IT Architect — IT Solution Experts IT Architect — IT Solution Experts

25 years · enterprise infrastructure

IT Infrastructure & Security experts

Twenty-five years designing, building and securing enterprise infrastructure — on-premises, cloud and hybrid, with applied AI where it genuinely helps.

What we do See the evidence

What we do

End User Compute

Managed laptops, desktops, mobile devices and virtual desktops — delivered and secured at scale.

AI & Agent Automation

Applied AI in operations — including self-hosted agents on your own infrastructure.

Infrastructure at scale

IT Architect is led by Darren Pilkington. Before cloud was the default the work was racks, storage, virtualisation and migration windows, and that grounding is why the cloud work holds up.

Data centre build and exit

Data centres built and commissioned for remote offices worldwide, and new enterprise facilities in the UK. Later, four legacy data centres decommissioned with zero data loss — the full lifecycle, from empty room to switch-off.

Migration at volume

Thousands of virtual machines and business applications migrated, including energy trading systems, plus 2,000 servers moved to hybrid cloud during a platform upgrade. Large migrations are a planning and rollback problem long before they are a technical one.

Global estates

Thirteen years as a global infrastructure architect for an energy group operating in more than 50 countries, followed by security and identity programmes reaching 65,000 users across hybrid cloud.

Technologies we deliver with

Virtualisation & compute
VMware vSphere (v3 to v8), Hyper-V, Proxmox, server and storage platform design
Storage & backup
NetApp (SAN/NAS), HPE, TrueNAS, Synology, Symantec NetBackup
Cloud platforms
AWS (IAM, EC2, S3, RDS), Azure (VMs, Entra ID, networking), hybrid cloud
Infrastructure as code
Terraform, Ansible, AWX / Ansible Controller, ARM, CloudFormation, PowerShell, Packer
Networking
Cisco, HPE, Fortinet, OPNsense, AWS and Azure networking, routing, switching, firewalls, segmentation
Operating systems
Windows Server (all versions), Ubuntu, RHEL, Amazon Linux
End user compute
Managed Windows desktops and laptops, Citrix XenApp, RDS, VDI, mobile device management, endpoint hardening
Enterprise services
Active Directory / ADDS, Group Policy, MOVEit Transfer & Automation, Microsoft 365
Identity & access
CyberArk, SailPoint, Entra ID, AWS IAM, Active Directory, zero-trust access, MFA, PKI
Security tooling
Splunk, QRadar, HP ArcSight, Qualys, Nessus, Tripwire, Symantec Endpoint Protection
Monitoring
Grafana, Zabbix, SolarWinds, ScienceLogic, MS Operations Manager
Containers & CI/CD
Docker, Kubernetes, Git, GitHub Actions pipelines
AI & agent automation
Claude, OpenAI and Grok APIs, agent orchestration, LLM-assisted IaC, self-hosted LLM deployment

How we work

Reproducible, not hand-built

If an environment cannot be rebuilt from source control, it is a liability. Everything we build is defined as code, validated in CI and documented for whoever inherits it.

Straight answers

Sometimes the right advice is that a migration is not worth it, or that AI will not help with the problem you have. You will get that view early, not after the invoice.

Security as a default

Hardening, identity and least privilege designed in from the start. Controls engineers route around are worse than none at all.

Evidence over adjectives

Working reference implementations are published publicly so you can inspect the standard of work before you commit to anything.

Got a project in mind?

Tell us what you are trying to achieve and you will get an honest view on whether we are the right fit for it. darren.pilkington@it-architect.uk or get in touch.