Andrew G. Hargreave III
Over three decades inside enterprise IT, I watched the same pattern repeat: growing businesses outpace their technology leadership. I built this practice to close that gap.
Background
I am a technology leader with more than three decades of experience in infrastructure architecture, systems operations, and IT leadership — spanning enterprise organizations and SMBs across fully remote and hybrid environments.
Through agh3 IT Services, I work with growing companies as a Fractional CTO, helping leadership teams stabilize technology environments, manage vendors, and implement systems that support operational growth.
My focus is reliability, clarity, and risk reduction. Less firefighting. More predictable operations. Technology that serves the business instead of becoming the business’s problem.
How I work
I prioritize honest assessment, clear tradeoffs, and outcomes that can be verified. If an approach looks good on paper but will fail in practice, I say so early. I communicate proactively, anticipate problems before they surface, and build the business cases leadership needs to act.
My work spans long-term embedded engagements focused on steady improvement, scoped strategic projects, and advisory relationships where a senior technical voice is what’s needed most.
Experience highlights
- ●30+ years in IT infrastructure, operations, and leadership
- ●Leadership roles across servers, storage, networking, identity, and cloud
- ●Enterprise and SMB environments, remote and hybrid
- ●ERP and operational systems implementation leadership
- ●Microsoft 365 and Entra identity modernization
- ●Vendor and MSP oversight and management
- ●Disaster recovery program design and test execution
What clients say
“Andrew is awesome — he will make any organization better. He makes your life easier through his ability to span multiple technical areas and build strong relationships across the organization. He’s proactive in communication, proactive in maintaining systems, and always ready when an issue arises. Andrew anticipates issues both short and long term and builds the business cases needed to address them.”David Middendorf — VP Engineering, Commercial Insights & Loyalty, 84.51
Projects and outcomes
A sample of representative work. Client names are omitted for privacy; references are available when appropriate. Each example shows the problem, the decision, and what changed.
Three-node cluster for core business systems
Problem: Client was running key workloads on a single aging virtualization host with no failover.
What I did: Designed and implemented a three-node Proxmox cluster with shared NFS storage, Proxmox Backup Server, and standard templates. Migrated workloads with minimal downtime.
Result: Hardware failures became inconvenient rather than catastrophic. The client gained clearer capacity planning and a documented recovery process.
- Proxmox VE
- Proxmox Backup Server
- Synology NAS
Identity modernization for a professional services firm
Problem: Mix of on-premises services and ad-hoc cloud usage, weak identity controls, and noisy email security.
What I did: Consolidated users into Microsoft 365, configured Entra-based identity, improved mail hygiene, and implemented practical security baselines.
Result: Users gained predictable access and the firm reduced support noise. Leadership gained a clearer picture of risk.
- Microsoft 365
- Entra ID
- Exchange Online
Firewall and VPN redesign
Problem: Flat network, aging firewall, and unreliable remote access. Too much trust in too few controls.
What I did: Implemented OPNsense, created separate networks for key workloads, and deployed improved VPN access with logging and alerting.
Result: Reduced blast radius for incidents and significantly fewer issues with remote staff connectivity.
- OPNsense
- Site-to-site VPN
- Network segmentation
Backup and recovery you can test, not just hope for
Problem: Backups existed, at least according to the software. Nobody had attempted a full restore in years.
What I did: Standardized backup jobs, created documented restore runbooks, and ran regular test restores with the operations team.
Result: Leadership gained confidence that data could be recovered. The team understood how to execute under pressure.
- Proxmox Backup Server
- Offsite storage
- Runbooks and testing