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Your business used to run smoothly. Then it grew. You added staff, some remote, some onsite, took on more data, added applications, and somewhere along the way the IT infrastructure that worked fine at 10 people started showing strain at 40. Things break. Fixes pile up. Nobody's quite sure what's running where.
IT systems don't have a check engine light. There's no dashboard warning that your backup hasn't completed in three weeks, that a former employee's account is still active, or that a core server is running out of headroom. You find out when something breaks, which is the worst time to find out. Datto's 2023 State of the Channel Ransomware Report found that unplanned downtime costs SMBs an average of $8,000 per hour, and most experience multiple events per year.
A paid IT infrastructure assessment is the diagnostic. Our team examines your environment, identifies what's working, what isn't, and what's one bad day away from becoming a problem. The output isn't a generic report, it's a prioritized picture of your infrastructure with specific recommendations and realistic cost estimates.
When It Makes Sense to Get One
The most obvious trigger is a merger or acquisition. Before combining two environments, you need to know what you're actually inheriting. But M&A is far from the only reason.
If your staff has grown past 25–30 people without a formal IT review, that's a reasonable point to take stock. Processes and technical debt accumulate faster than most businesses realize. A company that added five remote employees during a growth period may have five different VPN configurations, three different endpoint management approaches, and no unified policy on any of them.
Other common triggers: a compliance requirement has appeared (HIPAA, CMMC, SOC 2, PCI DSS), a security incident has occurred or nearly occurred, performance complaints from staff have become routine, or an upcoming contract requires demonstrating security posture. Sometimes the trigger is simply that leadership wants an honest picture before committing to a multi-year IT investment.
What a Real Assessment Actually Covers
A thorough infrastructure assessment doesn't just inventory hardware. It maps your environment against your actual business needs and flags the gaps. The Stratify IT Workscope Assessment covers:
- Hardware and software inventory: What's running, what version, what's nearing end-of-life, what's unlicensed or unmanaged.
- Network and connectivity: Firewall configuration, network segmentation, remote access setup, DNS and filtering controls.
- Security posture: Endpoint protection, patch status, MFA coverage, user access controls, and whether former employee accounts have been properly offboarded.
- Backup and recovery: Whether backups are actually completing, where data lives, how long recovery would realistically take after an incident.
- Compliance alignment: If your industry has regulatory requirements, HIPAA for healthcare, CMMC for defense contractors, PCI DSS for payment processing, the assessment maps your current state against those requirements and identifies the gaps.
- Capacity and growth planning: Whether your current infrastructure can support where the business is heading, and what would need to change if it can't.
The result is a documented roadmap: what needs immediate attention, what can wait, and what the realistic cost looks like at each stage. If you've been running on instinct and institutional memory rather than documented infrastructure, this is what changes that.
How Stratify IT Structures It
One thing worth knowing: if you proceed with Stratify IT for the recommended implementation after completing the Workscope Assessment, 100% of the assessment cost applies toward that engagement. You're not paying separately for the diagnosis and the fix.
That structure matters because it changes the incentive. The assessment is designed to give you an honest picture, not to upsell services you don't need, because the next step only makes sense if the recommendations are accurate.
If your infrastructure has been running on autopilot and you're not sure what's underneath it, reach out to Stratify IT. We'll walk you through what the Workscope covers, what to expect from the process, and what a realistic timeline looks like for your environment.
For most SMBs, a thorough assessment runs somewhere between $2,500 and $10,000 depending on environment size and scope. A 30-person company with a handful of servers and basic cloud services is a different project than one with 80 endpoints, multiple locations, and a mix of legacy on-prem and hybrid infrastructure. Firms that include penetration testing or compliance mapping as part of the engagement will be on the higher end. Be skeptical of anything priced under $1,500, that's rarely enough time to go deep. Free evaluations are sales tools. They're designed to get a foot in the door and identify enough pain to justify a managed services proposal. That's not necessarily bad, you might learn something useful, but the scope is narrow and the output is shaped by what the MSP sells. A paid assessment has no predetermined conclusion. The team doing it is compensated to find the truth, not to pitch a solution. That independence is the entire point of paying for it. Leave it as-is. Cleaning things up beforehand defeats the purpose. Assessors need to see your actual environment, including the deferred patches, the undocumented firewall rules, and the backup jobs that technically run but haven't been verified in months. If you've already identified issues and started addressing them, mention it to the assessment team so they can note it, but don't delay the engagement while you tidy up. The value is in an honest picture, not a polished one. Ask specifically who will be doing the technical work and what their background is. A credentialed assessor, CISSP, CISM, or someone with hands-on network and systems engineering experience, approaches this differently than a generalist running a scanning tool and writing up the output. Ask for a sample deliverable from a previous engagement (anonymized). If it's full of generic recommendations with no specifics, that's telling. The report should read like it was written about your company, not any company.Frequently Asked Questions