A full digital transformation of the organisation's data and productivity stack: 50TB migrated off Dropbox onto on-premise storage I designed and run, a self-hosted file platform with search, a move from Google Workspace to Microsoft 365, and the firewall and VPN layer securing all of it.
Years of work had accumulated into roughly 50 terabytes sitting in Dropbox: every project, every asset, every archive. It was expensive, it was slow to search, access control was coarse, and it put the organisation's entire history in someone else's data centre at a time when client requirements, including government work, increasingly demanded control over where data physically lives. The mandate: bring it home without losing the convenience that made the cloud attractive in the first place.
I designed the whole stack, storage, platform, identity and network, and led its build as one system rather than four projects.
The organisation owns its data again, physically. The recurring cloud storage bill is gone, replaced by hardware that pays for itself. Search went from "ask whoever has been here longest" to a query box over everything. Access control became structural instead of honor-system. And the setup satisfies the data-residency requirements that government work brings with it, which turned compliance from a blocker into a capability.
The migration is the easy half. The hard half is making on-premise feel as effortless as the cloud it replaced, because if the new system is even slightly more annoying than Dropbox was, people route around it and the whole investment dies quietly. That is why the platform layer and search mattered as much as the storage itself: sovereignty only sticks when it is also the most convenient option in the room.