What We Audit
AI models are only as good as the data and systems behind them. Before recommending any solution, we assess the four pillars that determine whether your infrastructure can support production AI workloads.
Data Quality
Schema consistency, null rates, duplicate detection, freshness tracking, and lineage mapping. We quantify exactly how clean your data is and what it costs you when it is not.
API Architecture
Endpoint design, rate limiting, authentication flows, versioning strategy, and error handling. We identify bottlenecks before they become outages.
Cloud Infrastructure
Resource utilization, cost allocation, scaling policies, and disaster recovery. We find the 30% of spend that delivers 0% of value.
Database Design
Indexing strategy, query performance, connection pooling, and schema evolution. We trace slow queries back to structural decisions and fix them at the root.
Assessment Timeline
Discovery
Connect to monitoring, read configs
Measure
Instrument latency, errors, costs
Analyze
Map dependencies, find gaps
Deliver
Prioritized remediation plan
Discovery
Connect to monitoring, read configs
Measure
Instrument latency, errors, costs
Analyze
Map dependencies, find gaps
Deliver
Prioritized remediation plan
Data & Infrastructure Services
Assessment Process
Our infrastructure assessments follow a structured, four-phase process designed to minimize disruption to your team while producing actionable results.
Discovery phase. We connect to your existing monitoring, review architecture diagrams, and interview the engineers who built and maintain your systems. No surveys, no questionnaires. We read the code and the configs.
Measurement phase. We instrument what is not already instrumented. Query latency distributions, data freshness SLAs, API error rates by endpoint, andinfrastructure cost per workload. Numbers replace assumptions.
Analysis phase. We map dependencies, identify single points of failure, and model the impact of each gap on your AI initiatives. Every finding gets a severity rating tied to business outcomes, not abstract risk scores.
Delivery phase. You receive a prioritized remediation plan with effort estimates, expected ROI for each fix, and a recommended sequence. We present to both engineering leadership and executive stakeholders.
Infrastructure Roadmap
The assessment produces a 90-day infrastructure roadmap tailored to your specific constraints: team size, budget, existing commitments, and AI objectives.
Each roadmap item includes the specific change, the engineer-hours required, the dependencies, and the measurable outcome. We do not deliver slide decks full of platitudes. You get a work plan your team can execute the following Monday.
For teams that want ongoing support, we offer implementation partnerships where Oaken AI engineers work alongside your team to execute the roadmap. This is not staff augmentation. We transfer knowledge as we build, so your team owns the result.
Common Gaps We Find
After dozens of assessments, patterns emerge. These are the issues we encounter most frequently, roughly in order of how often they appear.
- No data validation at ingestion. Bad records enter the system silently, degrade model performance over weeks, and surface as unexplained accuracy drops months later.
- Database queries without proper indexing. A missing index on a foreign key can make a simple JOIN 100x slower. We typically find 5-15 missing indexes per assessment.
- No connection pooling. Applications opening a fresh database connection per request instead of reusing pooled connections. This caps throughput at a fraction of what the hardware supports.
- Cloud resources provisioned for peak, billed 24/7. Auto-scaling policies that were never configured or were set once and forgotten. Savings of 30-50% are common after right-sizing.
- API rate limits discovered in production. Third-party API integrations without retry logic, backoff, or fallback paths. One upstream outage cascades into a system-wide failure.
If any of these sound familiar, reach out at ben@oakenai.tech. We will tell you within one conversation whether an assessment makes sense for your situation.