[{"content":"Your organisation pays Microsoft licences that increase every year, your data is hosted in the United States, and you have no leverage if pricing policies or terms of service change.\nThere are mature open source alternatives, deployable on-premise, that cover the essential office use cases: collaborative file management (Nextcloud), online document editing (Collabora), video communication (Jitsi, eduMEET), instant messaging (Matrix/Element), email (Postfix, SOGo).\nI assess your situation, design the migration, deploy the infrastructure and train your teams. Your data stays in your datacenter, under your control.\n","date":null,"permalink":"https://labconsulting.be/en/services/sovereignty/","section":"Services","summary":"","title":"Digital sovereignty \u0026 Microsoft 365 alternatives"},{"content":"Your users access dozens of applications with different identities. You have SSO in place but it does not work everywhere. MFA is half-deployed. Rights management has become unmanageable.\nI design and deploy centralised open source authentication systems — SSO, MFA, identity federation between organisations, integration with existing Active Directory. Solutions that work in production, not just in demos.\n","date":null,"permalink":"https://labconsulting.be/en/services/authentication/","section":"Services","summary":"","title":"Authentication \u0026 access management"},{"content":"Your servers are ageing, your continuity plan relies on goodwill, and migrating to the public cloud raises questions about cost and data sovereignty.\nI design and deploy on-premise high availability infrastructure — virtualisation (Proxmox), distributed storage (Ceph), automatic failover between sites. Your data stays with you, your services stay available.\n","date":null,"permalink":"https://labconsulting.be/en/services/infrastructure/","section":"Services","summary":"","title":"Private cloud \u0026 high availability"},{"content":"Your network has grown by successive additions over 15 years. Nobody knows exactly what talks to what. A security incident reveals vulnerabilities nobody suspected.\nI audit and restructure network architectures — segmentation, filtering, remote access, multi-site interconnections. I deploy reverse proxies and authentication gateways using proven open source tools (Traefik, Nginx, Fail2ban, Wazuh).\n","date":null,"permalink":"https://labconsulting.be/en/services/network/","section":"Services","summary":"","title":"Network architecture \u0026 perimeter security"},{"content":"The NIS2 directive applies to your organisation and you are not sure where you stand or where to begin.\nI assess your compliance level, identify priority gaps and help implement the required technical measures — logging, incident detection, vulnerability management, access control. Using auditable open source tools, not proprietary black boxes.\n","date":null,"permalink":"https://labconsulting.be/en/services/nis2/","section":"Services","summary":"","title":"NIS2 compliance"},{"content":"Your teams are already using AI tools — ChatGPT, Copilot, Claude — without anyone having defined what can be sent to them and what cannot. Or you want to deploy agents capable of automating business processes, without knowing how to isolate them from your critical systems.\nI work on two areas: advice and usage policy (data classification, guardrails for cloud AI services) and on-premise deployment (open source models on your infrastructure — Ollama, vLLM, LiteLLM — for data that cannot leave your perimeter). In both cases, I design agents with the required isolation mechanisms.\n","date":null,"permalink":"https://labconsulting.be/en/services/ai/","section":"Services","summary":"","title":"Agentic AI — deployment \u0026 secure isolation"},{"content":"Your deployments are manual, undocumented and non-reproducible. Every intervention takes twice as long as expected because the environment is never quite as expected.\nI implement deployment and configuration automation — Ansible, Terraform, Python. What was a two-day operation becomes a repeatable 20-minute deployment.\n","date":null,"permalink":"https://labconsulting.be/en/services/automation/","section":"Services","summary":"","title":"Automation \u0026 infrastructure as code"},{"content":"25 years of IT infrastructure experience, built entirely on open source solutions, in critical production environments.\nMy background spans three complementary areas: electronic engineering (INRACI), web application development (Bureau Van Dijk, 1996–2000), and large-scale infrastructure operations. This combination allows me to work simultaneously on overall architecture and implementation details — from network design down to the packet that does not pass.\nWhy open source #Not for ideological reasons. For pragmatic ones, grounded in experience.\nOpen source solutions give access to the code, the logs, the internal mechanisms. When something does not work, you can understand why — and fix it. With proprietary solutions, you wait for vendor support.\nAfter 25 years, I know the limits of open source as well as its strengths. The question is not \u0026ldquo;open source or not\u0026rdquo; but \u0026ldquo;which tool, for which need, with what operational maturity\u0026rdquo;.\nWhat I actually do # Design and deployment of centralised authentication systems — SSO, MFA, identity federation Migration from Microsoft 365 to sovereign open source alternatives (Nextcloud, Collabora, Matrix, Jitsi) Multi-site high availability infrastructure — virtualisation (Proxmox), distributed storage (Ceph) Network architecture — design, segmentation, access security NIS2 compliance — assessment, tooling, implementation of technical measures Deployment automation — Ansible, Terraform, Python On-premise AI and agents — Ollama, vLLM, LiteLLM, Open WebUI, secure deployment My approach #I work on real problems, not theoretical ones. I read the logs, reproduce the failures, test the hypotheses. I commit to results, not billed days.\nEducation\nUniversité Libre de Bruxelles — Licence en Informatique (1991–1996) INRACI — Qualification A2 Électronique (1989–1991) Languages\nFrench — native English — professional Dutch — passive comprehension ","date":null,"permalink":"https://labconsulting.be/en/about/","section":"About","summary":"","title":"About"},{"content":"","date":null,"permalink":"https://labconsulting.be/en/contact/","section":"Contact","summary":"","title":"Contact"},{"content":"Senior IT infrastructure consultant, based in Brussels. 25 years of operational experience on critical production environments, built exclusively on open source solutions.\nI work on infrastructure problems that resist standard approaches, and help organisations take back control of their digital stack — authentication, collaboration, storage, communication — without dependency on proprietary vendors.\nPractical alternatives to Microsoft 365, on-premise high availability, data sovereignty: results in production, not promises.\n","date":null,"permalink":"https://labconsulting.be/en/","section":"LabConsulting","summary":"","title":"LabConsulting"},{"content":"Site owner #Philippe Van Hecke Rue Gillebertus 22, 1090 Jette, Belgium lemouchon@proton.me\nCompany number: (registration in progress)\nData collected #This site collects no personal data. There is no contact form, no registration, no analytics, no tracking cookies.\nLocal storage (localStorage) #The visual style selector uses your browser\u0026rsquo;s localStorage to remember your colour preference. This information stays on your device and is not transmitted to any third party. It is not used for tracking purposes.\nYou can clear this data at any time from your browser settings.\nEmail #If you contact us by email, your address and message content are processed solely to respond to your request. No data is transmitted to third parties.\nHosting #This site is hosted on a private server located in the European Union (OVH, Belgium/France).\nCookies #This site does not use cookies. The localStorage mentioned above is not a cookie and is not subject to the ePrivacy directive.\nApplicable law #Belgian law. For any questions: lemouchon@proton.me\n","date":null,"permalink":"https://labconsulting.be/en/privacy/","section":"Legal notice \u0026 privacy","summary":"","title":"Legal notice \u0026 privacy"},{"content":"Tailored engagements, from targeted interventions to full projects. All solutions are built on open source tools proven in production.\n","date":null,"permalink":"https://labconsulting.be/en/services/","section":"Services","summary":"","title":"Services"},{"content":"","date":null,"permalink":"https://labconsulting.be/en/tags/","section":"Tags","summary":"","title":"Tags"}]