robswain.au
About
Background, how I work, and the independence commitment.
Background
Originally from the United Kingdom, now based in Sydney. I have been working in IT since the 1990s, through the rise of the internet, the social media era, and now the work of figuring out where AI actually belongs.
My work has spanned finance, fast food, education, government, and service providers, including time at IBM, the Bank of England, and the Financial Services Authority. Regulated environments and unregulated ones, large and small, with a consistent thread underneath: how systems behave over time, where ownership goes missing, and why the same patterns of failure keep appearing in environments that are supposed to be different.
What I care about is the gap between how IT is described on paper and how it actually behaves in practice. Most of what I do, in any environment, comes back to closing that gap.
Recent Experience
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Technical Director and Solutions Architect for a growing MSP, helping clients to streamline their IT to allow them to get on with running their businesses.
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Leading a team of highly experienced on-prem, cloud, networking and cyber professionals and being responsible for all architectural decisions. Leading relationship management across all internal departments and across a system of 45 schools.
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Led IT operations and infrastructure projects, responsible for the national IT infrastructure with 500 restaurants and 2 commercial datacentres in VIC and WA in addition to significant cloud services.
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Responsible for both technical and service management for 15 large clients in the Sydney CBD including relationship management, regular client meetings and technical assessments.
How I work
Fundamentals come before novelty. The environments I have seen fail do not usually fail because they lacked a sophisticated tool. They fail because something basic was assumed rather than verified. Patch coverage that was reported but not checked. Backup jobs that ran without anyone confirming restores worked. Admin accounts that accumulated over time without a formal review. The answer to those problems is not a better dashboard. It is someone looking at the actual state of the environment and being honest about what they find.
Intent and enforcement are different things, and the gap between them is where risk lives. Most organisations have reasonable policies. Fewer have those policies consistently enforced. The reasons are usually mundane: a legacy exception, a transition that never fully completed, a control that was configured correctly in one tenant and never replicated to the one that was acquired two years later. I look for that gap specifically, because it is where the theoretical posture and the actual posture diverge.
Ownership matters more than most IT conversations acknowledge. When something goes wrong, the question of who is responsible for that system, that configuration, that account is usually answered slowly and unhappily. Clarity about ownership before an incident is not a bureaucratic exercise. It is the difference between a contained problem and a prolonged one. Part of what I do is help organisations understand what they actually own and who is accountable for it.
The independence thing
I am employed by an MSP called Deskport PTY LTD. The work offered through robswain.au is deliberately independent of it. If you engage me through this site, Deskport will not be pitched to you during the engagement or within 90 days of it completing. That constraint exists because an independent review is only worth paying for if it is actually independent, and I want that to be verifiable, not just asserted.
Let's talk.
Interested in working together, or just want to connect? Drop me a line and I'll get back to you.
rob@robswain.au