End-to-end Microsoft Azure migration for UK organisations moving away from on-premises, co-located, or competing-cloud workloads. Discovery through cutover, delivered by Microsoft-certified Azure architects.
Most Azure migrations fail in the same places: incomplete discovery, an under-engineered landing zone, a cutover plan that ignores DNS and identity, and validation that stops at "the VM booted." We treat each of these as a phase with its own deliverable, sign-off, and rollback path.
1. Discovery and dependency mapping. We use Azure Migrate (or equivalent tooling for non-VMware estates) to inventory every server, database, and network flow. Output: a workload catalogue with disposition per workload — retire, retain, rehost, re-platform, refactor, or replace.
2. Landing zone. A production-grade Azure environment built on the Cloud Adoption Framework: hub-spoke or Azure Virtual WAN topology, identity from Entra ID, policy and tag taxonomy, log ingestion to Azure Monitor / Sentinel, role-based access, and a deployment pipeline. The landing zone is signed off before a single workload moves.
3. Migration waves. Workloads grouped by dependency cluster, not by team. Each wave has a runbook: pre-flight checks, replication, cutover window, DNS switchover, post-cutover validation, and a documented rollback. We run one wave end-to-end as a pilot before committing to scale.
4. Post-migration. Cost baseline, performance baseline, security posture review, and a 30-day hypercare window where the team that did the migration is the team that fixes anything that surfaces.
Full workload inventory with disposition, dependencies, and migration complexity. Becomes the source of truth for waves and budget.
Azure environment as Bicep or Terraform — networks, identity, policy, monitoring, governance. Deployable, reviewable, and yours to keep.
One runbook per wave with cutover steps, validation checks, communication plan, and rollback. Tested in pilot before wave 1.
Day-30 baseline of Azure spend per workload, performance metrics versus pre-migration, and the next round of optimisation candidates.
The brief. Exit a co-location data centre by end of fiscal year. Roughly 120 Windows and Linux servers, three SQL clusters, two regulated workloads requiring evidenced controls, and a hard audit deadline.
The work. Eight weeks of discovery and landing-zone build, then six migration waves over twelve weeks. Two regulated workloads were re-platformed onto Azure SQL Managed Instance and App Service for Containers; everything else lifted-and-shifted onto Azure VMs with Azure Backup and Site Recovery for the cutover.
The result. Cutovers completed inside their planned windows with zero unplanned downtime. Compute footprint reduced after right-sizing in the post-migration phase. Audit trail produced from Azure Policy and Sentinel evidence — no separate audit project required.
Anonymised illustrative engagement. Numbers reflect typical scope and outcomes for an engagement of this size; specifics vary by environment.
Discovery is two to four weeks for most mid-size estates. A landing zone takes another three to six weeks depending on identity, network, and policy complexity. Migration waves run in parallel from there, with most engagements completing inside four to nine months end-to-end. Tiny estates (under twenty workloads) can be done in eight to twelve weeks total.
Yes. We are based in Ashford, Kent and most of our work is for UK clients, but we deliver remotely across Europe, the Middle East, and North America. We will sign country-specific data-handling and contractor agreements where needed.
Our principal engineer holds Microsoft Certified: Azure Solutions Architect Expert and DevOps Engineer Expert, plus Associate-level credentials in Azure Administrator, Developer, Security Engineer, and AI Engineer. The full credential list is on our about page.
Yes. Cross-cloud migrations follow the same phased pattern but with cloud-specific tooling — for example, using Azure Database Migration Service for cross-cloud SQL moves and rebuilding identity around Entra ID rather than IAM. We will be honest about workloads that are better left where they are.
Knowledge transfer is part of every engagement. The landing zone is delivered as code your team can read, modify, and deploy. Runbooks are written for your operations team to execute. We default to working alongside your engineers rather than around them.
Thirty days of hypercare are included — the team that delivered the migration handles incidents and answers questions. After that, clients typically engage us for ongoing optimisation (cost, performance, security posture) on a retainer or per-project basis. There is no lock-in.
A 30-minute call to scope your estate and timeline. No obligation, no decks.
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