I’ve been in IT for more than three decades. Long enough to have built AD forests by hand and long enough to have watched most of that infrastructure quietly move into the cloud.
My core background is Windows environments. Active Directory, DNS, DHCP, Group Policy, SCCM, the infrastructure layer that everything else sits on. Over the last few years that’s shifted towards Microsoft 365, Azure, and Intune, and honestly that’s where most of the interesting work is now.
Security runs through all of it. Not as a bolt-on, but as part of how I design and manage environments. That’s meant a lot of time in Microsoft Defender, Conditional Access, and Intune for device compliance, building out proper defence-in-depth rather than relying on a firewall and a patch schedule. Zero-trust gets talked about a lot. Making it actually work in a live environment is a different job entirely.
A few years ago I took a break from IT to persue other interests. But after Covid I decided to come back to IT support. After 5 years away wasn’t a step down, it was a deliberate reset. I wanted to rebuild my knowledge properly and get hands-on with the shift towards cloud-first, identity-led security, rather than bolting new skills onto old assumptions. Since then I’ve added fresh certifications in Microsoft 365, Azure, and Security, and I keep adding to that.
PhotoITPro is where I write up what I’m working through. Configuration walkthroughs, security concepts, the odd rant about a tool that should be simpler than it is.
It’s aimed at people who already work in this field, sysadmins, engineers, and anyone managing Microsoft environments who wants clear, practical detail without the marketing gloss. If that’s you, I hope you find something useful here.