The Challenge
A PCB contract manufacturer had been in operation for 22 years. The technology environment had accumulated accordingly: servers added and never fully decommissioned, a partial cloud migration that stopped halfway, software licenses under former employees' email addresses, recurring charges on credit cards that had since been canceled (and therefore failing silently), and a network that one longtime IT contractor understood and nobody else did.
The ownership transition was planned. The buyer's attorney flagged IT due diligence as a required item before close.
What the audit found:
- 14 active vendor accounts, of which 4 were accessible only through credentials stored in a former employee's personal password manager
- 3 servers in a rack that were running but had no documented purpose — one turned out to still be serving a legacy ERP module that had been "replaced" three years prior
- A domain registrar account registered under a personal email address with no secondary contact
- $1,840/month in recurring SaaS charges, of which approximately $420/month were for tools no one was actively using
- SSL certificates on two public-facing services expiring within 60 days, unmonitored
- A partial Azure migration that had moved some file shares to cloud storage but left directory sync in a broken state affecting login behavior at one workstation group
The Solution
We worked in parallel streams over six weeks:
Access recovery and documentation Recovered access to all vendor accounts, transferred ownership to business email addresses under company control, and documented every account in a structured asset register with vendor contact, renewal dates, contract terms, and assigned internal owner.
Environment cleanup Decommissioned the three undocumented servers after verifying no active dependencies (the legacy ERP module was exported and archived). Cancelled $420/month in unused subscriptions. Renewed expiring SSL certificates and set up automated renewal monitoring.
Azure migration remediation Identified the root cause of the directory sync issue (a misconfigured sync rule introduced during initial migration) and corrected it. Completed the remaining file share migrations that had been left pending.
Handoff package Produced a complete handoff document for the incoming ownership team: network diagram, server and services inventory, vendor register, active subscription summary, open items requiring attention within 90 days, and recommended actions within the first year.
The Result
The technology audit and remediation were completed six weeks from engagement start, ahead of the deal timeline.
The buyer's IT due diligence review found no unresolved issues.
The incoming ownership team had documented access to every system from day one — no dependency on institutional knowledge from departing staff, no undocumented accounts to chase down.
The $420/month in cancelled subscriptions covered approximately 40% of the engagement cost within the first year.