Selected work
From end-of-life infrastructure to a secure cloud foundation
I led a phased cloud-first modernisation for an international industrial company, retiring outdated infrastructure, strengthening identity and access controls, consolidating organisational data and reducing the recurring IT run rate by over 50%.
Context
When I took ownership of IT, I inherited an overbuilt and poorly documented on-premises environment supporting approximately 50 employees. Core services were spread across too many servers and software vendors, modern security controls were missing, and several systems were approaching or already at end of life.
The most urgent risk was the on-premises Exchange server, which had one month of Microsoft support remaining. Continuing with it would have increased both security exposure and operating costs.
Decision
I developed the technical and financial case for a phased cloud transformation. I showed the leadership team how the existing environment affected cost, security and operational resilience, and how services already included in our Microsoft licensing could replace expensive on-premises infrastructure.
Leadership approved the programme, and I took responsibility for its architecture and delivery.
Delivery
With support from my team, we delivered the transformation through several focused projects:
- Migrated approximately 60 mailboxes to Exchange Online.
- Moved identity from end-of-life domain controllers to cloud-native services.
- Introduced multifactor authentication and Conditional Access.
- Decommissioned approximately five servers.
- Rationalised software vendors and licensing.
- Consolidated approximately 2 TB of data from network drives and Dropbox into SharePoint.
- Removed obsolete data with business owners, refined parts of the information structure and trained users on SharePoint and OneDrive.
The data migration required resolving legacy file-path limitations and ownership issues involving content in Dropbox. The complete programme was delivered without lost email or data and without material interruption to the business.
Outcome
The new environment reduced the recurring IT run rate by over 50%. The one-time migration costs were recovered through savings in less than one month.
Beyond the financial result, the company moved away from unsupported infrastructure and gained a more secure, resilient and supportable foundation for international work, modern device management and governed use of enterprise AI.