permanent fix in once the root cause was resolved.

What drives it

I have had two very influential mentors over my career and I still learn from both. Underneath that, the drive is straightforward: tangible business impact, complex puzzles, and continuous personal growth.

Balance

Personal and professional success are not competing goals. Work provides purpose and structure; health, family and personal growth provide the foundation and the mental clarity to perform. Holding both forces me to be efficient during work hours and focus on high-impact outcomes rather than long ones, so that when I step away I can actually be present. That is what prevents burnout and keeps perspective sharp on high-pressure projects.

Outside work

My kids and I love the outdoors — camping, fishing and hiking, as often as we can manage it.