IT Infrastructure Health Check
See the state of the infrastructure before decisions depend on it.
A senior-led assessment of servers, virtualisation, storage, security, monitoring, backups and recovery readiness.
Discuss this requirement →Start with the environment, risk and required outcome.
A senior-led assessment of servers, virtualisation, storage, security, monitoring, backups and recovery readiness. Namandla Consultants begins with evidence and recommends a proportionate engagement rather than a generic technology package.
Connected expertise for the wider environment.
Assess the environment before accepting the risk.
Server Support is a structured enterprise capability designed to improve reliability, control, security and operational continuity. The appropriate scope depends on the organisation’s systems, business impact, internal skills, service levels and risk requirements.
Clear steps. Visible decisions.
What it answers
Seven questions. Most organisations can answer two or three of them confidently.
What is actually running? A reconciled inventory of servers, storage, network devices, virtual machines, cloud resources and endpoints, checked against your asset register and against network discovery. The gap between those three is usually the most interesting finding.
Where is the capacity? Storage, memory, compute, bandwidth and licence consumption, with growth trend and a projection of when each reaches its limit.
What is out of support? Hardware past warranty, operating systems and database versions past support, hypervisors and firmware behind and which of those are that way because a business application requires it.
Where are the single points of failure? Every one of them, marked as deliberate or accidental. The accidental ones are the finding.
Is the backup position real? When a restore was last performed, what it proved and the gap between stated recovery objectives and measured capability.
What is the security posture at infrastructure level? Patch position, management interface exposure, segmentation, administrative access and logging.
What should be done, in what order? Findings ranked by consequence and by effort, separated into what you can fix with what you already own and what would need spending.
What we look at
Compute and virtualisation
Host inventory, cluster configuration, resource allocation against actual use, snapshot age and count, hypervisor version and support status, licensing position.
Storage
Capacity, growth rate, performance, RAID and redundancy state, firmware and whether any array is running with a failed member nobody noticed.
Servers and operating systems
Version and support status, patch level, disk headroom, service state, scheduled tasks and the ones running under accounts whose passwords nobody holds.
Databases
Version and support status, backup configuration, growth, index and log health and the maintenance jobs that were configured once and have been failing since.
Network
Topology, segmentation, configuration currency, interface errors, uplink saturation, PoE headroom and failover link state.
Backup
Scope against what actually matters, job success and duration trend, repository capacity, immutability, offsite copy and the date of the last verified restore.
Cloud
Resource inventory, cost with attribution, security configuration, identity and access, backup coverage.
Microsoft 365
Tenant configuration, identity security, licence assignment against use, device enrolment and data protection.
Documentation
What exists, whether it is current and what is missing.
What you get
A written report. Structured by area, with findings, evidence and consequence stated plainly. Not a tool export with a cover page.
A ranked action list. Each item with what it is, why it matters, roughly what it takes and whether it needs spending or just configuration. Separated into three horizons: fix now, plan this quarter, plan this year.
A risk register of the things that cannot be fixed immediately, with compensating controls and review dates.
A capacity projection showing when each constrained resource reaches its limit, so expansion is planned rather than urgent.
A measured recovery position per critical system, against the objectives you thought you had.
A one-hour walkthrough with whoever needs to hear it, including the people who will be asked to fund the actions.
It is yours. No obligation, no lock-in, and it is written so another provider could act on it. We would rather be chosen on the quality of the assessment than on being the only party who understands it.
How it runs
Scoping call, twenty minutes, to establish the estate size and what you already know.
Access and discovery
Read-only access to systems, monitoring data collection and configuration gathering. Non-disruptive throughout. Nothing is changed.
Interviews
Short conversations with whoever runs the environment and with the business owners of the systems that matter. The technical picture and the business picture rarely agree, and the disagreement is informative.
Analysis and report
Walkthrough
Typical duration is one to three weeks depending on estate size, most of which is discovery running in the background rather than effort on your side.
What it usually finds
Not a promise, and it is a consistent pattern across the environments we assess.
A backup that has never been restored. An out-of-support system in production that nobody had flagged. Storage or a licence pool closer to its limit than anyone realised. Two or three single points of failure nobody had chosen. Security capability already licensed and never configured. A dependency that would have surfaced during recovery. Documentation that stopped being accurate some years ago.
The value is rarely one dramatic discovery. It is that everything is written down, ranked and can be funded and sequenced rather than argued about.
Common questions about Infrastructure Health Check
What is an infrastructure health check?
An independent written assessment of your IT estate covering inventory, capacity, resilience, support currency, backup and recovery position, security posture and documentation, with a ranked list of what to do about what it finds.
It is a point-in-time exercise rather than an ongoing service. The output is a report and an action list you can act on yourself, hand to your existing provider or use to brief a project. It is deliberately written to be useful to someone other than us.
Is it disruptive?
No. Discovery is read-only and nothing is changed. It runs in the background while your environment operates normally.
The demand on your side is access, a few short interviews and an hour for the walkthrough. Most of the elapsed time is data collection running rather than anyone doing anything.
How long does it take?
One to three weeks depending on the size of the estate. A single-site environment with a handful of servers is at the shorter end. A multi-site estate with cloud, databases and operational technology is at the longer.
The scoping call establishes which. We would rather give you an accurate duration up front than start and extend.
What does it cost?
It is quoted per engagement based on estate size, because a ten-server single site and a four-site estate with cloud and databases are genuinely different pieces of work.
The scoping call gives us enough to quote accurately. There is no obligation attached to it and we will tell you on that call if we think the exercise would not return its cost for your environment.
Do we have to use you afterwards?
No. The report is yours regardless and it is written so another provider could act on it.
We do this because an assessment written to be actionable only by its author is not an assessment, it is a sales document. If the findings lead to work you want us to do, good. If they lead to work your existing provider does, that is a reasonable outcome too.
Will you find things our IT team missed?
Usually, and that is not a criticism of them. An internal team is close to the environment and carries assumptions about it that stop being true. An outside pass questions what everyone stopped questioning.
The findings are also frequently things your team already suspected and never had the evidence to make a case for. A written, independent report is often exactly what an internal person needs to get something funded.
Can you assess a cloud-only environment?
Yes. Resource inventory, cost with attribution, security configuration, identity and access, backup coverage and architecture review.
Cloud environments generate different findings from on-premises ones. The recurring ones are cost attribution nobody owns, resources that were never switched off, over-broad identity permissions and the assumption that the provider is backing your data up.
How often should we do this?
Annually is a reasonable cadence for the structural questions, with capacity and currency tracked continuously if you have a managed service.
More usefully: do it when something has changed. An acquisition, a site opening, a provider change, a departure of the person who knew everything, or a project that will depend on infrastructure nobody has looked at recently.
When is it not worth doing?
If your environment is a dozen cloud-managed laptops, Microsoft 365 and no servers, there is not much estate to assess. A tenant assessment would serve you better and it is a smaller exercise.
The health check earns its cost where there is infrastructure: servers, storage, virtualisation, network, databases, multiple sites or a recovery position you cannot currently evidence. We will say on the scoping call if you sit below that.