Decisions
IT consulting for companies in Dubai and across the Emirates
Most of what is brought to us as an IT problem is a question of ownership. Which supplier holds the domain, whose personal account the billing sits on, whether anyone has ever restored from the backup, and what any of it would cost to move. None of that is visible from inside the system, and all of it is settled before the next thing gets built.
Nobody can produce a list of the systems the company pays for every month.
The domain, the hosting or the ad account was registered by someone who has left, or by an agency you no longer use.
There is a backup, and no one in the building has ever restored from it.
Two suppliers each say the fault is on the other side, and neither contract says who is right.
You are being quoted for a rebuild and cannot tell whether the system you have is actually the problem.
- 01
The asset register
Every domain, account, repository, server and subscription the business depends on, with who owns it, who administers it, what it costs and how it is recovered. The finding is usually not a missing system but a load-bearing one registered to a person rather than to the company.
- 02
Access, and what survives someone leaving
Whether access is issued to people or to shared logins, how far the default permission reaches, and what the leaving sequence actually removes. The recovery chain is checked first, because every account it can reset is only as protected as the mailbox at the end of it.
- 03
Mail, and the fraud that arrives through it
Whether anyone can send mail as your domain, whether your own mail reaches an inbox, and what the second factor is on the account that recovers all the others. By value this is the attack a normal company is most exposed to, and it is settled in DNS records rather than in a product.
- 04
Suppliers, contracts and the cost of leaving
What each contract obliges, what a handover would actually contain, whether source and build instructions are transferable at all, and what the last day looks like. Lock-in is a property of the arrangement rather than a fault in the supplier, which is why it is assessed rather than complained about.
- 05
Continuity, tested rather than described
How much work the business is willing to lose and how long it can be down, stated as two numbers somebody has agreed to, and then a restore performed to find out whether the copies support them. Until a copy has been restored from, it is a hypothesis.
- 06
What not to build
Where the answer is to buy something, keep what exists, or change a contract instead, that is what the report says. It is the recommendation a supplier who bills for building has no reason to make, which is the whole argument for taking the advice from someone who is not also quoting for the work.
- 01
An asset register: every system the company depends on, with its owner, its administrator, its cost and its recovery path
- 02
Findings ordered by what each would cost on the day it fails, not by how hard it is to fix
- 03
A supplier assessment: what the contracts oblige, what a handover would contain, and what leaving would cost
- 04
A sequenced plan with a budget, including the items we recommend not doing
Invariant
A company owns what it can recover without asking anyone's permission. The rest is rented.
- Are you based in Dubai?
- No. Data Nexus is licensed in Ras Al Khaimah by RAKEZ and the work is done from Etihad Towers in Abu Dhabi. We hold no Dubai address and will not publish one. For an estate review the geography sits on your side of the table in any case — the systems being reviewed are yours, and so is the room they are reviewed in.
- How is this different from the business process audit?
- The process audit is about how work moves between people. This is about what the company owns and who can reach it. They meet at one point — the handover between a department and a supplier — and where an engagement needs both, we say so rather than selling one of them twice.
- Do you resell the hosting, licences or hardware you recommend?
- No, and there is no referral arrangement behind any recommendation. Advice is worth what its independence is worth; a consultancy paid by both sides is a reseller with a report attached.
- How long does it take?
- Two to four weeks for a normal estate, most of it spent obtaining access to things nobody could immediately find. The register and the findings arrive together, because a finding without the register behind it is an opinion.
- What if the finding is that nothing needs changing?
- Then that is the deliverable, and you have it in writing the next time a supplier quotes for a rebuild. It is the cheapest thing we produce and the least often asked for.
- From a brief to work somebody has accepted
- A piece of paid work, travelling from the sentence that started it to the moment the buyer agrees it is finished and can carry it without the supplier. 6 steps, 6 known jams.
- From something breaking to somebody confirming it works
- An outage, from the moment the system stopped being correct to the moment a person has checked that it is correct again — including the parts that happen before anybody has touched a keyboard. 6 steps, 6 known jams.
Bring whatever exists — an invoice folder, a spreadsheet, a supplier's name. The first session establishes what the company depends on and how much of it is held by somebody other than the company. That answer is worth having on its own, and everything else here is built on it.