Expert IT Consultation
Engagements often begin with a short diagnostic (such as Cloud Cost Triage) before expanding into deeper architecture or governance work.
The most expensive IT problems are the ones being solved incorrectly.
I’m Russ Profant. After 30 years inside HP, Morgan Stanley, CIBC, RBC, and others, the pattern I keep seeing is the same: organisations spend months and significant budget pursuing solutions to problems that were never correctly diagnosed in the first place. My work starts where most consultants stop — before the solution is chosen.
A personal banking team had grown from one digital product application to seven, each maintained separately by a team of six developers. A Big Four firm was brought in to assess why delivery was slowing and costs were rising. Their recommendation was organisational. The actual problem was architectural — a foundational misunderstanding of the domain that had been compounding for years, creating linear cost growth with every new product variation.
I documented the root cause and a path to a single unified application. One application. Same six developers. The diagnosis was correct. Whether it was acted on is a different question.
A core transaction processing system had “failed” twice in six months, breaching SLAs and triggering an emergency replacement project — in the middle of a cloud migration. The proposed fix was a circuit breaker pattern implementation: invasive, high-risk, and expensive to introduce into a stable, thoroughly-tested production system.
Within two days I identified the actual problem: a connection pool configuration set for a 15-year-old load profile that had never been updated. The system had never failed. It had simply run out of configured connections. The fix was a configuration change, not a code change. No replacement needed. The engineering team had been unable to reach this conclusion after six months.
These are not unusual cases. In almost every environment I have worked in, the stated problem and the actual problem are different things. The gap between them is where the real cost lives.
Background
I studied Philosophy at the University of Toronto — specifically philosophy of mind, which in the early nineties was the discipline closest to what we now call AI. The habit of going back to first principles before accepting a problem’s framing has stayed with me across thirty years of technical work.
My career has covered financial services, investment banking, healthcare, and government — across organisations ranging from global tier-one institutions to early-stage startups:
At Morgan Stanley I worked inside one of the most operationally disciplined technology environments I have encountered anywhere — a deliberately simple global stack running thousands of systems at close to 100% daily success rate. That experience shaped how I think about complexity: most of it is unnecessary, and almost all of it is expensive.
At RBC I re-architected an ETL system and improved throughput tenfold, on a trajectory toward a hundredfold improvement before the engagement ended. At FundSERV I built an enterprise-wide backend data testing system at a time when no such paradigm existed in the industry.
How I work
I do not start engagements by proposing solutions. I start by verifying that the problem being solved is actually the problem that exists. This step is almost always skipped under delivery pressure, and its absence is almost always expensive.
My engagements are deliberately short and scoped. A Cloud Cost Triage takes ten days. An Architecture Maturity Assessment has a defined output. A fractional architecture retainer has a clear monthly allocation. The goal is to give you something actionable quickly — not to create dependency.
I work remotely by default and on-site when it makes sense. I am based in Mississauga, Ontario.
Current focus
Cloud architecture and cost efficiency on AWS and Azure, FinOps practice, and enterprise architecture governance. See the Certifications page for current credentials.
If you are solving a problem that keeps getting more expensive, it is worth a conversation.
A 20-minute screening call costs nothing and requires no preparation.
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