Muhammad UsmanIndependent data platform consulting
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Your data platform should earn its keep — not quietly drain your budget.

I'm an independent data engineer who helps stretched teams get an expensive, fragile, or risky data platform back under control — less cost, less risk, safer change.

Tell me what's going on →
Sound familiar?

The numbers below are the everyday reality for stretched data teams.

Hover any one for the detail and the source.

29%
of cloud spend is wasted
Costs are climbing, and hard to explain. Wasted cloud spend rose to 29% in 2026, and 84% of organisations say they struggle to keep cloud costs under control.
Flexera, 2026 State of the Cloud ↗
38%
of migrations run over budget
A migration is coming, and you're right to be nervous. Nearly 4 in 10 migrations run over budget — ~23% over on average — with legacy complexity the number-one cause. Done right, that overrun is exactly what's avoidable.
IDC, cloud migration statistics ↗
45%
of data-team time is firefighting
Your team is firefighting instead of building. Data engineers now spend roughly 45% of their time fighting fires rather than building what the business needs.
Joe Reis, 2026 State of Data Engineering ↗
7%
of enterprises are truly AI-ready
Leadership wants more than the platform can deliver. Only 7% of enterprises say their data is truly ready for the AI and analytics their leaders are asking for.
Cloudera / Harvard Business Review, 2026 ↗

Hover a number for the detail and its source — on mobile, tap.

You're far from alone.

Data platforms mutate over time, until they become genuinely hard to maintain — and eventually no one person holds the whole picture. None of that means something's wrong with your team. It's some of the highest-return work there is to fix: migrations that land on time, wasted spend recovered, a team that gets back to building. That's the gap I close.

How I help

Like a good mechanic for your data platform.

I listen to how it's running, look for what's wearing out or quietly costing you, and give you a straight, honest read on what to tackle first. No vendor agenda — just what I actually see.

1

Start with a diagnostic

I look closely at your platform — cost, performance, risk, what tends to break when you change it — and come back with an honest, independent picture of where things really stand.

2

A prioritised view of what matters

A clear sense of what's worth tackling first and what can wait, in plain language your whole team can act on. You stay in the driver's seat on what happens next.

3

Hands-on help, if it's useful

If you want it, I can roll up my sleeves and help put the fixes in place — or simply advise as you go. Your pace, your call.

Why me

16 years keeping real systems alive.

16 years in data and operations, about 10 of them hands-on keeping big, heavily-used data warehouses fast and alive. I've been on the 3am incident calls and the migrations that could've gone sideways. I work independently — so the only thing I'm selling is the truth about your platform.

Download the services overview (PDF) ↗

Contact

Tell me what's going on.

A short message is enough to start — what's happening with your data platform, and what's worrying you. I read every message myself.