Cloud Services Built Around Your Business, Not the Other Way Around

The Cloud Is Not Optional Anymore

By 2026, 78% of UK businesses run at least some workloads in the cloud. The holdouts are finding it harder to recruit IT staff, harder to maintain ageing hardware, and harder to meet the resilience expectations of clients and regulators.

For firms subject to ISO 27001 or other compliance frameworks, a well-planned migration is doubly important. Cloud migration done badly is worse than not migrating at all. We have seen firms lose weeks of productivity to botched migrations — email outages, missing files, applications that stopped working because nobody tested them in the new environment. That is not a technology problem. It is a planning problem.

How We Approach Cloud Migration

Every migration starts with a thorough assessment. We document your current environment: servers, applications, data volumes, dependencies, and integration points. We identify what moves to the cloud, what stays on-premise, and what needs replacing entirely.

Then we build a migration runbook. This is a step-by-step plan that covers every workload, every user, and every risk. It includes testing milestones, rollback procedures, and a communication plan for your team. Nothing moves until the runbook is reviewed and approved.

Azure migration is our most common engagement. We move file servers to SharePoint and OneDrive, email to Exchange Online via our Microsoft 365 management services, line-of-business applications to Azure Virtual Machines or Azure App Services, and backups to geo-redundant cloud storage. For firms with specific compute or AI requirements, we also deploy on AWS.

Azure or AWS: How We Actually Decide

Most London firms asking this question already have the answer in their existing stack. The decision is rarely about raw capability — both platforms will run your workloads — and almost always about what you already own and who has to support it.

Your situation	Usually the right call	Why
Already on Microsoft 365, Entra ID, Windows Server	Azure	Single identity, single admin console, licence portability (Azure Hybrid Benefit) cuts VM cost materially
Heavy Linux, containers, or a dev team already using AWS tooling	AWS	Deeper container and serverless maturity; your engineers stay productive
GPU or AI workloads with variable demand	Either, priced per workload	Availability and spot pricing differ month to month in the UK regions
Trading or low-latency systems	Hybrid, often neither	Colocation near the exchange usually beats both on latency
Under FCA or DORA scrutiny	Azure, typically	Not technically superior — but the audit trail and UK data residency story is easier to evidence

The honest answer is that platform choice matters less than migration discipline. We are certified on both and have no commercial incentive to push either.

What Cloud Migration Actually Costs

Migration cost is dominated by labour and complexity, not licences. For a 50-person London firm, a straightforward lift-and-shift of file servers, email and one or two line-of-business applications typically runs £8,000–£20,000 in project work, spread across 4–8 weeks.

What moves that number:

• Application count and age. Three modern applications are simple. One 2009 bespoke system with no vendor support is often more work than everything else combined.
• Data volume and shape. Two terabytes of files migrate fine. Two terabytes with 400-character paths, duplicate permissions and twelve years of nested shares does not.
• Identity debt. If Active Directory has never been cleaned up, that cleanup is part of the migration whether you budget for it or not.
• Downtime tolerance. Weekend cutovers with parallel running cost more than a Friday-night switch. Regulated firms usually need the former.

Ongoing cloud spend is the number people underestimate. Unmanaged Azure or AWS environments routinely run 20–35% above what they need, because nothing gets switched off and nothing gets right-sized. That waste is recurring, which makes it worth more than the one-off migration saving.

Six Things That Go Wrong in Cloud Migrations

These are the failure modes we are most often called in to fix — usually after someone else’s migration:

1. Nobody tested the line-of-business application. Email and files move cleanly. The practice management or portfolio system is the one that breaks, and it is discovered on Monday morning.
2. Permissions were migrated as-is. Twelve years of accumulated folder permissions get copied into SharePoint, and suddenly everyone can see the payroll folder. This is also the single most common way a Copilot rollout leaks data.
3. No rollback plan. The cutover fails at 2am and there is no tested route back to the old environment.
4. Licensing was an afterthought. Firms pay for Azure VMs at full rate when Hybrid Benefit would have applied, or buy per-user licences they already owned.
5. Bandwidth was not checked. A 500GB initial sync over an office connection that also carries Teams calls does not end well.
6. The old servers stayed on. Decommissioning slips, and the firm pays for both environments for months.

Every one of these is a planning failure, not a technology failure. That is why the runbook exists.

Migration Timeline: What to Expect

Phase	Typical duration	What happens
Assessment	1–2 weeks	Full inventory of servers, apps, data, dependencies and identity
Design and runbook	1–2 weeks	Target architecture, migration sequence, rollback procedures, comms plan
Pilot	1 week	A representative group of users moved and monitored before anyone else
Bulk migration	2–4 weeks	Data pre-seeded and synced; users moved in waves
Cutover	1 weekend	Final sync and switchover, typically under 30 minutes of user-visible downtime
Hypercare	2 weeks	Elevated support, issue triage, decommissioning of old infrastructure

Larger or more regulated environments extend the assessment and pilot phases rather than the cutover. Complex migrations run 3–6 months end to end.

Data Residency and Compliance

For FCA-regulated firms, DORA has made cloud concentration risk a board-level question rather than an IT one. You now need to evidence where data physically sits, what happens if the provider has an outage, and how you would exit the provider if you had to.

We deploy into UK regions by default, document the data flows as part of the migration pack, and make sure your cloud provider contracts contain the exit and audit clauses your regulator expects to see. If you are working toward ISO 27001, the migration documentation doubles as Annex A evidence — it is far cheaper to produce it during the project than to reconstruct it a year later.

Hybrid Cloud for Regulated Firms

Many of our financial services clients, particularly private equity firms and asset managers, cannot move everything to the cloud. Data sovereignty requirements, legacy trading platforms, and low-latency connectivity needs mean some workloads must stay on-premise or in a London-based colocation facility.

We design hybrid cloud architectures that give you the flexibility of the cloud where it makes sense and the control of local infrastructure where it is required. Azure Arc and site-to-site VPN tunnels keep everything connected and manageable from a single pane of glass.

Ongoing Cloud Operations

Migration is the beginning, not the end. We monitor your cloud environment continuously, manage patching and updates, optimise costs, and ensure your security posture keeps pace with the evolving threat landscape. Our backup and disaster recovery services ensure your cloud workloads are protected and recoverable. You get monthly reports showing spend, utilisation, and recommendations — no surprises. Learn more about the true cost of IT downtime and why proactive cloud management matters.