About

I am Darren Pilkington, an it infrastructure & security architect with 25 years in enterprise IT. I work through IT Solution Architecture Limited, based in South Wales and working remotely across the UK.

The short version

Most of my career has been spent inside large, regulated organisations — aviation, financial services, consultancy — designing and securing infrastructure where downtime and data loss carry real consequences. That means cloud migrations that had to work first time, security architecture that had to satisfy auditors, and automation that had to be maintainable by whoever came next.

Why independent work

Large programmes teach discipline, but smaller organisations often need the same standard of thinking without a consultancy's overhead. A small business moving to the cloud faces the same identity, backup and segmentation questions as a large one — the answers are just proportionate. That gap is the interesting part.

On AI

I use AI tooling daily in delivery and I am genuinely enthusiastic about it, which is exactly why I try to be careful about it. Agents wired into real systems are privileged accounts, and most of the value comes from infrastructure and security judgement rather than clever prompting. If AI will not help with your problem, I will say so.

Credentials

BSc in Applied Psychology and Computing. Certifications across the stack rather than in one corner of it: AWS Solutions Architect and Cloud Practitioner, CompTIA Security+, VMware Certified Professional (vSphere 3 to 6), NetApp NCDA and NCIE, Microsoft MCITP and MCSA Enterprise Administrator, Azure architecture and networking, Citrix XenApp CCAA, Fortinet FCNSA and Symantec NetBackup. The full list is on LinkedIn (opens in a new tab).

How engagements usually run

• A conversation first, at no cost, to work out whether the problem and I fit
• A written view of scope, approach and risks before anyone commits
• Fixed price where the work can be defined; day rate where it genuinely cannot
• Documentation and handover treated as part of delivery, not an extra