IT Nerdia is a founder-led consultancy helping small and mid-sized organizations modernize Microsoft 365, security, networking, infrastructure, and private AI — without the overhead of a large firm.
Why IT Nerdia Built for organizations that need senior-level IT judgment on a project — not another vendor pitch, and not another junior team learning on your environment.
What I do
Most engagements draw on more than one of these. The common thread is a small number of clients at a time and a single point of contact who owns the work end-to-end.
Migrations from aging on-prem environments to Microsoft 365, Entra ID, SharePoint, and Intune — including email migrations from Exchange, Google Workspace, and hosted IMAP with minimal downtime. Identity cleanup, conditional access, license rationalization, and a clean handoff to whoever runs IT day-to-day.
Practical, layered security for organizations that don't have a full security team. MFA and conditional access, endpoint detection and response, Intune-managed devices, mail filtering (Mimecast, Barracuda), site-to-site and remote-access VPN, patch hygiene, and audit-ready documentation that actually gets used.
Network design and segmentation for offices, multi-tenant buildings, and high-density environments — VLANs, SD-WAN, managed Wi-Fi on Meraki and SonicWall — plus on-prem and hybrid server work: Hyper-V, Proxmox, NAS/SAN, VPS hosting, and the cloud services that sit alongside them. Secure integration of BMS, Niagara/JACE, access control, and surveillance where building systems need to coexist with IT.
For organizations that want the productivity of modern AI without sending their data to third-party providers — design and deployment of on-premises or private-cloud LLM environments. Model selection, GPU sizing, secure document retrieval over internal knowledge bases, and integration with existing identity and access controls. A good fit for legal, financial, real estate, and any organization with sensitive data or compliance pressure.
The founder
I've spent more than 25 years running IT for organizations that couldn't afford downtime — including a government tollway authority, a manufacturer, and a multi-tenant commercial property organization where I'm the sole IT lead today.
IT Nerdia is how I take on project and advisory work outside of that — for clients who want a senior engineer's judgment rather than a junior team's hours, and a single person who'll be on the call six months later.
More about MichaelWhy clients work with IT Nerdia
Government, manufacturing, multi-tenant commercial real estate, and small-business consulting. The work has changed; the discipline hasn't.
Migrations from Windows NT to Active Directory, on-prem to Microsoft 365, on-prem PBX to VoIP, virtualization with Hyper-V and SAN, commercial build-outs from base-building up. Details available under NDA.
You talk to the person doing the work. No account managers, no rotating engineers, no offshore handoff — and a written scope before anyone touches your environment.
How I work
Designed so you know exactly what you're getting before any work starts, and so the project ends with a clean handoff — not a dependency.
A 30-minute call to understand the environment, the constraint, and whether I'm actually the right fit. Some projects aren't — and I'll say so.
A short, written scope with fixed-fee or hourly options, a realistic timeline, and a clear definition of done. No surprises later.
I do the work, document it as I go, and check in on a cadence we agree on up front. You see progress, not status theater.
You get the runbooks, the diagrams, and a clean handoff — either to your team or under a lightweight ongoing support agreement.
Tell me a little about the environment and what you're trying to change. I read every inquiry personally and reply within two business days.
An independent consultancy. IT Nerdia is operated solely by Michael Callaway and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or representing any current or former employer. All engagements are conducted on personal time and personal equipment, with strict separation from any salaried role.