The IT audit
Almost everything starts here. Over one cycle we go through what you actually have rather than what the documentation claims: servers, network, licences, backups, security posture, the applications people use and the spreadsheets they use instead.
You get back a written picture covering:
- What exists, where it runs, who supports it and when it expires
- What is at genuine risk, ranked, with the cost of each failure
- What you are paying for twice, or paying for and not using
- What to fix now, what can wait a year, and what to leave alone
- A cost against each recommendation, so the list is a budget rather than a wish
The audit is a complete piece of work on its own. Plenty of clients take it, act on it themselves, and come back a year later. That is a fine outcome.
Why independence matters here
We take no commission from any vendor. That sounds like a small thing until you have seen the alternative: a recommendation that happens to match whatever the consultant resells, a licence count that creeps upward, a migration whose business case was written by the company doing the migrating.
When we recommend a product we will tell you what we rejected and why. When the honest answer is that your current system is fine and the problem is a process, we say that, even though the process fix is a smaller invoice.
Architecture and vendor selection
When something genuinely needs building or buying, the work is to narrow the field honestly. We write the requirements with the people who will use the thing, score the options against them, and show you the scoring rather than the conclusion.
For architecture we produce the diagram, the failure modes, the cost at your current size and at three times your current size, and the decisions that would be expensive to reverse. The last one matters most. Plenty of architecture is reversible and not worth agonising over. The parts that are not should be the parts you spend the meeting on.
Cost review
Technology spend accumulates quietly. Licences for people who left, cloud instances nobody can identify, overlapping tools bought by different departments, support contracts renewing automatically on terms agreed four years ago.
A cost review goes line by line through what you pay and what it is for. In most companies of this size something meaningful comes out, and the exercise pays for itself. Where it does not, we tell you that too.
Asked before,
answered straight
How long does an IT audit take?
One 28-day cycle from start to written report. Most of the elapsed time is access and interviews rather than analysis, so the more quickly we can talk to your people, the sooner you have the document.
Will you recommend products you sell?
We do not resell anything and take no vendor commissions, so there is nothing we are motivated to recommend. When we suggest a product you get the alternatives we rejected and the reason.
Can you review work another provider has proposed?
Yes, and it is a common reason people call. A second opinion on a large quote, a migration plan or an architecture proposal is a contained piece of work and usually worth the cost several times over.
Bring us the quote.
Whether it is a proposal you are unsure about or an estate nobody has looked at properly in years, the first conversation costs nothing and is not a pitch.