Highlighted engagements.

The directory at the centre of this lender had been extended, patched and worked around for twenty years, and the institution had outgrown it. Nobody could say with confidence who held administrative rights, or what would break if a permission were withdrawn. A set of legacy IBM terminal applications, still in daily use on the lending desk, depended on it in ways that had never been written down.

The lender now holds a written, current account of who can administer what, the evidence sits behind it, and the cutover cost the business no scheduled downtime at all.

This practice draws and engineers buildings, and its archive of design files, tens of terabytes, accumulated over decades, is the business. When we took the estate over from its previous provider, all of it depended on ageing hardware with no backups of any kind, no fault tolerance and no high availability. A failed disk would have been a catastrophe, and a quieter risk sat alongside that one: a file overwritten or deleted in error was simply gone.

Some months later a storm took one of the servers offline for two days. The practice learned of the failure from us, rather than from any interruption to its work.

What this provider asked us was narrow and serious: if ransomware reached the estate, and the attacker went for the backups first, as they now routinely do, would patient records survive it? On examination, the answer was no. The backups sat on the same network, reachable with the same credentials, and had not been restored from in living memory.

The provider can now put a date on the last time its backups were shown to restore, and it is always within the month.

Six offices, large video files moving between them all day, and one ageing virtual private network carrying everything. Whoever connected, an editor, a freelancer, an attacker with a phished password, landed on the whole internal network, and the security team knew it. The tunnel also had a habit of dropping mid-transfer, which the production schedule felt every time.

The old tunnel is decommissioned. Connecting to the network no longer grants any access of its own.

This firm's product teams could create cloud resources faster than anyone could keep account of them. Then the month-end invoices stopped being explicable. Resources nobody owned ran on for months, spending was a surprise rather than a figure, and the question of who was entitled to change production had several answers depending on who was asked.

The teams kept their speed. What changed is that the bill is now a number the firm can predict, and every running resource has a name against it.

This plant runs day and night, every day of the year, and the systems that schedule and feed the line run with it. The servers beneath them were years past their service life, but every conventional replacement plan began with the same impossible sentence: first, stop the line. The plant could not stop, so the approach was built around that constraint.

The old servers were powered off months after the line had stopped depending on them. Production never paused once.