Chris Astley

Chris has over 16 years experience in building and managing enterprise workloads in multiple scenarios. For the past 10 years he has focused on deploying applications and services in public cloud environments whilst retaining a strong security posture. He is a capable leader in bringing modern technology practices to large enterprises and is an industry expert in major cloud providers such as amazon web services, microsoft azure and google cloud platform.

Today, Chris is responsible for the connected cngineering practice for KPMG UK. The team has numerous capabilities around devops, cloud, application development and automation, allowing the firm to quickly and easily deploy applications and services to clients. By building this capability, Chris has given KPMG a competitive edge in terms of agility and speed to market and is assisting clients in gaining a similar capability themselves. Through these capabilities, KPMG has been able to deploy over 1,000 workloads to the cloud in support of our clients’ business transformation projects.

Large UK Banking Client – building out a Client Due Diligence data processing service in the cloud with a strong focus on information security. Obtaining regulatory approval for storing sensitive client data in the cloud whilst running and operating a 24/7 highly resilient yet agile and cost effective service. Lead a large team of devops engineers in the delivery of a reliable infrastructure that could be built in hours to support several thousand simultaneous users.

Leading the design and delivery of a unified demilitarized zone (DMZ) in microsoft azure to implement security policies for all cloud-deployed, public-internet facing services for one of the UK’s biggest banks. Working closely with the Cyber Security teams and ensuring all policies are complied with, easily evidenced and automated in their deployment.

Leading the strategy and delivery of a pathfinder/accelerator programme within the bank to rapidly adopt public cloud services in amazon web services (AWS). Chris lead the team in defining a detailed control framework alongside actionable tasks to deliver them in an efficient and automated way. At the same time KPMG lead and augmented an existing client-side engineering team to build out the minimum viable product (MVP) of a public cloud deployment while transferring knowledge and skills into the organisation. The net result being that this client can now stand up an entire service in minutes where it used to take several months.