Adam led the original network services review that established the technical debt baseline at UKSBS and made the case for investment in a full network redesign. The pre-existing estate had grown organically over many years, was physically segregated at the switch layer, ran on outdated security models, and operated thirteen firewalls across multiple vendors. In the worst case, getting traffic from one part of the network to another required rules to be deployed across up to eight firewalls spanning four different vendor platforms.
His review became the foundation for what grew from a project into a multi-workstream programme, on which he served as senior architect. He designed the new network end-to-end in collaboration with the client's network SMEs and the chosen vendors, produced the full set of design artefacts from high-level topology through to cabling schematics, built the bill of materials and costings, and put the project plan together. When the original project manager offboarded early, he took on much of the project management work directly, and continued in that capacity until a technical delivery lead was brought in once the firewall migrations were running steadily.
Beyond design and project leadership, Adam worked at the coalface throughout delivery. He physically deployed and cabled network devices, ran cable-pull failure tests against scenarios he had drafted, drafted the routing topology changes required for each firewall migration, and identified that approximately a quarter of the existing subnets could be decommissioned immediately. He also worked the firewall migration weekends to provide technical expertise, troubleshoot issues as they arose, and recover migrations when problems occurred.
The outcome is a unified switching topology coupled with a heavily rationalised, single-vendor firewall estate. The firewall count reduced from thirteen to eight logical firewalls (four per site) running on a virtualised hardware platform of approximately five physical devices. Each site now operates a single firewall policy rather than a separate policy per logical firewall, making rule deployment significantly faster than the team has ever been able to achieve. Approximately eighty devices were removed from the legacy network during the programme, and around twenty-five new switches were deployed to operate the new fabric. Every component is highly available, and the deficiencies of the old estate have been resolved.