Cloud cost & governance
Find the spend that signals an architecture problem, not a rightsizing problem. Tagging, landing-zone hygiene, commitment strategy, and a ranked savings backlog.
Boutique IT & infrastructure advisory · Minnesota
Clear decisions for cloud, AI, and the infrastructure underneath them.
Pragion Advisory helps mid-market IT teams decide what to modernize, what to migrate, and what to leave alone — with a prioritized plan instead of another dashboard.
- Focus
- Azure-heavy & hybrid estates
- Format
- Fixed scope, fixed price
- Typical turn
- 10 business days
Services
Four problems worth paying to solve properly
Virtualization modernization
A defensible decision brief for VMware-era estates: stay, renegotiate, re-platform, or move to cloud — with cost, risk, and dependency tradeoffs made explicit.
AI workflow & governance
Where AI agents genuinely reduce operational load, which data must never leave, and how to run it with review, disclosure, and cost control in place.
Documentation & runbooks
Recover institutional knowledge after turnover or acquisition. Architecture diagrams, runbooks, and operational docs your on-call team will actually open.
Engagements
Scoped so you can say yes on a Thursday
| Engagement | What you get | Timeline |
|---|---|---|
| Cloud Cost & AI Governance Assessment | Findings, financial opportunity ranges, and a 90-day remediation backlog ranked by effort and risk. | 10 business days |
| Virtualization Modernization Brief | Options analysis with cost models, dependency map, and an executive recommendation you can take to a board. | 2–3 weeks |
| Documentation Sprint | Structured architecture docs, diagrams, and runbooks assembled from your existing tickets, configs, and notes. | 2 weeks |
| Fractional Infrastructure Architect | A senior architect on retainer for design review, vendor pushback, and decisions that need a second set of eyes. | Monthly |
Every engagement starts with a written scope, an explicit exclusions list, and a fixed price. Implementation work is quoted separately.
Fit
Worth being direct about this
A good fit
- 50–2,000 employees with a real Azure or AWS bill and no dedicated FinOps function.
- A VMware renewal, hardware refresh, or migration decision sitting unresolved.
- An IT team that knows what’s wrong but needs an outside brief to get it funded.
- Leadership that wants a ranked list of decisions, not a 90-page assessment.
Not a fit
- Staff augmentation, ticket queues, or on-call coverage.
- Hourly body-shop work with no defined outcome.
- Greenfield application development or custom product builds.
- “Add AI to it” mandates with no underlying business problem.
Most environments don’t need a transformation program. They need someone to read the whole picture calmly and tell you which three decisions actually matter this quarter.
- Discovery
A structured questionnaire plus read-only access. No discovery theatre, no six-week onboarding.
- Evidence
Findings tied to real billing data, configuration, and dependencies — every recommendation is traceable.
- Decisions
An executive brief written for the person who has to fund it, with the technical appendix behind it.
- Handoff
A prioritized backlog your own team can execute, or optional help delivering the first slice.
About
A senior practitioner, not a pitch deck
Pragion Advisory is an independent practice led by Nick Standke, an infrastructure and cloud architect with a career spent inside enterprise estates — Azure and AWS, VMware, Cisco networking, Linux and Windows platforms, and the cost and governance systems wrapped around them.
The work is deliberately narrow: diagnose clearly, price the outcome, and hand back something your team can act on. One active engagement at a time, so the attention is real.
- Azure & AWS architecture
- FinOps, tagging & cost governance
- VMware & on-prem modernization
- Networking & security review
- AI agent workflow design
- Technical documentation
FAQ
The questions that come up first
How is this priced?
Fixed price per engagement, quoted after a short scoping call. Diagnostic work is never billed hourly — you know the cost and the deliverable before anything starts. Implementation and out-of-scope work is quoted separately at a day rate.
What access do you need?
Read-only is the default: billing and cost exports, configuration inventory, and whatever architecture documentation exists. Elevated access is requested only when a specific finding requires it, and always with your change process.
How is my data handled, including with AI tools?
Client material stays isolated per engagement and is not used to train anything. AI assists with drafting, evidence organization, and document structure — every recommendation is reviewed and validated manually before it reaches you. How your material is processed is disclosed in writing up front.
Do you resell hardware, licenses, or cloud?
No. There are no vendor commissions, referral fees, or resale margins, so the recommendation is the recommendation. If the right answer is to renew what you have and change nothing, that’s what the brief will say.
What does the deliverable actually look like?
An executive brief written for the person funding the work — findings, financial ranges, risks, and a recommendation — plus a technical appendix and a 90-day backlog ranked by effort and impact. Delivered as a document your team owns, not a portal subscription.
How quickly can you start?
One active engagement at a time, so availability is genuinely limited. Most engagements start within two to three weeks of a signed scope, and assessments run ten business days from access.
Contact
Start with a conversation, not a proposal
Twenty minutes comparing notes on your cloud spend, VMware position, or documentation gaps. If there’s no engagement worth scoping, you’ll get that answer too.