PE firms walk away from profitable businesses because the IT looks messy. We tell you what the mess actually is, what it costs to fix, and whether it changes your offer, then, if you win the deal, we fix it. Buy the profitable, ugly one with your eyes open. Fixed fee, days not weeks, and a report your investment committee will accept: Deal Scan £7,500, full Technical Due Diligence from £18,000, quoted before we start.
The diligence on this page comes from a firm that holds both certificates itself, 00508-ISMS-001 and 00508-QMS-001, issued by a UKAS-accredited certification body and audited independently every year. We package evidence the way an investment committee wants it because we produce the same evidence ourselves.
The team behind the certificatesTechnology due diligence is an independent assessment of a target company's technology, its infrastructure, security, licensing, and any custom software, carried out before you complete a deal, to work out whether the technology changes what the business is worth and what it will cost to own after completion.
It is also called technical due diligence or IT due diligence. We do one thing that generic checklists do not: we make the risk measurable and fixable, so every report ends with a number that moves or confirms your offer.
The report answers four questions a deal team actually needs answered before it commits capital.
Every engagement is a fixed fee, agreed and quoted before any work begins, no day-rate surprises, and a number your investment committee can plan around. Pick the one that matches where you are in the process.
A rapid red-flag assessment before you make an offer, run off the data room plus the target's external footprint, domains, exposed services, breach history, licensing, end-of-life software, and key-person risk on custom systems. You get a short red-flag report with a clear proceed, proceed-with-caution, or walk recommendation. It credits in full against a Technical Due Diligence commissioned within 90 days.
The full report, run in exclusivity. Infrastructure, security posture, and licensing, plus the custom-software question answered properly: what it is (architecture, stack, quality, documentation), whether it is maintainable (framework use, key-person dependency, takeover feasibility), and what it costs to keep, wrap, or replace, with integration cost and a remediation estimate the deal team can put in the model.
Post-completion remediation and integration. Cyber Essentials or CE+ certification of the target (we are the certification body), a collaboration-first cross-tenant model, guests, shared channels, a single address-book feel, rather than a forced tenant merge, SharePoint-to-SharePoint migration where domains are kept, device and Intune enrolment, the acquisition-integration playbook, and a security uplift to the standard the group or its contracts require.
The same work, from the other side of the table.
If you are preparing a business for exit, we get the IT story clean before you go to market: documentation in order, certifications in place, warranty-disclosure preparation, and the estate mapped against the checklist a buyer's investment committee will actually run. You walk into the room knowing what they will find, rather than discovering it live in a data-room Q&A. From £12,000.
We have worked on both sides of the deal table, including live IT-warranty disclosure during SPA negotiations, so the disclosures you make are ones you can stand behind. The same readiness work suits investors and lenders preparing an asset for sale too, from growth-equity rounds and venture debt through to full buyouts, not only private equity.
No open-ended scope and no day-rate meter. We agree what we are assessing, the timetable, and the fixed fee before any work starts.
You give us read access to the data room and permission to assess the target's external footprint. We agree scope, timetable, and the fixed fee up front, against your deal thesis rather than a generic checklist.
We assess the estate, infrastructure, security, licensing, and the custom software, and pressure-test it against how the business actually runs. AI-accelerated where it makes us faster, engineer-reviewed throughout.
You get a report with a clear recommendation and a number that moves or confirms the model, findings your investment committee can rely on, not a deck of maybes.
If you complete, we can fix what we found and integrate the target. It is quoted separately and is entirely yours to award, to us or to anyone else.
The deliverable is not the assessment, it is a report an IC will sign off, and that takes a credential wall most IT firms cannot put on the cover, plus a team that can actually fix what it finds. We are an NCSC Assured Service Provider and a Cyber Essentials certification body, with UKAS certified ISO 27001 and ISO 9001. We assess, remediate, and run.
Technology due diligence is the Prove it side of Dead Simple Computing, and it draws on the same team that handles the rest of a deal's technology lifecycle. That means the Cyber Essentials certification and NCSC-assured security work that lets us certify and harden a target, the software engineering team who can actually read a target's codebase and take it over if you keep it, and the managed IT service that runs the estate once the deal closes.
Because we can do the remediation, we keep it deliberately separate from the diligence. The report is priced and delivered as a standalone piece of work under our governance and audit practice; the findings are the findings whether you ask us to fix them, hand them to your own team, or take them to another supplier. If a deal needs something outside this scope, we will tell you plainly.
If you want to see the questions a good report works through, our technology due diligence checklist sets out the six areas and the custom-software question in full.
Technology due diligence is an independent assessment of a target company's technology before you complete a deal, its infrastructure, security posture, licensing, and any custom software, carried out to work out whether the technology changes what the business is worth and what it will cost to own after completion.
It is also called technical due diligence or IT due diligence. A good report ends with a number: a remediation and integration estimate the deal team can put straight into the model.
Financial due diligence checks the numbers; technology due diligence checks whether the technology behind those numbers is sound, secure, and affordable to run. Cyber due diligence is one part of it, the security posture, breach history, and exposure, whereas technology (or technical) due diligence also covers infrastructure, licensing, integration cost, and the state of any custom software. We can cover the cyber question inside a full technical report, or as a standalone Deal Scan.
A pre-offer Deal Scan takes 3-5 days. A full Technical Due Diligence takes around 10 working days, depending on the size and complexity of the target. We agree the timetable up front and work to your deal calendar, including in exclusivity.
We publish fixed fees. A Deal Scan is £7,500, and it credits in full against a full Technical Due Diligence commissioned within 90 days. Technical Due Diligence starts from £18,000, tiered by the size and complexity of the target and quoted before we start. Sell-side IT readiness starts from £12,000. That is a fraction of Big-4 tech DD pricing, and every fee is agreed before you commit.
No, and we structure it so you do not have to take that on trust. The report is a standalone fixed fee: you are paying for the diligence, not a sales pitch for the fix. Any remediation or integration is quoted separately and is entirely yours to award, to us, to your own team, or to another supplier. The findings stand whoever does the work.
That is often the hardest part of a deal, and it is where we are strongest. Our software engineers assess the codebase itself, architecture, stack, code quality, and documentation, and answer the questions that matter: is it maintainable, would one key person leaving sink it, and what does it cost to keep, wrap, or replace? If you complete, the same team can take the software over, so a risk we flag is one we can also close.
Yes. Most Technical Due Diligence runs during exclusivity against a fixed completion date. We agree scope and timetable before we start and deliver a board-ready report to it. If a deal is moving faster, the Deal Scan gives you a proceed, caution, or walk call in 3-5 days.
Yes. Sell-side IT readiness is the same work from the other side of the table: we get a business's IT story clean before it goes to market, documentation, certifications, and warranty-disclosure preparation, so it stands up to the buyer's investment committee. It starts from £12,000, and it suits investors and lenders preparing an asset for sale, not only trade owners.
Tell us about the target and where you are, pre-offer, in exclusivity, or preparing for exit, and we will set out which engagement fits, what it costs, and how fast we can turn it round. Fixed fee, agreed before we start. We reply within one working day, and you will speak to an engineer, not a salesperson.
Hello, I am Ainsley, the assistant here at Dead Simple Computing, and a governed AI assistant we built ourselves. Ask me anything about managed IT, cyber security, software and AI, or governance and audit. I can also put you in touch with a person.
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