I’m just going to give you props. I have worked in Managed IT Services for a dozen years and some of the worst clients are construction, engineering and architects who use solidworks, autodesk and archicad products.

You’ve eaten humble pie and admitted that using computers as a tool, and systems design are different and though you might understand a lot, just like I can build a 3d model, the devil is in the detail.

Building robust solutions that meet your business continuity plans, disaster recovery plans, secure your data for cyber risk and to meet ISO and yet are still somehow usable in a workflow for end users is not something you just pick up as a hobby and implement.

The way I handle technology Lifecycle is in 5 steps: strategy, plan, implement, support, maintain. Each part has distinct requirements and considerations. It’s all well and good to implement something but you need to get support when it goes wrong or misbehaves. You need to monitor and report for backups, patching, system alerts. Lots of people might do the implement, but consider the Lifecycle of the solution.

People do these things at home but they’re home labbing, they’re labs. Production requires more.

Anyway a bunch of people closer to your part of the world will probably help you out here.

I just want to again recognise and compliment you on realising and openly saying you want help rather than just do the usual “oh I know best” that I hear over and over usually just before someone gets ransomed on their never patched log4j using openssl heartbleed publicly exposed server infrastructure.