Independent advice on the stack you already pay for.

One to three weeks depending on how much there is to look at and how quickly access comes through. Access is usually the bottleneck, so the kickoff call is mostly about identifying who holds which credentials.

No, and the audit is priced as a standalone piece of work for exactly that reason. Plenty of clients take the report to their own team. If you would rather we implement, that is quoted separately after you have read the findings, not bundled in before.

Yes, and it is common. The role is usually the independent second opinion rather than a replacement — an in-house team that has lived with a system for years knows things no audit will surface, and the useful engagements combine both.

No. There are no reseller agreements or referral fees behind any recommendation here. It is the reason to hire an independent consultant rather than asking a vendor whether you need their product.

Then that is the finding, and it is worth knowing. Several engagements have concluded that the existing setup was fine and the real problem was elsewhere — usually process or ownership rather than technology.

Rarely, and only with a number attached. Rebuilds are the most expensive recommendation available and the easiest to make, so the bar is high: it has to cost less than repairing what exists, and the report has to show the arithmetic.

Yes — reviewing someone else's proposal or scope is a common short engagement. What usually needs examining is whether the scope matches the problem, and what has been left out that will arrive later as a variation.

Audits are quoted as fixed-scope pieces of work, so you know the cost before it starts rather than watching an hourly meter. Ongoing advisory runs as a monthly block of hours. Either way the scope is written down and the number does not move without a conversation.

No. This is advisory and implementation work — architecture, migrations, performance, analytics. Day-to-day desktop support and helpdesk are a different discipline, and a local managed service provider will do it better and cheaper than we would.

Yes, and it is one of the more useful things to bring in an outside view for. The comparison gets made against your actual requirements and your team's actual capacity to maintain the thing, rather than against a feature matrix that both vendors wrote.

Yes, as a matter of course before any access is granted. Audits involve credentials, codebases and commercial data, and that is handled with the confidentiality it warrants.