About

Welcome to my corner of the web! I’m Mark Beacom, and I call the scenic landscapes of Northeastern Ohio home.

My world revolves around my wonderful partner, our two adventurous sons, and Meeko, our spirited Siberian Husky. We’re a crew that thrives in the great outdoors, often found camping, hiking, foraging, or simply soaking up nature on a walk. Our love for exploration extends to life on the road in our beloved RV, where we’re constantly seeking new terrains and creating lasting memories.

At home, my wife and I share a deep passion for horticulture. This includes cultivating vegetables indoors and delving into the fascinating world of mycology. This passion has even grown into a new venture, Mush Ohio, where I'm not only growing gourmet culinary mushrooms but also building systems to help them flourish. That work led to a 2025 Farmer Veteran Coalition Fellowship and a 2025 TSTI Fellowship in EU-US agriculture innovation.

Professionally, I joined Microsoft in March 2026 as an Enterprise Cloud Solution Architect in the Cloud & AI Platforms organization, working with financial services customers on cloud and AI transformation. Most of my time goes to translating business outcomes into Azure architecture and AI modernization roadmaps, usually in environments where the answer has to survive a risk committee as well as a design review.

The problem I find most interesting right now is enforceability. AI agents have moved from a developer productivity feature to production actors inside the software development lifecycle, and most organizations are still governing them with guidance rather than controls. A guardrail that lives in a prompt is a suggestion. A guardrail that lives in branch protection is a control. That distinction, along with agentic AI operations, platform engineering, and spec-driven development, is most of what I write about here.

Before Microsoft I ran Cirrustack, an SDVOSB-certified cloud consultancy delivering enterprise architecture and AWS modernization engagements, and built WeMush, a mycology intelligence platform. Earlier I was Senior Director of Architecture and Infrastructure at Wowza, leading cloud consolidation, cost optimization, and an engineering organization redesign for a global streaming platform. Before that I led enterprise cloud transformations at AWS Professional Services as a Team Lead and Senior DevOps Architect, establishing subject-matter-expert programs and reusable infrastructure patterns that delivery teams adopted across engagements. Along the way I've collected 20+ certifications spanning Azure, AWS, GitHub, HashiCorp, and Kubernetes, and I contribute to open source, including Locust, MoviePy, GitHub Spec Kit, and Google's Gemini Processors framework.

This trajectory was built on a foundation that includes early experiences in the US Army and, later, a BS in Information Technology and an Executive MBA, all made possible by the unwavering support and motivation from my family.

I’m always eager to connect and exchange ideas: agent governance in regulated environments, Azure architecture for financial services, platform engineering that has to hold up under an audit, or the intricacies of mushroom cultivation. Feel free to reach out for a chat. You can learn more about my professional experience on my LinkedIn profile or my personal website.