Who's behind IIS Rescue

Steve Buckner

Microsoft Certified Trainer & Azure Solutions Architect

IIS Rescue is a solo, project-based operation. The person who scopes your project is the person who runs it — there are no account managers, no handoffs, and nobody junior learning on your website.

I have worked in IT since 1986 — 40 years. For more than 20 of those I have been a Microsoft Certified Trainer, which means Microsoft has credentialed me to teach other engineers this material, not just to apply it. I still do this for a living: my day job is as a cloud systems engineer managing enterprise Microsoft infrastructure, and IIS Rescue is the work I take on alongside it.

That combination is deliberate, and it is the honest reason to hire me over an agency. I am not a consultant who last touched IIS a decade ago and now sells strategy. I patch, migrate and retire this exact class of system as routine work — which means when I tell you a rehost will take two weeks, that estimate comes from having done it recently rather than from a template.

I have also personally deployed, patched and eventually decommissioned the generation of servers this business exists to migrate. The Windows Server 2012 box running your website is not a historical curiosity to me. I installed those when they were new.

The credentials, for what they are worth

Certifications do not migrate a website — experience does. But they are verifiable, and they are a reasonable way for a stranger to check that the person promising to move your site actually knows the platform it is moving to. Mine are current and can be checked directly:

• //Microsoft Certified Trainer (MCT) — for over 20 years. Credentialed by Microsoft to train other engineers.
• //Microsoft Certified: Azure Solutions Architect Expert — the destination most of these migrations land on.
• //Microsoft Certified: Azure Administrator Associate — running the infrastructure day to day, not just designing it.
• //Microsoft 365 Certified: Administrator Expert — for the mail, identity and tenant questions that surface mid-migration.
• //Microsoft Certified: Security Operations Analyst Associate — because an out-of-support server is a security problem before it is a hosting problem.
• //Microsoft Certified: Azure Virtual Desktop Specialty — relevant when the legacy app has a desktop client attached to it.

You do not have to take my word for any of that. The full record — nine current certifications and thirty-three exams passed — is published by Microsoft on my Microsoft Learn transcript, and the badges are on Credly. Both are third-party pages I cannot edit.

Where this is heading

Alongside the migration work, a growing part of what I do is responsible AI adoption — helping organizations introduce AI capability in a way they can actually govern and sustain, through the AI Rollout Framework.

It is more connected to legacy migration than it first appears. Both are the same problem in different decades: an organization depends on technology it does not fully understand, the people who set it up have moved on, and somebody has to make it safe to keep going without breaking what already works. Forty years of doing the unglamorous version of that is what I bring to your website.

What that means for your project