I'm Ashley. I've been fixing, building and securing IT since 2003.

I didn't plan any of this

I never meant to get a job in IT. I'd spent my teenage years breaking the home computer, fixing it, reinstalling Windows and teaching myself PHP. Then, on the last day of year 12, my cousin called: the company he worked for needed an extra pair of hands.

I had no plans for schoolies, so I went in the next Monday and started the week after. Five years later I was the last IT person standing there. I was doing all the sysadmin work, running the document management system and pulling financial reports out of the ERP.

It was an ASX-listed company answering to the US FDA and Australia's TGA (read: drug regulators). So I learned change control and document control before I knew they had names.

Then the long way round

• An ISP, an IT support business looking after clients all over Brisbane, and a run of Queensland Government and QR National contracts.
• About four years at Avanade. For three of them I flew Brisbane to Melbourne most weeks, running Windows 7 and Office 365 rollouts for BHP, ANZ and Rio Tinto. I got promoted twice, to manager. The management stuff turned out to be the most useful thing I learned there.
• Architecture at Mexia, which Deloitte bought in 2018: API gateways and security for banks and payment platforms.
• Federal Government work at Leidos, where I was Chief Architect on a CyberArk privileged access program (read: controlling who holds the keys to everything).
• Three years as CTO, CISO and general manager at Emantra. I ran security, assurance and certification for regulated and government customers.
• Since January 2025, I've been Principal Architect at Securitribe, the business I run now. The work is smaller and closer to home than the big names above: software and platform businesses, and one Microsoft 365 security uplift that covered more than 20 client tenants for a managed service provider.

The whole thing, role by role →