The Sovereignty Index™
Your estate, measured.
Your debt, in pounds.
Most boards have never been shown what their IT is actually costing them — not the invoices, the hidden number: the cost of fragility, dependency, and deferred decisions. The Sovereignty Index™ produces that number, with the evidence behind it, in three weeks. Fixed fee. No obligation to go further.
One document. Three things on every page.
Every Sovereignty Index™ output contains three things your current IT provider will not produce: a scored position across five pillars, a calculated Technical Debt Burden stated in pounds, and a prioritised set of findings your board can act on without translating from technical language first.
Pillar scores
A scored position across Identity, Velocity, Resilience, Security, and Cognitive — each rated on a common scale so the board can see the shape of the estate at a glance.
Technical Debt Burden
A single £ figure representing the annual cost of your current estate's fragility — emergency cover, insurance exposure, deal risk, and staff hours lost to workarounds. Not an estimate. A calculation, with the working shown.
Prioritised findings
A ranked set of findings with recommended actions, sequenced by impact and effort. Written for a board audience. Takes your existing team from "we think there's a problem" to "here is the problem and here is what to do about it."
Five pillars. Fifty questions. One number.
The Index assesses your estate across five areas that together determine whether you are genuinely in control of your IT — or whether the appearance of control is masking structural fragility that will eventually surface as a cost or a crisis.
Identity
Who can access what, and how do you know?
Most mid-market estates have never fully audited who holds privileged access — to infrastructure, to SaaS applications, to data stores. Identity assesses your directory architecture, privileged access management, and offboarding rigour. It is consistently the pillar that produces the most immediate findings.
Velocity
How quickly can your IT respond to the business?
Velocity measures the gap between what the business asks IT for and when it arrives. Long lead times, manual deployment processes, and uncontrolled change all compress your ability to respond to market conditions and add direct cost to every initiative that touches technology.
Resilience
What happens when something fails?
Resilience covers backup integrity, recovery time objectives, disaster-recovery test records, and single points of failure. Most businesses assume their backups work. The Sovereignty Index™ verifies that assumption. The gap between assumed and actual recovery capability is where the largest debt figures emerge.
Security
What is your exposure, right now?
Security assesses patch currency, endpoint coverage, perimeter configuration, and security event visibility. Not a penetration test — a structural assessment of whether your posture is coherent and whether your board is receiving an accurate picture of risk.
Cognitive
Does your IT team know everything they need to know?
Cognitive measures documentation quality, knowledge concentration, and institutional dependency. When key knowledge sits in one person's head — or has left the business entirely — your estate becomes fragile in ways that do not show up in any other pillar. It is also the debt that compounds fastest when staff change.
Three weeks. A written output. No slide decks.
The Sovereignty Index™ is designed to produce a decision-ready document in three weeks from first call. The process is structured, not open-ended.
Briefing and scoping
A structured call with the people who know your estate — typically IT leadership and one member of the senior team. We establish scope, agree access to documentation, and set the review calendar.
Estate review
We work through a structured review of your configuration, documentation, and tooling across all five pillars. This is desktop-led — no agents, no scanning tools, no access to live systems. You control what we see.
Modelling and output
We translate findings into scored positions across each pillar and calculate your Technical Debt Burden in pounds. The output is a written document — not a slide deck — structured for board presentation. It states your position, your debt figure, and a prioritised set of findings with recommended actions.
Timelines vary slightly by estate complexity, but three weeks is the standard. We have never delivered a written output later than four.
Who this is for.
Boards that suspect the picture is incomplete
If your IT reporting tells you everything is fine but incidents keep happening, the Sovereignty Index™ produces an independent view that doesn't go through whoever manages your estate.
Finance directors facing a renewal or migration decision
Before committing to a new vendor contract or a cloud migration programme, it is worth knowing what you actually have. The Index gives you a baseline that makes any subsequent investment decision defensible.
Businesses after a period of rapid growth
Fast growth almost always means IT inherited by acquisition, headcount, or circumstance rather than designed. The debt that accumulates during growth tends to surface as risk or cost at the worst possible moment.
Leadership teams preparing for a transaction
Technical debt is increasingly scrutinised in M&A due diligence. An independent assessment before a process starts gives you a cleaner data room and avoids findings that reduce valuation or delay close.
The diagnostic is a fixed fee, agreed in writing before work begins. If the findings do not justify the next step, you stop here — better informed, with a document your board can hold.
Ready to see the number?
The first call is a conversation. If the Sovereignty Index™ is the right next step, we will tell you exactly what it involves, what the fixed fee is, and what you will have at the end of it. You decide.