Get a second opinion before you commit the capital
A senior architect reviews the design you are about to fund — or the one you inherited — and tells you plainly where it will hold, where it will not scale, and what it will cost to operate once the project team has gone home.
- An independent technical review with no product line to defend
- Written findings on scalability, resilience, security posture and day-two operability
- A view of the total cost to run the design, not just the cost to build it
No cost · Roughly two weeks · No procurement conversation attached
What you receive
- Design assessment
- Failure mode analysis
- Scalability review
- Operability review
Most architecture decisions get reviewed once, by the people who made them
These four situations account for nearly every architecture review we are asked to run.
The architect left
The design intent walked out with them. What remains is a set of diagrams nobody can defend and a team maintaining decisions whose reasoning was never written down.
A large capital request is pending
A seven-figure refresh needs board approval and the only technical validation available comes from the vendor who stands to book the revenue.
The design was never stress-tested
It works at current scale because current scale is small. Nobody has asked what happens at three times the load, or during the failure mode the redundancy was bought to survive.
Build cost was optimized, run cost was not
The design wins on capital cost and then quietly consumes two additional headcount to operate, which nobody modelled because operations were not in the room.
A written opinion you can take to a board
Direct, evidence-backed, and written to be read by both engineers and the people approving the spend.
Design assessment
What the architecture does well, where it is fragile, and which assumptions it rests on that are no longer true. Stated plainly, without hedging.
Failure mode analysis
What actually happens in each failure scenario the design claims to survive — including the ones where the failover path has never been tested under load.
Scalability review
Where the design stops scaling, what the specific constraint is, and roughly when your growth curve reaches it.
Operability review
How much of the design assumes an expert is watching. Monitoring gaps, manual runbook dependencies, and the parts that only one person understands.
Total cost of ownership model
Build cost set alongside licensing, support, power, and the operational headcount the design implies over a five-year horizon.
Recommendation memo
A short written recommendation — proceed, proceed with changes, or reconsider — with the reasoning laid out so it survives being forwarded without you in the room.
Two weeks, and two meetings
Deliberately light on your team’s time. Most of the work is done against documents you already have.
Context session
What the design is meant to achieve, what constraints shaped it, and what decision this review needs to inform.
Document review
Architecture documents, diagrams, configurations, bills of materials and any vendor proposals on the table.
Technical interviews
Short conversations with the engineers who built or operate it. This is where the undocumented reasoning usually surfaces.
Findings and memo
A working session on the findings, followed by the written recommendation memo delivered to you.
BlackHawk Data is the only partner that truly owns the outcome. They designed it, deployed it, and operate it every day.
Not a sales engineer reviewing a competitor’s design
A vendor design review
- Conducted by someone carrying a quota on the products under discussion.
- Findings reliably conclude that the answer is more of what that vendor sells.
- Evaluates the build. Operating cost is somebody else’s problem.
- Delivered as a presentation that cannot be forwarded without interpretation.
- Reviewed against a reference architecture rather than against your constraints.
A BlackHawk architecture review
- Conducted by a practising architect with no revenue attached to the outcome.
- Findings frequently conclude that the design is sound, or that the fix costs nothing.
- Evaluates build and run together, with a five-year total cost of ownership model.
- Delivered as a written memo that stands on its own in front of a board.
- Reviewed against your growth curve, your team size, and your regulatory obligations.
Questions we get every time
Yes, and that is the most common version of this engagement. We review the design on its technical merits. If it is good work we will say so in writing — which is a useful thing to be able to show the people who approved it. A significant share of our managed services clients came to us with environments built by someone else.
Tell us what you need reviewed
A sentence on the design and the decision it feeds is enough to scope this. A senior architect will follow up within one business day.
- Reviewed by a practising senior architect, not a sales engineer
- NDA in place before any documentation changes hands
- No product recommendation attached to the finding
- A written memo you can forward without interpretation
Weighing this against hiring instead?
We published a full comparison of hiring a senior architect versus fractional access, including the real loaded costs on both sides.