Frequently asked questions

Every assessment is fixed scope, fixed price and fixed end date, agreed in writing before it starts — never open-ended, and never billed by the hour without your prior agreement.

We do not publish prices. Every engagement is scoped and quoted individually, with you, before any work starts.

Two separate documents, not one.

A short engagement letter scopes and prices the assessment itself. Only if you decide to proceed does a second, separate statement of work price the delivery work — built from what the assessment actually found. Signing the first never commits you to the second.

Full detail on both stages is on how we work.

Yes — one access policy, not a different one per silo.

• Named individual accounts for every engineer who touches your environment. No shared credentials, ever.
• Least privilege by default, with elevation that is requested, approved, time-boxed and logged.
• Multi-factor authentication enforced on our accounts as well as yours.
• A documented offboarding step, executed at the end of the engagement and evidenced to you.

During an assessment specifically, access is read-only — we inspect, we do not change configuration. The full policy, including subprocessors and data handling, is on the trust page.

Johan Madrid takes the call — the person who would actually scope the work.

If the call progresses, you get a written one-page recap within 2 business days of it; if it does not, a one-line honest no.

AS DataWorks is based in San Diego, California; delivery runs in US business hours under a US entity and US contracts.

AS DataWorks is the trading name for the data and Azure practice of Automated Solutions LLC, a California limited liability company (Secretary of State file no. 202359292696). The registered address is deliberately not published — a decision, not a gap — and the AS DataWorks fictitious-business-name filing is in preparation. See about and trust for the full entity details.

Everything we build is yours from day one: infrastructure and pipeline code in your repository, documentation and runbooks written for your team, and cloud subscriptions billed to you directly.

We do not build anything only we can operate — no undocumented scripts on somebody's laptop, no configuration that exists solely in a console. If you decide to leave, or if we ever had to stop, a competent engineer could pick up the repository and the runbook and keep going. That is a design requirement of how we work, not a promise made after the fact.

Five kinds of caller, honestly:

• You need a regulatory audit, an attestation, or a signed compliance opinion. We build and document environments that stand up to those reviews; we do not issue the opinion.
• You run a global estate measured in thousands of servers. A systems integrator built for that scale is the right shape of firm, and we will say so.
• You want a decision, or a cutover, by Friday with no assessment. That is how a cloud bill nobody can explain gets created.
• Your only driver is "the board wants a cloud strategy" with no operational problem underneath it. The assessment will probably tell you to stay where you are — and we will still charge for it.
• You need a model that makes or materially influences a regulated credit, lending, insurance-pricing or employment decision. That needs a specialist model-risk practice, not us.

We would rather tell you this on the first call than after you have paid for a discovery phase.