I started Harfoush because too many technology decisions get made by whoever is in the room selling something — and not enough get checked by someone who has actually operated what's being proposed.
My name is Ahmed Harfoush. I've spent more than two decades in telecommunications and IT infrastructure, most of it in Service Provider networking — IP/MPLS, SD-WAN, network security, cloud connectivity and managed services. I hold an active CCIE Service Provider certification, continuously maintained since 2013, alongside certifications across Cisco, Fortinet and Palo Alto technologies.
Most of my career has been spent leading technical organizations inside a major global telecom operator, where I ran a regional technical management group covering architecture-led delivery, shared centers of excellence, dedicated strategic-customer teams and indirect delivery models for enterprise, wholesale and airline customers. That work sat across architecture, implementation, operations, incident escalation and vendor governance — which is a longer way of saying: I've had to live with the consequences of the architectures I helped design.
That's the gap Harfoush is built to close. A customer asks for secure connectivity across 500 sites, and gets back a proposal with SD-WAN, three security platforms, two monitoring products and a stack of licenses that were never really justified against the requirement. Nobody sets out to over-engineer a solution — it happens because nobody in the process is specifically responsible for asking what's actually necessary. That's the role Harfoush plays.
My job is to check a proposed architecture against the actual requirement, and tell you plainly what's necessary, what's optional, and what isn't justified.
I work independently and vendor-neutrally. I'm not paid by a manufacturer to recommend their platform, and I don't take a percentage of what gets sold. The recommendation is built around your requirement, and I'll say so plainly when a proposal — including one of my own past recommendations — doesn't hold up.
If you're an enterprise trying to validate a proposal, or a service provider trying to sharpen one before it goes out the door, that's the conversation I'm set up to have.