The data-center lease ends in 14 months. Half those VMs haven't been touched in three years.
Lift-and-shift everything and you'll pay cloud prices for data-center waste. We inventory what actually runs, right-size what moves, retire what doesn't, and land it all in an Azure foundation with real DR and a bill someone can explain.
It looks straightforward on paper. It never is.
On-prem infrastructure is expensive to keep and scary to leave. Lift-and-shift alone just moves the mess and adds a meter to it.
Backups exist but restores are untested. Security monitoring is a folder of alerts nobody reads.
A right-sized cloud footprint, real disaster recovery, and a monthly bill that makes sense.
The zombie VMs retire, the oversized ones shrink, and the bill reflects workloads — not the fear-based sizing of 2019.
Backup and site recovery configured, then tested with a real failover exercise — so the plan is muscle memory, not a PDF.
Tagged resources, budgets with alerts, reservations where they pay, and a monthly cost review that keeps drift from compounding.
The playbook, phase by phase.
Cloud migrations go wrong at the edges — the undocumented dependency, the license surprise, the DR that was never tested. The phases exist to find those edges early.
What runs, what talks to what, what's licensed how, and what hasn't logged a user in a year. Read-only discovery — the retirement list starts here.
Subscriptions, networking, identity integration, policy guardrails, and cost management — the foundation everything lands on, built before anything moves.
One meaningful workload moved end to end — performance benchmarked, runbook written, rollback rehearsed. Assumptions die here, cheaply.
Workloads move in dependency order, each with a cutover window, verification, and rollback gate. Right-sizing happens at the move, not 'later.'
Backup and site-recovery configured and TESTED with a failover exercise, Sentinel or monitoring wired to someone who reads it, and the cost-review cadence started.
Week ranges reflect a typical engagement — your written plan comes with dates and fixed prices before anything starts.
The horror stories, and the engineering that prevents them.
Every failed cloud migration is one of these four stories. The controls are unglamorous and they work:
Everything lifted as-is, sized as-was, running 24/7 with nothing reserved.
An undocumented dependency on a server that stayed behind.
First real outage, first real failover attempt — and the runbook was fiction.
The migration stalled at 60% and both environments run forever.
Assembled from published, fixed-price engagements.
Infrastructure engagements are assembled from published services — the foundation, the moves, and the operations that follow.
Names, not logos.
Clients who made the move, telling it like it was.
Recorded by the clients themselves — real names, real projects. Videos open in a new tab.
Questions we get asked, answered without spin.
If your question isn't here, ask it below — an engineer answers by email, and Mike reads every one.
Should everything go to Azure?
Almost never everything. The honest output of discovery is four lists: move, retire, replace-with-SaaS, and stay (for now). Zombie VMs get retired, commodity apps often become SaaS, and what moves is what earns its cloud bill.
What will Azure actually cost us monthly?
The landing-zone phase produces a forecast built from your real inventory — right-sized instances, reservations, storage tiers — not a portal calculator guess. Then the monthly review keeps reality tied to the forecast.
Can we do this without downtime?
For most workloads, yes — replication-based moves with short cutover windows in agreed maintenance slots, and a rollback gate per wave. The genuinely hard ones get called out in the pilot phase with honest options.
Who runs it afterward?
Your team, our team, or both — the handover includes runbooks and monitoring either way. Many clients keep us on a monthly operations scope with the cost review built in; some take it fully in-house. Both are fine outcomes.
Our lease deadline is tight. Where do we start?
Discovery this week — it's read-only and fixed-price. The wave plan is then built backwards from your lease end with buffer, and if the timeline is genuinely impossible we'll tell you that in week three, not month eleven.
Talk to the person who’ll actually be accountable.
Thirty minutes with Mike — our CEO, not a sales rep. He’ll tell you whether we’re the right fit, including when we’re not.