Case study · Sep 2009 – Apr 2025
The Case Centre: fifteen years of infrastructure nobody had to think about
Sole IT administrator for an international, not-for-profit publisher serving business schools worldwide. One person, every layer — from the patch panel to the cloud bill — for over fifteen years. The achievement isn't any single project; it's that IT was never the thing standing in the company's way.
01The job under the job
On paper: keep the network up, the servers running, the staff supported across macOS, Windows and mobile. In practice, being a company's only IT person for fifteen years is a different discipline from working in a team. There is no escalation path — you are the escalation path. Every decision has to be made knowing you'll personally live with its maintenance burden for a decade, which turns out to be an excellent filter against fashionable complexity.
That constraint shaped everything on this page, and it's the through-line to the CaseConduit build: architecture chosen so one person can operate it isn't a compromise — done properly, it's a forcing function for simplicity.
02The long migration: metal to managed
I inherited a classic 2000s estate — onsite servers, local file shares, on-premise email — and over the years retired all of it, deliberately and without drama.
- All onsite servers migrated to AWS, then managed as cloud infrastructure proper: VPC design, EC2, Route 53, S3, IAM. This was 2010s-era AWS adoption at a small organisation — no consultants, no migration partner, one administrator reading, testing and cutting over service by service.
- File and email services moved to Microsoft 365, including the Exchange Online migration — the single highest-stakes change a small company's IT can make, because everyone notices email.
- The server room itself upgraded along the way — racks, patch panels, KVM, UPS — because the physical layer still has to be right even while you're working to empty it.
Migrations at a 25-person company have a property big-company case studies never mention: there is no maintenance window that doesn't hit someone's deadline, and no second administrator to roll things back while you sleep. The discipline is sequencing — service by service, each step reversible, each cutover boring. Fifteen years of that is where my instinct for incremental, always-live change comes from.
03Security as a habit, not a project
- Cyber Essentials: implemented the security policies and controls to meet the standard — patching regimes, access control, boundary defences — and kept them met, year after year.
- Email trust: raised DMARC (with SPF/DKIM) to a strict standard and held it there — unglamorous work that quietly protects a publisher's domain reputation, deliverability and brand.
- Network boundary: managed all company firewalls and implemented the full spread of VPN configurations — BOVPN, IKEv2, IPSec, SSL, L2TP — as remote and site-to-site needs evolved.
- Disaster recovery: planned and implemented the DR solution — and treated backups the only way that matters, as something you test, not something you have.
04Running IT as a business function
Sole-charge IT is half engineering, half stewardship of other people's money and time.
- Owned the IT budget — circa £100K annually — and every procurement decision against it, from laptops to cloud spend to the company's VoIP and mobile contracts.
- Built the IT help desk in SharePoint — ticketing, purchase requests, SOPs — so support had structure and history rather than living in one person's inbox.
- Automated the tedious: a Microsoft 365 PowerAutomate AI flow reconciling invoices against statements — early, practical AI adoption doing a finance chore reliably.
- Wrote internal tooling where buying made no sense: a file distribution system and a server drive-health monitor in ColdFusion — pragmatic code in service of operations.
- Delivered projects end to end — conception to completion — including a pivotal IT role in the company's rebrand.
05What fifteen years proves
Longevity in a sole-charge role is itself the reference: a business doesn't keep its only IT person for fifteen years unless things work, costs make sense, and the person is someone non-technical colleagues can actually talk to.