Services

Four boutiques rather than a department store: I work where off-the-shelf products stop being enough — open source software, artificial intelligence, the security of IT systems, and the hours after the damage is done.

The boutiques

A boutique is not a factory. It carries little, but carries it well, and whoever walks in is advised rather than served. That is how I work: on few mandates at a time, but personally — the same person from the first conversation through to final acceptance.

Open Source

I advise individuals and companies who take data protection seriously and want to move their IT onto open software. Not out of allegiance, but because open systems can be verified: you keep your data, your choice of supplier, and control over what runs on your servers. And then there is what shows up at the end of the year — licence fees nobody raises any more, because there are none.

Analysis of the existing infrastructure — what is in place, what it costs, what depends on what
Cost comparison: what licences and subscriptions tie up each year today — and how much of that falls away
Design of the open source solution, cut to fit your processes rather than the other way round
Support from installation through commissioning to final acceptance
Development of bespoke solutions that cannot be bought anywhere

Artificial Intelligence

Artificial intelligence is not a product you buy, it is a tool that has to fit the way you work. I build bespoke solutions around AI agents — software that carries out tasks on its own rather than merely answering questions. Entirely on your own hardware if you wish, so that no data ever leaves the building.

Analysis: which work is worth automating — and which expressly is not
Design of the agent architecture, the data paths and the points of control
Development and integration into the existing system landscape
Commissioning and acceptance against measurable criteria

Ethical Hacking

If you want to know how secure your systems are, you have to let someone attack them — under control, documented, and under written authorisation. I probe your infrastructure the way an attacker would, and afterwards tell you what I found and what needs doing.

Penetration tests, passive and active
Reporting: readable for management, precise enough for the engineers
Hardening concepts for IT systems, worked out in detail
Blue and red team operations in cooperation with external firms

Testing is carried out solely under written authorisation from the owner of the system.

Incident Response

Once the systems are encrypted, the order of events decides everything. Restore from backup straight away and you overwrite the traces — and with them the basis for the insurance claim, the criminal complaint, and the question of whether the attackers are still inside. I secure the evidence first, establish what happened, and only then bring the business back up.

Immediate measures: contain the incident before it spreads further
Forensic imaging of storage media and memory, with an unbroken chain of custody
Analysis of the course of events: entry path, timeline, extent of data exfiltration
Restoration of operations, and a report for insurers, authorities and management

In an emergency: disconnect from the network, yes — power down, no. Memory is often the single most valuable piece of evidence.

The forensic examiner

Beat W. Meier spent many years conducting forensic investigations for public authorities and writing expert opinions for the courts. That regularly included the part where others gave up: opening locked IT systems and locked mobile devices and recovering their data — where access had been lost, refused or encrypted.

Securing evidence that has to hold up in court is different work from simply getting a system running again. Every step is documented, every copy is provably unaltered, the chain of custody stays unbroken — from first access to a report that withstands an opposing party.

Announcement · Autumn 2026

Intelligence Hub

An MCP server that connects your language model — Claude, ChatGPT, or one running on your own premises — to the public record. You ask in sentences rather than keywords, and every answer arrives with the source it rests on.

The real work sits underneath: what the federal administration publishes unstructured — minutes, dispatches, motions, reports — is converted into structured form, linked across the boundaries of the individual databases and refreshed daily. Only that makes a question answerable that no single database could settle on its own.

Trace which party and which politician backed a piece of business — and who opposed it
Hold the arguments made against the statistics and the letter of the law, and see which of them stand up
Turn the finished analysis into draft articles — with the evidence they rest on attached

It is built for newsrooms and independent investigation, for publishers, for archives and historical research, for political science and fact-checking, for law firms that need the legislative history of a statute, for associations and organisations tracing how influence was exerted — and for anyone who wants to know how a decision actually came about.

The Intelligence Hub launches in autumn 2026. Would you like to hear the moment it is ready? Sign up here

What I do not offer

Maintenance contracts. A call at three in the morning needs a team, not a single person. For that I work with well-established firms that meet your requirements and provide support up to 24/7. I will tell you plainly where my work ends and who takes over from there.

Let us talk

A first conversation costs nothing and usually settles whether — and how — I can help.

Get in touch