Decide before you move
Cloud migration is sold as a foregone conclusion. It is not. Some workloads are dramatically better off in the cloud, some are roughly neutral, and a few get materially worse and more expensive.
Email is an easy call. Running your own mail server in 2026 means owning spam filtering, deliverability, reputation management, patching and availability for a service that costs a few dollars per user hosted. File sharing is nearly as clear once you account for VPN complexity and remote access.
Line of business applications are where it gets specific. Some vendors have real cloud versions. Some have a licensing model that punishes virtualized hosting. Some have latency requirements that make a hosted database miserable for staff in an office. A database server that runs happily on hardware you already own can cost more per month in Azure than the hardware cost to buy.
We model it properly. Actual compute and storage requirements, license implications, egress charges, the connectivity upgrade you will need, and the five year total rather than the first invoice. Then we tell you which workloads to move, which to leave and which to retire entirely.
Microsoft 365 done thoroughly
Most businesses we meet are already on Microsoft 365 in some form. Very few are using it well, and fewer still have secured it.
Migration. We move mail, calendars, contacts and files from Exchange, Google Workspace or hosted providers in staged waves. Coexistence is configured so mail routes correctly while some users are moved and some are not, calendar availability keeps working across the boundary, and shared mailboxes and distribution groups come across intact. File data syncs in the background over days so the final cutover is short.
Hardening. This is the step that gets skipped. A default tenant permits legacy authentication, allows any user to share externally with anyone, has no conditional access, retains audit logs briefly and lets users consent to third party applications on their own. We fix all of that: multi factor authentication enforced, legacy protocols disabled, conditional access aligned to how your staff actually work, sharing scoped deliberately, retention and litigation hold configured, auditing extended and alerting connected to something a human reads.
Structure. SharePoint deployed without planning becomes a worse version of the file server it replaced. We design the site and library structure around how your teams work, set permissions by group rather than by individual, and configure OneDrive so personal work is backed up without becoming a shadow file server.
Backup. Microsoft protects the service. Your content is your responsibility. We deploy third party backup covering Exchange Online, SharePoint, OneDrive and Teams, with retention that matches your actual requirements rather than Microsoft’s 30 to 93 day defaults. More detail on this in disaster recovery and backup.
Azure and hybrid
For workloads that do belong in Azure we handle the design and the ongoing cost discipline. Right sized virtual machines, reserved instances where usage is predictable, storage tiered by access pattern, and site to site connectivity back to your office.
Hybrid architectures remain common and are often correct. Regulation, latency, a stubborn application or a recently purchased server can all justify keeping systems on premise while email, collaboration and identity live in the cloud. We build the identity bridge so staff get one login across both, and we make sure your virtualization platform and your cloud environment are managed as one system rather than two disconnected ones.
After the migration
Cloud environments drift. Licenses get assigned to people who left. Sharing links accumulate. Costs creep as somebody spins up a test resource and forgets it. Security defaults change when Microsoft ships something new.
Ongoing management under a managed IT agreement covers the maintenance: user onboarding and offboarding, license true ups so you stop paying for seats you do not use, security policy review as the platform evolves, and cost reporting so surprises stay small.