A practical checklist for infrastructure audits
What we look for during a discovery and topology audit — and why it matters before any migration.
Every infrastructure project — migration, expansion or a straightforward health check — should start with the same discipline: a proper audit before any change is made.
Physical inventory comes first: servers, switches, firewalls, cabling and their actual age and warranty status, not what's assumed to be running.
Network topology is next. Undocumented environments are common, and a clear map of how traffic actually flows is often the single most valuable artifact an audit produces.
Security posture — firewall rules, access controls, patch levels and endpoint protection — gets reviewed alongside backup and disaster recovery testing, since both determine how much risk the business is actually carrying.
The output isn't just a report. A good audit produces a prioritized list of what needs fixing now, what can wait, and what should inform the next hardware refresh or migration plan.