Alerion vs Excel

Where Excel is the right tool

For a small IT estate — a handful of systems, one person keeping the list — a spreadsheet is often the correct choice, not a compromise.

• No marginal cost. Most organizations already hold a Microsoft 365 licence, so there is nothing new to buy or provision.
• No adoption curve. Everyone on the team already knows how to open, filter, and edit a spreadsheet — no training, no change management.
• Total flexibility. Any column, any layout, any ad-hoc calculation — a spreadsheet imposes no schema and adapts to however a team already works.
• Fine below a certain size. Below roughly a page or two of systems maintained by a single person, the limits below rarely bite in practice.

Where a spreadsheet breaks down

The limits below are structural, not a matter of discipline — they show up as soon as more than one person maintains the sheet, or the estate outgrows a page or two.

• No dependency graph. A spreadsheet lists items in rows; it cannot represent that system A depends on system B, so the downstream impact of a change has to be worked out from memory.
• No automatic detection. Nothing in a spreadsheet flags a missing owner, a contradictory status, or an orphaned entry — someone has to notice, and over time no one reliably does.
• No tamper-evident audit trail. Native change history and comments can be edited or deleted by anyone with edit access, so there is no reliable record of who changed what and when.
• Drift with every additional editor. Copies get emailed, duplicated, and diverge — the moment there are two owners there are, in practice, two versions of the truth.

What Alerion adds

Alerion is built specifically for the four gaps above — it maps an IT estate as a live graph instead of a list.

• Dynamic IT mapping — an interactive graph of IT components and their dependencies, kept current instead of going stale between reviews.
• Automatic risk and inconsistency detection — missing dependencies, contradictory statuses, orphaned entries flagged without anyone having to notice by hand.
• Change impact analysis — simulating a change before it is made, using the dependency graph a spreadsheet cannot hold.
• Audit log — every change is recorded automatically, not left to whoever remembers to leave a comment.

Compliance posture

• ISO 27001:2022 — in progress, expected Q3 2026.
• SOC 2 Type II — in progress, expected Q4 2026.
• GDPR / RGPD (EU 2016/679) — active: personal data is anonymised before every AI model call, and a data processing register (Art. 30) is maintained.

Not a replacement for everyone

Below a certain estate size, Excel remains the right tool — and the two coexist without friction: a spreadsheet for quick ad-hoc lists, Alerion for the dependency graph, detection, and audit trail a spreadsheet cannot provide.

Where Alerion is young

One asymmetry this page owes you plainly: a spreadsheet has been refined for decades and is not going away; Alerion is in beta. Its published figures come from an internal beta on a representative example environment, and its ISO 27001 and SOC 2 audits are in progress, not complete. If you need a tool with a long production track record today, that is a legitimate reason to stay on a spreadsheet for now.