01 / Evidence
Evidence gapThe primary database reaches 72–85% CPU during documented peak periods. Capacity expansion requires a maintenance window, and no load test validates management’s 3× volume assumption.
Specialist workstream · Buy-side diligence
White-label infrastructure diligence for Tech DD teams
A fixed-scope assessment of infrastructure economics, scalability and operational resilience, delivered inside your existing diligence process.
Bring Operational Baseline in when infrastructure is material to the investment case and the core team needs principal-level depth across cost, scale, resilience or operational concentration. The workstream fits your scope, cadence and report format without changing client ownership.
- Scope
- Specialist workstream
- Timeline
- 7–10 business days
- Access
- Read-only evidence
- Delivery
- White-label / report-ready
Deliverable
What the partner receives
- 01
Cost baseline
Scale sensitivity, spend drivers, allocation limits and growth assumptions.
- 02
Material findings
Evidence-backed conclusions tied to the investment case and operating model.
- 03
Evidence confidence
Assumptions, evidence gaps and confidence levels for each conclusion.
- 04
Remediation economics
Cost ranges, timing, dependencies and proposed owners, with the estimation basis and limitations stated.
- 05
100-day priorities
A prioritized plan with sequencing and accountable decision points.
- 06
Findings defense
Report-ready wording, a findings register and principal-led findings defense with the lead team.
When to bring it in
When to use the workstream
- 01
Material cloud spend
Cloud or platform spend is material to gross margin.
- 02
Aggressive growth case
The investment case assumes rapid customer, traffic or data growth.
- 03
Revenue-critical availability
Availability or recovery failure would impair revenue or reputation.
- 04
Key-person concentration
The platform depends on a small number of operators or undocumented knowledge.
- 05
Missing infrastructure depth
The lead team needs defensible findings without adding delivery headcount.
What is assessed
What the review covers
Evidence is tested against the transaction thesis and operating model, rather than scored against an abstract maturity framework.
- 01
Cost base & scale economics
Run-rate, spend drivers, commitments, allocation limits and growth sensitivity.
- 02
Architecture & scale
Workload shape, capacity assumptions, bottlenecks and failure concentration.
- 03
Reliability & recovery
Service objectives, backup integrity, recovery paths and incident evidence.
- 04
Delivery controls
Release process, rollback, environment parity and deployment concentration.
- 05
Observability & operations
Detection, escalation, ownership, runbooks and tacit dependencies.
- 06
Security foundations
Identity, secrets, network boundaries, patching and control-plane hygiene.
- 07 / Synthesis
Post-close implications
Material risks, integration constraints, remediation order and likely investment needs.
Finding anatomy
How findings are written
Each material issue is written as a short causal chain. The format makes the judgment inspectable and easy to integrate into the wider report.
Operational Baseline / Infrastructure reviewIllustrative extract · No client data
02 / Finding
The deal case goes beyond validated database capacity evidence. Achieving the assumed growth depends on a manual scale path with service interruption risk.
03 / Transaction impact
Modeled growth may require additional capacity investment and planned downtime in the first ownership year. Remediation cost and timing remain unquantified.
04 / Remediation
Before close, review existing performance evidence and capacity modeling; use a targeted load test if feasible within the deal. Cost the capacity options and assess maintenance-window exposure. Agree an owner and sequence implementation and validation in the 100-day plan.
Confidence: Moderate. Current peak utilization is evidenced; 3× capacity and remediation cost remain unvalidated. CPU utilization alone does not establish the volume ceiling.
Report notation
- High exposure
- Evidence gap
- Evidenced control
- Remediation
Synthetic example shown only to demonstrate output structure.
Typical workflow
How the workstream fits your process
- 01
Scope
Transaction thesis, materiality threshold, deadlines and report format.
- 02
Evidence
A focused request list mapped to the infrastructure workstream.
- 03
Review
Read-only analysis of architecture, cost, operations and control evidence.
- 04
Management
Targeted questions to test assumptions and close the material evidence gaps.
- 05
Calibration
Materiality and language aligned with the lead advisor before finalization.
- 06
Delivery
Report-ready findings, supporting register and a working session to test and defend the conclusions with the lead team.
Typical timing: 7–10 business days from evidence access. The schedule compresses or expands around the deal timetable and quality of available evidence.
Engagement design
Engagement controls
Partner-led mandate
The lead advisor retains the client relationship, the wider diligence mandate and ownership of the final report.
Read-only assessment
Evidence is reviewed without production access or operational changes during diligence.
Defined specialist scope
The workstream does not replace penetration testing or formal compliance certification.
Independent judgment
Findings are independent of cloud resale, migration delivery and managed-services revenue.
Explicit evidence limits
Evidence gaps, assumptions and confidence levels remain visible. Precision is not invented where the available evidence does not support it.
Operator experience
Infrastructure judgment earned in production.
Nikita Tsepov has spent seven years building, operating and improving high-volume, multi-region production systems for revenue-critical software. His experience includes a US SaaS unicorn processing billions of dollars in annual transaction volume, 99.99%+ production availability, high-risk migrations and infrastructure economics across predominantly bare-metal environments.
Meet Nikita- Transaction-scale SaaS
Built and operated multi-region production infrastructure for a US SaaS unicorn processing billions of dollars in annual transaction volume. Availability, capacity and security failures carried immediate customer, revenue and reputational consequences.
- Reliability under high-risk change
Maintained 99.99%+ production availability and completed a five-major-version migration of a critical self-hosted production system with zero downtime and zero data loss. Reduced alert noise by roughly 70%, improving signal quality during real incidents.
- Infrastructure economics at production scale
Operated and optimized predominantly bare-metal infrastructure estimated to avoid approximately $1.8 million in annualized hyperscaler spend. The estimate reflects a like-for-like AWS/GCP footprint costing approximately $150,000 more per month. Availability, security and operational control were maintained.
Nikita performs the evidence review, writes the findings and defends the conclusions personally. The workstream remains principal-led from scope alignment through final delivery.
Live transaction
Discuss the transaction scope
Send the deal context, timeline and the current scope. A fit check can usually be completed from that.