We serve as your fractional cloud architecture team — conducting architecture reviews, building technology radars, evaluating vendors, and designing enterprise-grade reference architectures across 6 industries.
Engineered for growing organisations.
Your CTO is busy shipping features, managing technical debt, and keeping production running. Your CIO is navigating vendor relationships, budget cycles, and board-level technology questions. Neither has the bandwidth to evaluate every emerging platform, run structured architecture reviews, or build technology radars from scratch — and the cost of getting these decisions wrong compounds for years. A bad vendor commitment locks you in for 36 months. An uninformed architecture choice creates rework that costs 10x the original implementation. A missed technology trend leaves you building what competitors bought off the shelf.
CloudForge serves as your fractional cloud architecture team — independent, vendor-neutral, and accountable for outcomes. We conduct architecture reviews using TOGAF-aligned methodology, build technology radars with Adopt/Trial/Assess/Hold classifications tailored to your industry and maturity, evaluate vendors with weighted scoring frameworks that eliminate subjective bias, and design enterprise-grade reference architectures that your teams can implement with confidence. We have done this across 6 industries and 50+ organizations, which means every engagement benefits from pattern recognition that no single-company CTO can accumulate.
Advisory without implementation is just opinion. What distinguishes CloudForge from traditional consulting firms is that our advisors are practicing engineers who still write code, review pull requests, and operate production systems. When we recommend a technology, we have deployed it. When we flag an architecture risk, we have seen it cause outages. When we evaluate a vendor, we have integrated their product and know where the documentation lies. This hands-on credibility means our recommendations are grounded in operational reality, not slide-deck theory — and your engineering teams trust our guidance because we speak their language.
Common scenarios where this service delivers the highest impact.
Series A startup with 20 engineers and no full-time CTO — architecture decisions are made ad hoc by senior developers, vendor selections are based on blog posts, and technical debt is accumulating without strategic oversight.
Structured architecture governance with ADR practice, quarterly technology radar, vendor evaluation framework, and board-ready technology strategy — providing CTO-level oversight without CTO-level compensation.
Enterprise engineering organization with 200+ developers making architecture decisions in silos — inconsistent patterns, duplicated effort, and no structured process for evaluating significant technical choices.
Established Architecture Review Board with defined scope, decision criteria, ADR templates, and review cadence — providing governance without bureaucracy and consistency without stifling innovation.
Organization evaluating 5 observability vendors with $800K annual commitment — each vendor claims superiority, sales teams provide biased POC environments, and the decision risks locking in the wrong tool for 3 years.
Structured evaluation with weighted criteria, controlled proof-of-concept on real workloads, total cost of ownership analysis, and vendor-neutral recommendation with explicit trade-offs documented.
Engineering leadership wants to adopt emerging technologies strategically but has no framework for evaluating which technologies to invest in, experiment with, or explicitly avoid.
Quarterly technology radar with Adopt/Trial/Assess/Hold classifications, evaluation criteria specific to organization's stack and maturity, and investment recommendations aligned to business strategy.
Private equity firm acquiring a SaaS company needs independent technical assessment — code quality, architecture scalability, security posture, technical debt quantification, and team capability evaluation.
Comprehensive technical due diligence report with risk-rated findings, remediation cost estimates, architecture scalability assessment, and investment recommendation with confidence intervals.
A proven methodology built for growing organisations.
Evaluate current systems against industry benchmarks and best practices
Build a prioritised adopt/trial/assess/hold framework for emerging technologies
Run structured RFP processes with weighted criteria and proof-of-concept gating
Align technology initiatives to business objectives with quarterly milestones
A Series B SaaS company with no CTO and engineering decisions made ad hoc by senior developers. Architecture choices were inconsistent across teams, three vendor commitments worth $800K annually were based on sales demos rather than structured evaluations, and the upcoming Series C due diligence required demonstrable technology governance that did not exist.
CloudForge served as fractional architecture team for 12 months: established ADR practice with templates and review cadence, ran 3 structured vendor evaluations with weighted scoring, built a quarterly technology radar, conducted architecture reviews of all major subsystems, and prepared technology strategy documentation for Series C investor due diligence.
Before CloudForge, every architecture decision was a debate that ended with whoever argued loudest. Now we have a structured process — ADRs, vendor scorecards, a technology radar — and our Series C investors specifically cited our technology governance as a differentiator. CloudForge gave us CTO-level thinking without needing to hire a CTO.
— CEO, European Series B SaaS Company
Enterprise architecture methodology providing a structured lifecycle from Architecture Vision through Change Management — adapted for cloud transformation programs with iterative delivery cycles rather than traditional waterfall governance.
Enterprise architecture modeling language for communicating complex system relationships across business, application, and technology layers — enabling stakeholder alignment through visual representations that bridge technical and business perspectives.
Strategic planning tool that maps technology components along a value chain and evolution axis — revealing build-vs-buy decisions, identifying commoditized versus differentiating capabilities, and informing technology investment priorities.
Technology assessment methodology classifying technologies into Adopt/Trial/Assess/Hold rings — adapted to organization-specific context with evaluation criteria reflecting industry requirements, team capabilities, and strategic alignment.
Software architecture visualization at four abstraction levels — Context, Container, Component, and Code — providing a shared vocabulary for communicating architecture decisions to audiences ranging from board members to junior developers.
Lightweight architecture governance through Architecture Decision Records — capturing context, decision, consequences, and review dates for every significant technical choice, creating an institutional memory that survives team turnover.
Current-state assessment complete and initial architecture review delivered — existing systems evaluated against industry benchmarks, critical risks identified, and governance framework established with ADR templates and review cadence.
Technology radar v1 published and first vendor evaluation complete — technologies classified into Adopt/Trial/Assess/Hold, initial vendor scored against weighted criteria, and recommendations presented to engineering leadership.
Reference architecture published and ADR library established — target-state architecture documented for primary subsystems, 15+ architecture decisions recorded, and review cadence operational across engineering teams.
Governance cadence self-sustaining with quarterly strategy reviews — technology radar updated, second vendor evaluation complete, architecture review board operational, and board-ready technology briefing delivered.
TOGAF 9 certified with 50+ architecture reviews completed across financial services, healthcare, logistics, SaaS, government, and retail. This cross-industry pattern recognition means we bring frameworks and failure patterns from adjacent industries that your single-industry team may not have encountered — anticipating risks before they materialize and recommending proven solutions your competitors have already validated.
Vendor-neutral by design — we do not resell cloud services, tooling licenses, or infrastructure products. Zero referral agreements with any technology vendor. When we evaluate 5 observability tools or compare 3 cloud providers, the recommendation optimizes for your requirements and constraints, not our revenue. This independence is why procurement teams and board members trust our evaluations.
Our advisors still write code — the advisory practice is staffed by the same engineers who build Kubernetes platforms, optimize CI/CD pipelines, and operate production systems for our implementation clients. This means architecture recommendations are immediately implementable, vendor evaluations account for operational complexity that sales demos hide, and technology radar assessments are grounded in hands-on experience rather than analyst reports.
We combine strategic thinking with engineering execution across 6 industries. Unlike consultancies that deliver recommendations and leave, CloudForge can implement what we advise. If an architecture review identifies a platform gap, our Kubernetes team can build it. If a vendor evaluation recommends a new observability stack, our SRE team can deploy it. This continuity from strategy to implementation eliminates the translation loss that makes most advisory engagements shelf-ware.
Let's start with a technical conversation about your specific needs.