The most common question we get about infrastructure audits is the one everyone is embarrassed to ask: what does it cost, and is it worth it? The honest answer is that the audit usually pays for itself before the fixes do. Here is what it actually involves.
What the audit looks for
An infrastructure audit is an inventory of everything your business runs on, and an honest look at each part:
- Hardware. What machines exist, how old they are, what they run, and which ones are one failure away from stopping work.
- Accounts and access. Who can log in to what, which accounts still belong to people who left, and where a single shared password sits.
- Vendors. Every service you pay for, what it actually does, and which ones are duplicated or forgotten.
- Backups. What is backed up, whether a restore has ever been tested, and whether the backup would survive the event it exists for.
- Exposure. What is reachable from the internet that should not be, and what would happen if each thing failed.
Notice what is missing: jargon. The deliverable is a plain-language report ranked by consequence — what is broken, what it costs if you ignore it, and what we would do about it, with a number on each option. It is written the way a busy owner reads, not the way a vendor writes.
What it costs
Our infrastructure audit starts at $2,500 for a single site with up to 10 devices, and $4,500 for multi-server or multi-site work, where we also perform a live restore test rather than trusting that the backup job reported success. That includes the on-site or remote review, the network diagram, the runbook, and the written findings. You keep all of it whether or not you hire us to do the fixes.
For comparison, small-business security assessments in the US typically start at $5,000, the average penetration test runs over $18,000, and Los Angeles providers bill assessment work at $200 to $350 an hour. Our entry audit is half the market floor, and it is a complete deliverable on its own. Some clients buy it specifically to take the fixes in-house with their own team, which is a perfectly good outcome.
One forgotten vendor subscription usually costs more per year than the audit does. A silent backup failure costs whatever the last month of work is worth. The audit is cheap relative to the surprises it finds.
What usually turns up
Across the audits we have done, the same five things show up over and over:
- Backups that stopped running months ago, with nobody checking.
- An admin account or two belonging to someone who left years ago.
- A forgotten vendor subscription charging every month for nothing.
- Wi-Fi and networking that was never designed, just extended.
- All of the above living in one person's head with no documentation.
None of these are dramatic. That is the point: it is the unglamorous parts that quietly decide whether Monday morning works. We do the unglamorous parts properly, and we document everything so it stops living in one person's memory.
If you would like a number to plan around, book a 30-minute call. We will tell you honestly whether you need a full audit or just a targeted look — and if you do not need one, we will say so.