Overview
Over 12 years I’ve designed, built and operated the entire IT estate of a multi-site manufacturing enterprise — leading a lean in-house IT function (myself and, for much of the period, one assistant) and scoping and coordinating external contractors for outsourced work, mainly low-voltage and structured-cabling installations. From the network up, what started as ad-hoc systems is now a documented, monitored, production-grade environment with a single source of truth.
By the numbers
- 5 production sites, 40+ physical locations
- 600+ managed devices and 800+ IP addresses in a structured plan
- 30+ virtual machines across 3 Hyper-V clusters
- 20+ site-to-site IPsec tunnels in a full mesh
- 500+ device types across 30+ vendors catalogued in the CMDB
Full-stack ownership
Direct, hands-on ownership across every layer of the stack:
- Network — core, distribution and access switching, routing and multi-vendor firewalls; segmented VLANs for servers, office, production, VoIP, Wi-Fi and physical-security systems.
- Compute — Windows Server, Active Directory and Hyper-V virtualisation across three clusters.
- Collaboration & identity — VoIP telephony (150+ handsets) and hybrid Microsoft 365 / Entra ID.
- Physical & life-safety systems — IP CCTV and access control integrated into the same managed network.
- Operations — an automated CMDB/IPAM (NetBox) kept in sync from asset management, plus centralised monitoring, logging and SIEM.
- Procurement & asset lifecycle — sole owner of company-wide IT procurement (laptops, workstations, monitors, printers, phones, smartphones, servers, networking and all peripherals) and of software licences and subscriptions (purchasing, renewals and monitoring). Ran two full hardware-refresh cycles end to end — from purchase and commissioning to decommissioning and disposal or resale on the secondary market.
- Team & vendor management — leading the in-house function and coordinating external contractors for outsourced installations (low-voltage, structured cabling), from scoping to acceptance.
What this represents
Network designed and deployed from scratch, server virtualisation across three clusters, a full-mesh inter-site VPN, and 600+ devices catalogued, monitored and documented — run by a lean in-house team and a managed network of contractors. In scope and complexity, it’s the kind of estate many organisations staff as a full IT department or outsource to a systems integrator.