Managed IT
A roadmap is how you stop
buying the same thing twice.
Strategic IT budgeting, roadmapping and technology planning, from someone who knows your business by name. Every vendor contract gets read before it renews, and there’s a person in your board meeting translating in both directions.
- Someone you know by nameWhat your vCIO handlesWatching
- The three-year roadmapWhat your vCIO handlesWatching
- Budgeting and the annual planWhat your vCIO handlesWatching
- Vendor and contract reviewWhat your vCIO handlesWatching
- Risk, in the board’s languageWhat your vCIO handlesWatching
- Translation, both waysWhat your vCIO handlesWatching
Foothills Digital—Sentrello Premier Partner
- AWS
- Azure
- Google Cloud
- DigitalOcean
- On-premises Linux
- On-premises Windows
Every one of our people holds active certifications on the platforms they work on.
Sentrello is our only partnership. On the clouds, it's our people who hold the certifications. We don't claim a partner tier, and we'll keep saying so until that changes.
Where this usually starts
So who decides what you buy?
Without an IT leader, it’s whoever was loudest in the last meeting. Or whichever vendor happened to call that week. Either way you end up with a budget nobody can explain.
- The contract auto-renewed at the new price, and the notice period closed a month before anyone opened the email.
- Two departments asked separately, so now you pay for two tools that do the same job.
- The IT budget is last year’s number plus ten percent, and nobody can say what the ten percent buys.
- Every project is urgent, which means none of them has a quarter to call its own.
- Your IT person is brilliant at fixing things and has never once been asked what should be built.
What we do instead
A person who knows your business, and a plan with numbers on it
Not a portal, and not a quarterly PDF. You get someone whose name you know, who learns how your business makes money, and who can start now instead of at the end of a recruitment drive. They write the roadmap with you, cost each year of it, read the contracts before the renewal dates arrive, and sit in the board meeting to explain what the technology means in the board’s own language. Then they turn round and tell the engineers what was decided, in theirs.
How it works
How it works
Mostly listening, to begin with. The plan comes after.
Learn the business before the servers
What you sell, where the money comes in, which systems it flows through, and what would hurt most if it stopped. We inventory the technology too. Just second.
Write down what you have, and what it costs
Every subscription, contract, renewal date and device, with its age. Almost every company finds something it’s paying for that nobody uses, and that’s usually the first thing we cancel.
Draw a three-year roadmap
What gets replaced, what gets merged and what gets left alone, each with a year and a reason. Three years, because hardware ages and contracts run in terms. Anything shorter is a shopping list.
Put a budget on it, and defend it
Each year costed and phased, so the board sees what’s coming before it arrives. When someone wants a new tool mid-year, the first question is which line it replaces.
Sit in the room and translate
Board meetings, leadership meetings, that awkward call with the vendor. Your vCIO explains risk and spend upward in business terms, then carries the decisions back down to the engineers as work.
What your vCIO handles
Someone you know by name
Fractional means a fixed slice of their week, not a helpline. The same person comes to every meeting, from the first week onward.
The three-year roadmap
Written with you, revisited each quarter, and specific enough that “why are we doing this?” has an answer in the document. It’s the reason projects stop showing up as emergencies.
Budgeting and the annual plan
Spend phased across the year and tied to the roadmap, so the board sees the shape of IT cost ahead of time. Capital against operating, committed against optional, and what would move if revenue did.
Vendor and contract review
Every agreement read before its notice period, not after. Terms renegotiated, overlapping products merged, and the auto-renew clause caught before it fires.
Risk, in the board’s language
Single points of failure, security exposure, what happens if your main supplier folds. Each one framed as business risk with a cost and a fix, which is the only shape a board can decide on.
Translation, both ways
The board hears what the technology means. The engineers hear what the board decided and why. A CIO who only talks upward is a consultant, and one who only talks down is a manager.
Related
Virtual CISO (vCISO)
Fractional executive leadership for your security strategy and risk governance. One named lead on your side of the table, for the slice of the week the job needs, who owns the risk register, the board report, and that questionnaire your biggest customer sent on Friday.
Asset Management
Hardware inventory, software licenses and lifecycle replacements, kept honest by automatic discovery instead of a spreadsheet. Every device found and every seat counted, with each warranty date known before it bites.
Compliance Management
We audit your setup against HIPAA, PCI-DSS, SOC 2 and ISO 27001, get you ready, and keep you there. The controls run all year and the evidence falls out of the running, so nobody spends audit week rebuilding twelve months from memory.
What are you deciding this year?
The renewals coming up, the projects on the list, and the question the board keeps asking.
Send us those and we’ll sketch what a first quarter looks like. The engagement is scoped to you and billed monthly or annually, with no package to squeeze into.
- What we arePlan, create, launch, maintain
- What we areSentrello Premier Partner
- What we areEvery quote written for you