Twenty years of building things that have to hold
Oakdale Technology Solutions Ltd is the consultancy practice of Lawrence McCann — a UK-based senior solution architect specialising in Microsoft security and Azure platform architecture.
Background
Over twenty years across cloud architecture, security, infrastructure, data and enterprise delivery — designing and implementing scalable, secure platforms across private, public and hybrid cloud environments, and leading the technical side of transformation programmes.
The primary specialism is Microsoft security architecture: Sentinel, Defender for Cloud, Defender XDR, Purview and Entra. That sits on top of a long senior Azure background in landing zones, CAF-aligned governance, network design and infrastructure as code, which is what makes the security work land properly — a detection strategy that ignores how the platform is actually built tends not to survive first contact with it.
Recent work spans security architecture for UK central government and cloud security engineering for a global technology services provider.
How the practice operates
Oakdale is a single-person limited company by design, not by circumstance. The person you scope the work with is the person who does it, which removes the usual gap between what was sold and what turns up.
That model has limits and they are worth being straight about: Oakdale does not staff large parallel workstreams or provide 24/7 operational cover. What it does provide is senior architecture and hands-on delivery, with the documentation and knowledge transfer that lets your own team take it forward.
Current focus
Continued capability building in GitHub-first platform engineering — reusable Actions workflows, OIDC and federated identity, Azure Verified Modules, and landing zone governance at scale — combined with the existing security architecture specialism.
How we work
Senior delivery, without the overhead
Scope to an outcome
Engagements are defined by deliverables — a design signed off at governance, a platform in production, a detection suite in operation — with the milestones agreed before work starts.
Build in the open
Design decisions, trade-offs and rejected options are written down as the work happens. Your team sees the reasoning, not just the result, and infrastructure lands as code in your repositories.
Hand over properly
Every engagement ends with as-built documentation, runbooks and knowledge transfer. The measure of a good outcome is that the platform runs well after the engagement closes.
Have a platform or security problem to solve?
Send a short outline of what you are trying to achieve and the timescales you are working to.