Cloud Modernization
Moving a system to the cloud is the easy half. The half that determines whether it was worth doing is what happens to your costs, your release cadence and your on-call rota six months later.
Lift-and-shift is a decision, not a default
Rehosting a workload unchanged is sometimes exactly right — when a data centre contract is expiring, when the application is stable and unloved, when the team has nowhere near the capacity for a rewrite. It is a legitimate answer and we will tell you when it is the one.
It is the wrong answer when it moves an expensive architecture onto metered infrastructure and calls that progress. A monolith that idles at ten percent utilisation costs more in the cloud than it did in your rack. We work out which of your systems are in which category before anyone writes a migration plan.
How we approach it
Portfolio assessment
We map what you run, what it depends on, what it costs today and what it would cost under each migration path. The output is a sequenced plan with real numbers, not a matrix of adjectives.
Incremental cutover
Traffic moves in slices behind a routing layer, with the old path live until the new one has proven itself. Rollback stays available at every step, which is what makes the schedule survivable.
Data migration
Usually the hard part. We plan for dual writes, backfill windows, consistency checks and the rehearsal runs that turn a terrifying weekend into an uneventful one.
Platform foundations
Networking, identity, secrets, logging and deployment pipelines built once and used by every team afterwards, so the tenth service to land costs a fraction of the first.
Cost engineering
Right-sizing, storage tiering, commitment planning and per-team attribution. Spend becomes something an engineering manager can see and act on.
Operational handover
Runbooks, alerting that means something, and enough time on-call together that your team is genuinely comfortable before we step back.
How an engagement runs
Inventory what is actually running
Not the architecture diagram — the running processes, the cron jobs on somebody's VM, the database nobody claims. Two to three weeks, and it usually surprises everyone.
Sort by what a move would buy
Each workload gets a decision: move as-is, re-platform, rebuild, or leave alone. The last one is a real option and we use it more than clients expect.
Move the least important thing first
The first cutover is a rehearsal for the ones that matter. We pick something real but survivable, and we practise the rollback before we practise the migration.
Cut over in slices, with a way back
Traffic shifted gradually, old path kept warm until the new one has proven itself under a full business cycle including month-end.
Attribute the bill
Cost per service, mapped to the team that owns it. Without that, cloud spend becomes a single unexplainable number that only ever goes up.
What you are left with
Landing zone
Accounts, networking, identity and guardrails as code you can read and change.
Cutover runbooks
Step by step, with the rollback path written first and rehearsed at least once.
Cost attribution
Tagging enforced at deploy time, and a dashboard that answers who spent what.
Decision record
Why each workload was moved, re-platformed or left alone — so the next team does not re-litigate it.
What good looks like afterwards
The measures that matter are unglamorous and easy to check. Deploys happen more often and hurt less. Infrastructure spend is understood by the people generating it. Recovering a service is a documented procedure rather than a search for whoever built it.
We would rather be judged on those than on a migration completion date, and we will set them up as tracked numbers at the start so the question can actually be answered.
- Deployment frequency and lead time, tracked from week one
- Cost per service, attributed to the team that owns it
- Recovery time demonstrated by rehearsal, not assumed
- A platform your team extends without calling us
When not to hire us
If your workload is stable, cheap to run and nobody is waiting on it, moving it to the cloud is a cost with no return. We will say so, and the assessment that told you is a fine place for the engagement to end.
We are also the wrong firm for a migration whose deadline is fixed by a contract expiry six weeks away. That work needs a lift-and-shift crew and a lot of hands, not a small team asking what should be rebuilt.
Common questions
A single well-understood application, six to twelve weeks. A portfolio of interconnected systems is a programme measured in quarters, and any firm quoting a date before assessing your dependencies is guessing. We would rather give you a sequenced plan where the first milestone is close enough to verify our estimates against.
Related work
Bring us the part that is stuck.
Send the constraint you are working around and we will come back with an approach, a rough shape of the work, and what it would take to hand it over.