Entrazure
What the role covers
The budget. A twelve-month IT budget that separates run cost, project cost and licensing, with the line items traced to contracts rather than to last year’s spreadsheet plus five percent. Most organizations find between eight and fifteen percent of spend attached to something nobody uses.
The roadmap. A twelve to eighteen month plan with named quarters, dependencies and a stated cost per item, written so a non-technical board can read it and challenge it. Anything we cannot justify to the CFO does not go on it.
The risk register. Actual risks with owners, likelihood, impact and a decision recorded against each one: mitigate, accept, or transfer. Accepted risk is written down and signed, so nobody discovers after an incident that everyone assumed someone else was handling it.
Vendor and contract control. A map of every IT contract, its renewal date, its notice period and its auto-renewal clause. This alone typically pays for the engagement in the first year, because the renewals nobody diarised are priced on the assumption that nobody will.
The leadership seat. Presence at the management meeting, translation between what the business is asking for and what it will cost, and a quarterly board pack that reports on delivery, spend and posture in the same three pages.
Architecture decisions that outlive us. Where the estate is Azure, decisions are made against the same standards we apply in delivery, and the technical work runs through the landing zone and managed Azure practices rather than being improvised.
Hiring your replacement for us. The job description, the salary band, the technical interview, and the handover. Ending the engagement well is part of the engagement.
How the engagement runs
Month 1, assessment. Two days on site or in your systems: infrastructure, identity, backup and recovery, licensing, contracts, security posture, and the three things that keep your leadership team awake. Output is a written assessment with a prioritized list, an estimated cost against each item, and a clear separation of what is genuinely risky from what is merely untidy.
Month 2, roadmap and budget. The twelve-month plan and the budget presented to leadership, argued, amended and signed. Not accepted quietly, argued: a roadmap nobody pushed back on is a roadmap nobody read.
Months 3 onward, cadence. A fixed number of days a month, with a standing agenda: delivery status, spend against budget, risk register changes, contracts approaching renewal, and one decision that needs making this month. Between visits we are reachable for the decisions that cannot wait.
Quarterly, the board pack. Three pages: what shipped, what it cost, what the posture looks like against a named framework, and what we are asking the board to decide.
Annually, the exit review. An honest answer to whether you now need a full-time IT director, and what the engagement should become if you do.
What you keep
- A written IT assessment with a prioritized, costed remediation list.
- A twelve to eighteen month roadmap in a format your board reads.
- An IT budget separating run, project and licensing, traced to contracts.
- A live risk register with owners and recorded accept-or-mitigate decisions.
- A vendor and contract map with renewal and notice dates.
- Four quarterly board packs a year, kept as the record of what was decided and when.
- The job description and interview material for your eventual full-time hire.
Who this is for
Organizations of roughly 50 to 300 people with real IT dependency and no IT director: manufacturers, clinics and health services groups, professional services firms, and venture-backed companies that grew past the point where the CTO can also run internal IT.
In Montreal and across Quebec, the pattern is specific. An SME with an office manager or a controller absorbing IT alongside their real job, an MSP invoice nobody audits, and Law 25 obligations that arrived with real teeth and no obvious owner. A fractional CIO in Montreal is usually hired for the roadmap and ends up earning the fee on governance. We work in French, and being a francophone Azure partner in Quebec means the documentation, the board pack and the privacy conversations happen in the language your leadership actually uses.
In Orlando and Florida, the driver is more often growth and acquisition: multiple sites, inherited tenants, a cyber insurance renewal demanding controls nobody owns, and an enterprise customer sending a security questionnaire. We are established in both countries, so the engagement is contracted and invoiced locally either way.
Who this is not for
If you need hands-on support, patching and a helpdesk, that is a managed service and not this. We will help you select and hold an MSP to account, but a fractional CIO who also answers tickets is doing neither job.
If you already have a competent IT director and want a second opinion, buy an assessment, not a standing role. Placing a second decision-maker over an existing one is how you lose the first one.
And if the reason IT is failing is that leadership will not fund it or will not decide, an outside CIO cannot fix that. We have taken those engagements before and the honest outcome is a well-written roadmap nobody executes. If that describes the situation, say so on the first call and we will tell you what we think would actually help.
Related
- Managed Azure and FinOps: the delivery arm when we also run the estate.
- Compliance architecture: SOC 2, HIPAA and Law 25 as a standing agenda item.
- Azure licensing through a direct CSP: consolidated billing and the licensing line of the budget.
- About Entrazure: the entities, the partner designations and who you would be working with.
- All Azure services: what the roadmap can call on once it is written.
Questions we get
How many days a month does this take?
Two to four days a month for an organization of 50 to 200 people with a stable estate. Six to eight during an active program such as a migration, an audit or an ERP replacement. We agree the number in advance and report against it, and if the work consistently needs more, that is a signal you are approaching a full-time hire rather than a reason to quietly bill more.
How is this different from hiring a consultant?
A consultant produces a recommendation and leaves. A fractional CIO holds the decision, owns the budget line, sits in the leadership meeting and is accountable for the outcome next quarter. The role includes saying no to a vendor, which a consultant paid by the deliverable rarely does.
Do you replace our managed service provider?
No. We sit on your side of that relationship. Part of the job is holding your MSP to its contract, reading the invoices properly, and telling you when a renewal is being priced on inertia. Where we do run infrastructure ourselves, the two arrangements are contracted and priced separately so the conflict is visible.
What happens when we hire a full-time IT director?
That is the intended end of most engagements and we help you get there: the job description, the technical interviews, and a handover of the roadmap, budget and risk register. We then step back to a quarterly advisory cadence or stop entirely. An engagement designed never to end is a dependency, not a service.
Can you work in French and in English?
Yes. We hold entities in Canada and the United States, and the engagement runs in the language of your leadership team. For Quebec organizations that means French internally, French documentation, and the Law 25 obligations treated as a standing agenda item rather than a project.
Do you sign off on security?
We report on security posture and own the remediation plan. Security architecture is led by certified security architects, and a fractional CIO engagement includes a quarterly posture review against a named framework. We do not, however, act as your certifying auditor, and no firm should do both.
Have a question about this work?
Three fields. An architect reads it and answers within one business day.