The practice
About
An independent practice in the Treasure Valley, Idaho, and the twenty-five years of engineering behind it.
Mark Lencioni
Founder & Principal Consultant
Mark has spent twenty-five years inside enterprise IT, delivering it rather than advising on it from outside: Active Directory and messaging estates carried through mergers and divestitures at a national healthcare distributor, the global productivity engineering organization of a major technology company, identity, PKI and Zero Trust architecture for a global logistics operator, and hardened, regulated cloud environments on federal and identity-vendor programs, including a virtual desktop platform that achieved FedRAMP High ATO. The consistent thread is the operational half of the discipline: the directory, the access model, the hardened baseline, the runbook.
He founded L&A Technical Advisory to make that depth available on a fractional basis. An organization facing an identity rebuild, a cloud foundation, an AI rollout or an operations turnaround generally requires neither a consulting firm nor a permanent hire, but a senior engineer who has delivered the work before, for the duration of the work.
He is currently embedded with an industry-leading client as an AI and IAM subject-matter expert, guiding an enterprise AI platform rollout: a citizen-developer intake and approval framework for a 3,000-user organization, and a hybrid reference architecture connecting on-premises inference to the vendor platform.
Operating principles
Four principles behind every engagement.
- 01
Identity is the control plane
Access policy, segmentation and monitoring all derive from identity rather than from network location or static role assignment. This holds whether the request originates from a person, a partner, or an AI system acting on someone's behalf.
- 02
Remove the waste first
A substantial proportion of IT problems are process problems presenting as technology problems. Before a purchase is recommended, the work is to identify the steps that persist only because nothing has removed them, which is frequently where the fastest improvement is available.
- 03
Hybrid by design
Cloud and on-premises are not a migration in progress. For most organizations they are the permanent shape of the environment, so architecture and access policy are designed to span both from the outset rather than reconciled afterward.
- 04
Leave it operable
An engagement that concludes with a system only the consultant understands has failed, whatever the deliverable stated. Documentation, runbooks and a structured handover are part of the work rather than an optional final phase.
Track record
Where the depth comes from.
Selected roles, most recent first. Each competency this practice offers is one Mark has delivered inside an organization that depended on it. Employers are given by sector; the named history is on LinkedIn.
Global logistics company
2024 – 2026
Senior IAM Architect
Modern PKI and Zero Trust initiatives, delivery standards for security engineering, and firewall automation.
Regional bank
2023 – 2024
Senior Systems Engineer
Windows, identity and cloud infrastructure for a regional bank in a regulated environment, and enterprise PKI with the security team.
Global networking manufacturer
2023
Senior DevOps Engineer
Hybrid Azure Government (GCC High) environments for federal workloads, STIG-based compliance, and enterprise IdP integrations.
Enterprise identity vendor
2022 – 2023
Principal Systems Engineer
A secure virtual desktop infrastructure on AWS GovCloud that achieved FedRAMP High ATO, plus automated CIS and STIG hardening.
Major technology company
2019 – 2022
Principal Systems Engineer, Head of Productivity Engineering
Directed global SaaS productivity operations with a team of more than twenty engineers, and standardized the operational metrics behind it.
Cloud contact-center SaaS
2017 – 2019
Senior Systems Engineer, IT Systems
Exchange to Microsoft 365 hybrid migration, and security process automation for SOC 2 Type 2 and SOX with the compliance officer.
National specialty retailer
2014 – 2016
Principal Systems Engineer
Led five engineers across end-user and server operations, built and tested the disaster recovery plan, and held PCI compliance with the CSO.
National healthcare distributor
2006 – 2010
Senior Engineer and Tech Lead, Messaging & SharePoint
Messaging and directory services through mergers and acquisitions, including the largest divestiture in the company's history.
Managed IT services provider
1999 – 2005
Senior Systems Engineer III
Active Directory and multi-tenant infrastructure, including one of the first “Red Forest” administrative-tier deployments built outside Microsoft itself.
Certifications
- Lean Six Sigma Green Belt
- ITIL v3 Foundation
- Palo Alto Networks Certified
- Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer (MCSE) — Exchange & SharePoint
Where the practice works
Based in the Treasure Valley, engaged nationally.
L&A Technical Advisory is based in the Treasure Valley, Idaho, and serves mid-market and enterprise organizations regardless of location. Engagements are delivered remotely by default, with time on site for discovery, design and cutover where the environment requires it.
