An outside read on the systems you have been too busy to audit.
Risk, fitness, and the three things that should change this quarter. Written for the CFO and the engineer, with no upsell waiting at the end.
- 2 to 6 week engagement · scoped per environment
- risk and fitness grading
- three changes this quarter · ranked backlog beyond
Technology Assessments, in plain terms.
We spend time with your team, your runbooks, your monitoring, your contracts, and the systems themselves. We talk to the people who get paged at 2 a.m. and the people who sign the renewals. The output is a written assessment in plain language. It tells you what is healthy, what is fragile, what is overspent, and what is one bad week away from a real incident.
We grade across the dimensions that matter operationally: resilience and failure modes, security posture and compliance fit, vendor and contract risk, cost relative to what the stack actually delivers, and the team's ability to run what they have. Nothing is rated in isolation. A system that scores poorly on paper but is well-operated and cheap may be fine. A pristine architecture nobody understands is not.
The deliverable closes with three changes for this quarter and a longer list ranked by payoff. We do not pad the report. If the answer is mostly that you are in good shape and one vendor needs to go, that is what the report says. We are not pitching a follow-on engagement, so the recommendations are honest.
Common triggers for this engagement.
- 01A new CEO, CFO, or board needs an independent read on the technology function
- 02Diligence is coming, whether from an acquirer, investor, insurer, or regulator
- 03You have inherited a stack you did not build and need to know what is real
- 04Incidents, cost growth, or vendor friction suggest something is off and you want a structured answer
Questions teams ask before signing.
Will you try to sell us services off the back of the assessment?
No. The report is the deliverable. If the recommended changes happen to be things we can do, we will say so and you can decide. We do not pad findings to manufacture follow-on work.
Who reads the final report?
It is written for two audiences in the same document. An executive section the CFO and board can act on, and a technical section the engineering team can work from. We deliberately avoid splitting these into two reports that say different things.
What does the assessment actually cover?
Infrastructure, application architecture, security posture, vendor contracts, operational practices, team capacity, and cost. Scope is set up front based on what you need answered. We do not boil the ocean.
How long does it take?
Two to six weeks depending on the size of the environment and how much access we have. A targeted assessment of one domain can run shorter. A full read of a mid-sized company is typically a month.
What happens to the data you see during the assessment?
We operate under a mutual NDA before any data changes hands. Everything we review is used for the assessment and nothing else. We do not retain copies of your architecture diagrams, contracts, or incident logs after the engagement closes.
Frequently scoped alongside this work.
AI Strategy
Where AI fits in your stack, what to build, what to buy, what to skip. The plan a senior engineer would write — scoped honestly against your team's footprint.
MSP Evaluation and Selection
We've worked with the providers you're considering — and the ones you should be. Independent shortlists, contract review, and an honest take on what 'managed' actually means with each.
Security Architecture Review
A structured read of how identity, network, and data controls actually fit together — not how the policy says they should. We surface the gaps before a real attacker, or an auditor, does.
Fractional CTO
Senior technology leadership for the quarters that matter most — architecture calls, hiring strategy, and the bets your team is too close to make. We embed with your leadership, not your tooling.