Four phases, and a written decision at the end of each one.
The gates are not bureaucracy. They exist because almost every engagement that goes wrong goes wrong at a handover point where nobody wrote down what was agreed.
Assess
We inventory the estate with tooling rather than working from your CMDB or a spreadsheet, because the two are never the same. Expect us to find things nobody knew were running.
Design
Architecture, with a written record of every significant choice — what we considered, what we picked, what it costs you later. Acceptance criteria are agreed here, not argued about at the end.
Build
Two-week increments, each ending in something you can actually look at. Code goes into your repository as we write it, so there is never a moment where the work only exists on our side.
Operate
Either we run it under an SLA, or your team takes it with runbooks and recorded sessions. We have no preference and no commercial reason to push you toward the first one.
The standards, and why each one exists.
Everything as code
Click-configured infrastructure cannot be reviewed, reproduced or rolled back. It is also how estates end up in the state we usually find them in.
Decisions on the record
In eighteen months someone will ask why it was built this way. The answer should be a document, not a guess from whoever is still there.
Tested, not assumed
We have lost count of the estates with nightly backups and no successful restore on record. Failover gets failed over. Backups get restored.
Security reviews every design
Our security people review the other teams' work by default. It slows a design down by a day and has caught things that would have cost far more later.
A runbook per procedure
If we hand your team an operational task, they get the procedure and the rollback with it. Handing over a responsibility without the instructions is not a handover.
Fixed scope, fixed price
Where the scope can genuinely be defined, we price it and carry the estimating risk ourselves. Where it cannot, we say so rather than pretending.
How engagements are structured.
Four models, matched to how well the scope can be defined up front.
Fixed fee
Assessments, penetration tests and defined builds. Certainty on price, and we carry the estimating risk.
Milestone
Larger programmes and migrations. Payment follows demonstrable progress, not the calendar.
Retainer
Managed services, SRE and virtual CISO. Twelve-month terms with a defined notice period.
Gain-share
Cloud cost optimisation on a share of verified savings. It pays for itself or it costs you nothing.
Let's scope it properly.
Tell us the constraint and the deadline. You'll get a straight answer on approach and cost.