About

Edward Skarke

Senior infrastructure and security engineer — more than twenty-five years in IT and cybersecurity, from classified networks afloat to zero trust across global estates.

“A first principles perspective, and the ability to leverage multiple technologies to reduce the overhead of systems management and compliance — solutions that reduce the overhead experienced by InfoSec, provisioning, storage, database and VMware teams.”

“Leveraging APIs to build capabilities instead of paying millions more for vendor features, where the vendor solution is sub-optimal for the specific use case.”
— from the LinkedIn profile

What the work is

Linux and Windows platform engineering, and the seam where it meets security: host management tooling, directory and identity services, network services and remote access, virtualisation, and the automation that keeps all of it reproducible. Most of it ends up published, because tooling nobody else can read is tooling nobody else can run.

The habit that runs through every project here is writing down what a thing actually does — what it verified, what it refused, what is still true of an attacker on a good day — rather than presenting a green tick. Hence the site's one claim: infrastructure that explains itself.

The perspective is first-principles. Name the value a service protects, then choose the least tool that delivers it, and keep the exit priced in: hypervisor, cloud, identity and tooling are all bets, and an estate should be able to change its mind about any of them without starting over.

Capabilities

The topics, grouped the way the work groups them. Each is drawn on the drawing set where a picture says it better.

Zero trust and network access control

Segmentation, multi-factor authentication and continuous monitoring as one design; micro-segmentation inside a single subnet at the host, with policy generated from entitlement.

sheet S-01

Security governance and compliance

Risk assessment, policy and procedure, internal controls and audit, risk acceptance with governance; CIS, NIST, PCI DSS and DoD 8500 delivered as baselines and measured as drift.

sheet S-05

Telemetry, SIEM and reporting

Splunk and pipeline-reduced ingest from Windows, firewalls, access proxies and endpoint security; dashboards for ownership, patch state, capacity and failure points at fleet scale; SQL reporting and data analysis.

sheet S-02

Storage, virtualisation and continuity

Fibre-channel fabrics, arrays in tiers, snapshots, replication and backup; VMware vSphere at architect level (HA, DRS, distributed switches, SRM); recovery designs with RPO and RTO as numbers.

sheet S-06

Directory and identity

Active Directory design, replication, roles, policy and migration; directory hygiene at scale; identity and access-management integrations; an internal CA and the trust that follows it.

Endpoint and configuration management

MECM/SCCM, Intune and Autopilot, Tanium and WSUS for deployment and patching; host-based security; agent management across geographic regions.

sheet S-05

Network services and IPAM

DNS, DHCP, routes, gateways, firewalls and load balancers; IPAM designed at the level of the model, whichever product holds it — Microsoft, NetBox, Infoblox, BlueCat and others.

Migration and integration

Namespace and storage migrations with every link accounted for; merger and acquisition deliveries against capacity, CMDB, network, security and operational-readiness gates; REST API integrations for bulk management.

sheet S-04

Automation and tooling

Expert PowerShell, working Python; modules rather than scripts; tools that reassess systems for real configuration change, cross-reference datasets into gap analyses and generate what automation deploys.

Cloud and platforms

Infrastructure as a service — compute, networking, gateways, routes, firewalls, load balancers — with function and platform services in the lab; Windows Server and client, Linux, FreeBSD, KVM/QEMU and virtual appliances.

Track record

Twenty-five years, by era. Roles and scale, not employers — those are on LinkedIn.

2024 – now	Advanced solutions consultant · energy sector · global oil & gas · Spring, TX · AppGate-based zero-trust, cloud-managed endpoint deployment AppGate entitlements (server · port · protocol, delegated to user groups) backed by Ardoq, with iBoss and CrowdStrike; 80,000 endpoints diagnosed from telemetry; domain-integrated DFS data-path migration mitigation across Goldfire, Office documents and Access databases — 100,000-plus links and 139,000 references remapped with scripted tooling and Splunk-enriched dashboards; ServiceNow intake reshaped for the same population
2018 – 2024	Senior Windows engineer · global credit bureau · infrastructure and security in-subnet micro-segmentation and CIS baselines across a global estate; Splunk dashboards for thousands of systems; 300-plus servers delivered for merger close-outs
2016 – 2018	Fibre-channel operations architect · subsea engineering · global operations 1,200-plus servers run and maintained; configurations audited from 1,100 by tooling; fabrics modernised across global sites
2008 – 2016	Senior systems engineer, storage and virtualisation lead · defence · enterprise network centre first multi-site SAN with replication and site recovery; a petabyte migrated; backup for 100-plus servers; a mobile-device platform for 55 tenant organisations
2006 – 2007	Directory services administrator · defence · air force directory, mail and DNS/DHCP for 17 bases; 500 core servers administered remotely
2000 – 2006	Systems and help-desk technician · navy · afloat and staff domain, mail and collaboration platforms on classified networks; the foundation the rest is built on

Training, certification, recognition

Security+ (continuing education)
Microsoft Certified Systems Administrator
A+
VMware vSphere, ESX and View (VMware Education)
EMC virtual datacenter and cloud infrastructure design
CommVault Simpana (on-site)
Navy Network Journeyman
Navy IT Systems Apprentice
Cisco routing and switching
Windows Autopilot (2025)
Splunk (2024)
Azure fundamentals (2024)

Recognised with an internal innovation award (2022) for vulnerability-management tracking and analytics, and a second place in an environment deployment and chaos-response hackathon. Experience delivering in high-security and air-gapped environments, and presenting technical solutions to industry and military leadership.

Where to look

Employers and dates are on LinkedIn; they are deliberately not reprinted here.

Getting started

Contact for a scoped engagement

Every engagement starts the same way: a conversation about what you run now, what is forcing the change, and what "done" has to look like. From that comes a written scope with phases, deliverables and an exit — before any work begins.