IT infrastructure that does what it says. In plain text. Under your control.
Managed network security and backup for London small businesses.
The firewall in your comms cupboard has a web dashboard that shows green lights. Your backup is described as "cloud sync." Your security appliances require annual subscription renewals to remain current — and if that renewal lapses, the green lights stay on. The monitoring system tells you everything is fine. Nobody checks whether that is true.
δivergent Byte builds infrastructure that tells the truth. Configuration in plain text. Behaviour that can be verified. Systems whose security does not depend on a vendor subscription remaining current or a direct debit not failing. Everything documented well enough that any IT-competent engineer can read it, audit it, and continue without our involvement if they need to.
We work with London small businesses — primarily professional services firms of two to twenty people — who have been meaning to sort out the backup situation, or whose IT person told them they need a proper firewall, or who are running infrastructure they have quietly outgrown and are not sure what to replace it with.
The hardware is yours from day one. The software carries BSD licences — permanent, no renewal required. The managed service covers everything operational. If the relationship ends for any reason, the devices continue working and the configuration is yours to take.
Your network boundary, correctly done. Runs OpenBSD: the operating system with two documented remote exploits in thirty years. No web management interface. No annual subscription. No protection that degrades silently when the direct debit fails.
Full details →Genuine backup. Not cloud sync. A verified, point-in-time record of every Mac in your office, monitored actively, with hourly snapshots across a rolling thirty-day window. ZFS-protected. Zero-delta monitored. We contact you before you know there is a problem.
Full details →Your backup, 280 miles away, in Newcastle upon Tyne. Geographically separated from London. Different electricity grid. Unambiguously UK jurisdiction. ISO-27001 certified facility. Annual disaster recovery test included. Successful nightly replication confirmed by a few bars of Fog on the Tyne.
Full details →The wrong attachment to the wrong client. Updated for 2026. If you work for multiple clients on the same computer, your browser knows things about all of them simultaneously. Autofill, session cookies, cached credentials, download history — none of it resets between client contexts unless something prevents it structurally.
Clean Slate is FreeBSD deployed on your existing hardware, giving each client a completely isolated working environment separated by a ZFS boot environment boundary that cannot be crossed accidentally. Your existing machine. Software costs nothing. The isolation is architectural, not procedural.
Full details →Thirty illustrated cards. Seven diagnostic axes. Participants take turns drawing. Somewhere between the image and the title, something connects — not a general principle, but something specific. A system inherited. A decision that made sense at the time. A cabinet door that has been closed for three years and not reopened.
Not Myers-Briggs for your IT stack. The reverse: something that looks like mumbo-jumbo and turns out to be rigorous. The workshop does not require BSD knowledge or technical fluency.
Request a conversation →Strategic IT consulting for organisations navigating significant technology decisions. Infrastructure architecture. Vendor assessment. Data sovereignty. Security posture review. Thirty years of commercial IT experience on the client side, not the vendor side. The distinction matters: client-side experience teaches what systems actually do, what they cost to maintain, and what happens when the licensing model changes.
About δivergent Byte →It is not a compromise choice, a hobbyist platform, or an ideological statement. It is the correct engineering decision for infrastructure that needs to be secure, comprehensible, and yours.
The BSD TCP/IP stack is the original implementation of the protocols the internet runs on. OpenBSD has recorded two remote exploits in its default install in thirty years. FreeBSD runs Netflix, PlayStation, and the majority of FTSE 500 storage infrastructure. The same technology that enterprise organisations procure under six-figure contracts is available, without licence fees, on commodity hardware that fits in a comms cupboard.
The gap between enterprise pricing and BSD pricing is not a capability gap. It is a vendor margin, a sales organisation, a certification programme, and a support contract. None of those things improve the cryptography.
A scoping conversation takes thirty minutes and produces a clear picture of what the right configuration is and what it will cost. No obligation. No sales pressure. If we are not the right fit, we will say so.
Request a conversation