Cloud Cost & Security Audit
We audit your AWS, GCP, or Azure environment, finding the ghost costs draining your runway and the security gaps hiding underneath. Most teams find both within the first week.
The Problem
You're paying for infrastructure you don't fully understand. Orphaned resources, overprivileged IAM roles, untagged spend, it adds up. And underneath the billing mess, there's usually a security problem waiting to be found by someone less friendly than us.
Who This Is For
Startups at 10-50 engineers with growing AWS/GCP/Azure bills and no dedicated security person. Teams preparing for SOC 2, Series A due diligence, or a first enterprise customer who sent a security questionnaire.
Typical Outcomes
Timeline Options
Quick Scan (7 days)
- Cloud cost audit and top waste identified
- IAM review and top access risks
- Security posture snapshot
- Top 10 prioritised findings
Full Audit (21 days)
- Everything in Quick Scan
- Network segmentation review
- Kubernetes RBAC and network policies
- Compliance gap analysis
- Implementation of top 10 fixes
- Full documentation handoff
Audit + Remediation (45 days)
- Everything in Full Audit
- Full remediation, not just findings
- Multi-cloud unified policies
- Security Hub / GuardDuty setup
- 45-day support period
This might not be a fit if...
- You're just getting started with cloud and have nothing running yet
- You need someone to manage your cloud day-to-day
- You want a penetration test only (that's a different engagement)
What You Get
The Transformation
Before
- AWS bill growing with no clear explanation
- Overprivileged IAM, everyone has admin somewhere
- Untagged resources, orphaned instances, idle databases
- No visibility into who accessed what
- Open S3 buckets you forgot about
After
- 20-40% cost reduction, every dollar accounted for
- Least-privilege IAM enforced and documented
- Full resource inventory, idle waste eliminated
- Audit logs enabled, access patterns visible
- Clean security posture, ready for due diligence
Engagement Models
Project-based
Fixed scope, fixed timeline, fixed price. Ideal for specific security initiatives.
Retainer
Ongoing support with priority response. Perfect for continuous security needs.
What influences pricing?
- Team size and environment complexity
- Timeline and urgency requirements
- Scope of systems and platforms
- Ongoing support and maintenance needs
Frequently Asked Questions
Explore Other Services
Pipeline Security
Your pipeline is deploying secrets to production and you probably don't know it. We audit and harden your CI/CD, catching vulnerabilities before they ship, not after.
Incident Readiness
When production breaks, does your team have a playbook, or does everyone just Slack the one person who knows the system? We build the runbooks, alerts, and processes so the next incident doesn't become a war story.
RBI Fintech Compliance
RBI Master Direction technical compliance for payment aggregators, NBFCs, and digital lending platforms headquartered in Bangalore. Data localization, encryption, MFA, 6-hour incident reporting, VAPT readiness, and CERT-In empanelled audit prep. Built into your AWS / GCP / Azure infrastructure, not into a binder nobody reads.
DPDP Compliance
Get your startup ready for the Digital Personal Data Protection Act before May 2027 enforcement. Data inventory, consent management, 72-hour breach notification pipeline, DPO scope, child-data special handling. Built into your codebase, not into a privacy policy nobody reads. Penalty exposure up to ₹250 crore.
AWS Baseline (India)
The 12 AWS security controls every Indian seed startup should turn on this afternoon: region-locked to ap-south-1, DPDP-aware, RBI-overlay-ready. Same opinionated baseline we open-sourced as aws-startup-security-baseline. Built for ₹30k-month retainers, not enterprise CAPEX.
K8s Audit (India)
Production Kubernetes cluster audit + hardening for Indian startups: RBAC review, network policies, admission controllers, supply-chain security, pod-security standards. Built for 3-15 node EKS / GKE / AKS clusters running real workloads, not enterprise mesh complexity.
SOC 2 (India)
SOC 2 Type I + Type II readiness for Indian seed startups, priced in rupees. We build you to audit-ready and shortlist India-based licensed CPA firms so the all-in lands at ₹15-30L instead of the ₹35L+ Western default. Vanta / Drata / Sprinto / Scrut integration, and a build cadence calibrated to Indian engineering economics. The attestation itself is always issued by the licensed CPA firm you engage.
Virtual CISO
Security leadership on a monthly retainer. One named person who owns your security decisions, answers your customers' questionnaires, and keeps cloud cost and cloud risk on the same review cadence, without a full-time CISO salary.
Chennai
Your cloud, infrastructure and security team on a monthly retainer, run from Chennai. Lower cloud bills, infrastructure that holds up, and security that stands up to scrutiny, for a fraction of what one senior hire costs. Remote-first, IST working hours, in-person in Chennai when it genuinely helps.
UAE
Your cloud, infrastructure and security team on a monthly retainer, for startups in the UAE. One senior engineer who owns the cloud bill, the deployment pipeline and the security posture together, rather than three separate hires or an advisory firm that writes recommendations someone else has to implement. Includes the security leadership work: enterprise questionnaires answered, and clarity on which data protection regime each of your entities actually falls under.
India
One senior owner for cloud, infrastructure and security across your Indian startup, on a monthly retainer in rupees. Built around what Indian teams actually get asked for: DPDP obligations, RBI overlays for fintech, and SOC 2 or ISO 27001 readiness priced for Indian engineering economics rather than Western defaults.
Bangalore
Cloud, infrastructure and security owned by one senior practitioner, on a monthly retainer, for Bangalore startups competing against the most expensive DevOps hiring market in India. Remote-first on IST hours, with the fintech and SaaS compliance surface Bangalore teams actually run into.
DaaS
Fixed-scope, fixed-price DevOps and security engagements you can start this week: cloud cost investigation, security audit, incident-readiness sprint, compliance gap scan. The quote is agreed before work starts, and every engagement ends with findings your team keeps. Start on demand, scale to fractional if you want it owned monthly.
Terraform
Terraform consulting for startups: codify the infrastructure that currently lives in consoles and one engineer's head. Reproducible environments, reviewable changes, secure state, and a CI/CD pipeline that plans before it applies. Works with existing infrastructure via import; Terraform and OpenTofu.
Migration
Startup-sized cloud migrations that arrive secure and cost-controlled: PaaS to cloud (Heroku class exits), cloud to cloud, region moves for data-localization, and account consolidation. Fixed scope, fixed price, senior engineer end to end. The migration is the cheapest moment you will ever have to fix cost and security; we use it.
AI Search Visibility
When your buyers ask ChatGPT, Gemini or Perplexity who to hire, the answer should include you. A fixed-scope sprint that measures where you stand in AI answers today and builds the technical layer that gets you cited: generative engine optimization (GEO), answer engine optimization (AEO), done with receipts. We ran this exact playbook on matrixgard.com and the results are public. A growth-side offering from the same practice; the security retainer remains the core.
See what your cloud is hiding.
Book a 20-minute infrastructure review. No pitch, just practical insights.