Surviving scale at Access Group - Ctrl Alt Lead podcast

'Anyone can build resilience. Where it gets complex is understanding how applications actually fail’

In this first episode of Ctrl Alt Lead season six, we go straight to the heart of one of IT’s most prevalent challenges: how to simplify without compromising security.

Built through decades of acquisitions, Access Group’s infrastructure supports thousands of applications and mission-critical workloads, including NHS payroll; applications where downtime is not an abstract risk, but a real operational and reputational threat.

In this episode, our first of 2026, regional technology director Rolf Krolke has brought order to a sprawling IT estate shaped by decades of acquisitions.

Rolf explains how the organisation approached large-scale consolidation by defining a reference architecture first, then choosing vendors that could evolve with it.

Modularity is a recurring theme, from compute and storage to networking, and Rolf is clear on why being able to upgrade and scale without disruption matters when availability targets are unforgiving.

The episode also digs into what “near-zero downtime” actually looks like. Rolf breaks down Access Group’s use of active-active designs, physically separated datacentres and extreme redundancy, while stressing that infrastructure resilience alone isn’t enough. If applications aren’t designed to fail over cleanly, no amount of platform engineering will save you (a lesson reinforced by recent high-profile cloud outages).

The discussion reflects a wider shift in IT leadership thinking, which will be reflected on a wide scale this year. Rather than rushing into transformation programmes, Rolf argues for stepping back, understanding the business problems you’re really trying to solve, and designing for failure as a default state.

For IT leaders dealing with estate sprawl, technical debt or rising uptime expectations in 2026, this episode sets the tone for the year: it’s about practical experience, honest lessons and fewer easy answers.

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