Technical Due Diligence
We assess the technology before you buy it, fund it, or rely on it.
Due diligence ahead of an acquisition or investment, or independent oversight of a delivery partner already engaged. An assessment from a team with no stake in defending decisions someone else made.
People, process, and technology, scored against recognised standards.
A technology estate rarely matches its documentation, and a good team can still be exposed by weak process or concentrated key-person risk. We assess all three, benchmarked against recognised industry standards.
Leadership and organisational structure, skills coverage, and key-person risk, referenced against workforce capability frameworks including People CMM and SFIA. Who delivers a critical fix if the person who usually does left tomorrow.
SDLC and delivery maturity, DevOps effectiveness, IT service management, and governance, referenced against CMMI, DORA delivery metrics, ITIL 4, COBIT, and ISO/IEC 29119 for testing practice. How the team actually ships and supports software, not how the runbook says they do.
Software product quality, architecture, cloud platform fit, application and infrastructure security, and AI/data readiness, referenced against ISO/IEC 25010, TOGAF, the Azure and AWS Well-Architected Frameworks, OWASP ASVS, and ISO 27001 or NIST CSF. What's actually running, and whether it can scale with the business.
Abstract Insights
ABSTRACT TEAM · 5 MIN READ
TRANSFORM · 5 MIN READ
TALENT · 8 MIN READ
CLIENT WORK
An outside view.
FINANCIAL SERVICES
Market Harborough Building Society
Independent evaluation of a third-party Azure migration
Market Harborough Building Society was migrating its on-premise infrastructure to Microsoft Azure through a third-party partner, with no internal Azure expertise of its own and limited visibility into how that migration was actually going. Abstract was brought in to independently evaluate the migration partner's performance: checking adherence to best practice, monitoring compliance with security standards and agreed service levels, and identifying risks including possible data exposure and downtime before they became incidents.
The result: clear visibility into the migration partner's performance, risks identified and mitigated ahead of go-live, and a completed migration that gave Market Harborough Building Society the scalability and security it was paying for.
PRIVATE EQUITY
M&A cybersecurity due diligence
Independent cyber risk assessment ahead of an acquisition
Ahead of a potential acquisition, a private equity investor asked Abstract to independently assess the cybersecurity posture of the target business, a professional services firm that had recently experienced a ransomware incident. Abstract ran an internal vulnerability assessment across networks, systems, and applications, mapped the external attack surface for exposed services and shadow IT, and delivered a risk-rated report benchmarked against ISO 27001 and Cyber Essentials, together with a workshop scoping a security uplift plan for the investor to weigh against the deal.
The result: the investor went into the deal with an independently verified picture of the target's cyber risk and a concrete remediation plan, rather than relying on the target's own assurances.
INSURANCE
Technology Platform Review
Platform health check ahead of continued investment
Abstract carried out a People, Process, and Technology assessment of a long-established platform, working directly with the delivery team through structured workshops rather than relying on management's own account of how things were going. The review found an experienced, low-turnover engineering team and solid fundamentals in areas like backup and disaster recovery, set against material gaps including no formal delivery methodology, entirely manual testing with no automated regression or security scanning, and deployments carried out by hand across several environments. Most of the platform's institutional knowledge sat with two or three people, a real risk in an otherwise strong, growing business.
The result: a clear, evidence-based picture of what was actually solid and what was actually at risk, and a scoped uplift plan rather than a case for a full rebuild, giving the client a defensible basis for deciding how to invest in the platform going forward.
As fast as the deal needs, as deep as the risk demands
Scope and access
We agree what's in scope, and get read access to the environments, code, and documentation needed, without disrupting anyone currently delivering.
Independent assessment
Our engineers and architects review the estate directly. Where a partner or team is already in place, we assess their work, not just interview them about it.
Findings and risk register
A plain-language report: what's solid, what's at risk, what it will cost to put right, and how urgent each item is.
Recommendations
A prioritised set of next steps, handed to you to act on, or to us if you want the same team to carry them out.
Book a Discovery Call
We'll scope what the assessment needs to cover, and how quickly it needs to happen.