About MEA / Michael Ashton

MEA IT Strategy & Modernization was founded to help growing organizations make better technology decisions and gain access to experienced technology leadership without necessarily adding a full-time executive.

Technology becomes increasingly important as organizations grow—but the answer isn't always more technology.

Sometimes the challenge is strategy. Sometimes it's cost, reliability, risk, vendors, organizational capability, or knowing which investment should come next.

MEA brings an independent executive technology perspective to those decisions, connecting technology choices to business priorities, measurable outcomes, and the organization's ability to execute.

Technology leadership from someone who has been accountable for the outcome.

Michael Ashton is the Founder and Managing Member of MEA IT Strategy & Modernization and a former Chief Information Officer with more than three decades of progressive technology leadership across local government, biopharmaceutical and regulated life sciences, and data center/cloud managed services environments.

His experience includes serving as a Chief Information Officer, leading a 120-person technology organization supporting five data centers, and directing global infrastructure and technology services across more than 19 manufacturing, laboratory, commercial, and corporate locations.

Michael's experience spans technology strategy, financial management, infrastructure and cloud modernization, operational performance, governance, cybersecurity and risk, business resilience, organizational leadership, and communicating technology decisions to Boards, CEOs, CIOs, and senior executives.

Technology leadership should ultimately produce results the organization can see.

Across Michael's operating leadership experience, those results have included:

• 18% reduction in cloud costs through hybrid-cloud workload-placement decisions.
• 50% reduction in network circuit costs through SD-WAN modernization across more than 19 sites.
• 99.999% availability while reducing major incidents by 80% and materially improving service-level performance.
• 60% reduction in vulnerabilities, with critical vulnerabilities remediated within 30 days.
• 100% RTO/RPO compliance through recovery planning and testing.
• Leadership of technology organizations and portfolios with annual budgets reaching $10 million.

Those results provide context for MEA's approach, but the objective of an engagement isn't to reproduce someone else's technology environment. It's to understand your organization's priorities and determine what outcomes matter to your business.

Michael's approach begins with a question:

What business problem are we trying to solve?

That question comes before choosing a platform, moving something to the cloud, replacing a network, introducing AI, or starting a transformation.

MEA evaluates technology decisions through business requirements, risk, cost, operational impact, organizational readiness, and expected value.

Sometimes the right answer is modernization.

Sometimes it's improving governance, accountability, vendor performance, or operating processes.

And sometimes the technology already in place remains the right answer.

The objective isn't more technology. It's better technology decisions.

Fractional leadership doesn't have to mean replacing the people or partners already supporting your organization.

MEA can work alongside an existing IT manager or director, internal technology team, MSP, vendors, and executive leadership.

Michael's leadership experience includes developing technology professionals and emerging leaders, establishing goals and accountability, succession planning, resource prioritization, and coordinating work across internal teams and external partners.

The goal is to add executive technology capability while strengthening the people and resources the organization already has.

MEA's recommendations aren't driven by a requirement to sell a particular cloud platform, hardware product, software package, or managed service.

That independence allows the conversation to begin with what the organization needs rather than what someone wants to sell it.

When specialized implementation expertise is required, MEA can help leadership understand the requirements, evaluate options, and work effectively with the appropriate internal teams, vendors, or technology partners.