Nick D'Amore
IT systems engineer. Identity, security, and the infrastructure nobody notices until it stops working.
Greater Seattle Area
whoami
I run IT for a ~200-person recycling and materials processing company spread across three sites and four legal entities. Architecture, security, vendor negotiations, and the occasional crawl under a desk in a scale house are all part of the same job, which turns out to be a very effective way to learn which decisions actually matter.
I built the function here from the ground up, and lately I've been growing it rather than just running it: documented systems instead of tribal knowledge, and a part-time L1 support role I brought on to take first-line work off the queue.
Identity and security are where I've gone deepest. Phishing-resistant MFA and Conditional Access design, taking away standing admin rights before someone else does it for you, and the account-compromise calls that explain exactly why both of those mattered. Along the way: an on-prem-Active-Directory-to-Entra-ID migration that didn't interrupt operations, PCI DSS compliance by way of network segmentation, and an ERP rescue whose best outcome was admitting it was the wrong ERP.
Lately I'm spending my time on enterprise AI adoption that amounts to more than buying licenses, moving line-of-business data to cloud platforms, and writing the documentation that means the next person isn't reverse-engineering my decisions from firewall rules.