Cloud architect · builder · Suwanee, GA

Untangling enterprise chaos.Modernizing the cloud.Building the tools + teams that power it.

Hi, I’m Steven. I walk into tangled enterprise chaos, figure out how the pieces actually connect, and map what can be modernized — and exactly how it has to be executed. Then I help do the work: aligning leadership, getting every product team moving, and training the org so they can own and run it afterward. Here’s the actual work I ship.

Hayes cloud mark
HAYESCONSULTING & SOLUTIONS
// Now
2024 →Cloud Architecture ConsultantGCPS · Azure & Azure Local — architecture, automation & platform work
2019–24Director of Cloud EngineeringAgilysys · 100% to Azure on AKS
2016–19Cloud & Enterprise Architecture MgrAcuity Brands · 72 apps to Azure
2014–16Sr. Cloud Escalation EngineerMicrosoft · public sector Azure
100%
of Agilysys products migrated to Azure on AKS
$500K
saved/yr at Acuity by retiring a data center
96
Azure Local redeployments in 2 weeks — solo
5M+
live events in a monitoring platform I built
// What I actually do

Untangle the mess. Align the org. Execute.

I never could pick a lane — I'll map a five-year modernization with leadership, then work shoulder-to-shoulder with the product teams who have to execute it.

01 · UNTANGLE

See how it all connects

Map the dependencies and the history nobody documented — then figure out what can actually move, what should modernize, and the order it has to happen in.

02 · ALIGN & ENABLE

Move the whole org

Get leadership and every product team pointed at the same outcome — and train people to run it long after the engagement ends.

03 · EXECUTE

Do the work, end to end

Migrations, architecture, automation, and full-stack builds — executed the way the system actually needs, not lift-and-shift.

// Selected work

Things I've built — click in for the tech talk.

// More shipped work

// The story I always tell · Acuity Brands

The bounty program.

Hundreds of legacy apps and a queue that would never clear — so I built a program that paid developers to modernize them on their own time. I pitched it to the CIO and HR, stood up the SharePoint tracker, and structured it so the company covered taxes and developers earned the full value of each migration.

It turned technical debt into a backlog people actually wanted — and it's the reason I got the only top performance rating IT had given in 15 years.

72
apps modernized to Azure
50%
faster modernization
15yr
first top IT rating in a decade-plus
// Let's build something

Got something gnarly to move, fix, or understand?

Azure migrations, monitoring you can trust, automation that should exist, or a full-stack build that needs an owner. Tell me what you're working through — I read everything that comes in.