The cloud bill went up 40% last quarter and nobody can quite explain it. You're paying for Microsoft 365 licenses for people who left in Q2. Three EC2 instances are running because someone spun them up for a proof-of-concept in 2023. This is normal — every SMB stack has 15-30% waste hiding in it. The audit that finds it usually pays for itself in the first invoice.
Your infrastructure grew organically. Someone signed up for a SaaS tool for one project; nobody canceled it. AWS accounts got created for prototypes and never got cleaned up. Microsoft licenses were bought in a hurry after a hiring spree. The person who set up your VPN is at another company now.
Individually, none of these cost enough to notice. Collectively, they're 15-30% of your annual IT spend. And that same organic mess is why performance is uneven, security posture has gaps, and no one can answer the question 'why is our stuff slow?' without a two-week investigation.
You want a proper accounting. Not a sales pitch dressed up as a strategy deck.
HOW WE FIX IT
01
Inventory everything
Every SaaS tool your team is paying for, every cloud account, every server, every network device, every SSL cert, every domain. We pull directly from your billing consoles (with your permission) and cross-reference with an actual user survey. Result: one spreadsheet with every line item, real cost, and named owner.
02
Cost audit
For AWS/Azure: idle resources, oversized instances, missing reserved capacity, unused storage. For Microsoft 365/Google Workspace: user license utilization, over-tier licensing (E3 where Business Premium works), departed-user cleanup. For SaaS: seat count vs. active user count, duplicate tools, unused enterprise features you're paying a premium for.
03
Performance audit
Network baseline (throughput, latency, packet loss at demarcation and at endpoints). Endpoint fleet health (patch level, disk pressure, memory pressure). Backup posture (last successful restore, RTO/RPO reality vs. what the vendor claims).
04
Written remediation plan
A prioritized fix list. Each item has: cost/effort to fix, savings or performance impact, and whether it's a same-week vs. same-quarter change. You get to see the plan before you commit to anything.
05
Execute what you approve
You choose what to remediate. We execute — cancel the SaaS licenses, right-size the EC2 instances, replace the switch that's dropping packets, decommission the fileserver nobody's used since 2022. Documented as we go.
●Written cost audit with quantified savings per line item
●Network + endpoint performance baseline report
●Prioritized remediation plan with cost/effort/impact per item
●Executed remediation (only for what you approve)
●Updated network diagram + IP scheme
●Ongoing monitoring recommendations
HOW THE ENGAGEMENT WORKS
Two-phase project
Phase 1 (audit + plan): 2-3 weeks, fixed price. Phase 2 (remediation): scoped after you approve the plan. You can stop after phase 1 if you don't want us to do the fixes — we hand off the report and you take it from there.
Rough cost
Phase 1 audit starts at $5,000 for a typical 25-100 person SMB. Phase 2 remediation is quoted per item. Most audits find 3-5x their cost in the first 12 months of savings — but we won't promise a number in advance, because it depends on how much waste is actually there.
Best time to do this
Before your annual license renewals, before a funding round, before an acquisition, after your finance team asks 'what is all this?' about your IT budget line.
QUESTIONS WE GET
How much waste does a typical SMB actually have?
In our audits: 15-30% of annual IT spend across cloud, SaaS, and licensing. The larger the org, the higher the number (more places to hide waste). Individual line items are usually small — the aggregate is not.
Do you take a cut of the savings?
No. Fixed-price engagement. Percentage-of-savings billing creates bad incentives (we'd only find fast, easy waste and skip the harder structural issues). We just charge for the audit.
Will you find things that reflect badly on our current setup?
Yes. That's the point. We're not there to grade anyone — we're there to save money and improve performance. If we tell your CFO everything is fine, the audit failed.
Can you audit our cloud without full admin access?
Read-only IAM access is enough for the discovery phase. We only need write access if you also want us to execute the remediation.
What if we already have an internal IT lead?
Great — they're usually the biggest fan of an outside audit. Gives them written cover to make the changes they've been recommending for a year.