Estate first, then waves
Move the estate without discovering it as you go
We migrate applications, databases and operations onto Azure, AWS, Google Cloud and Cloudflare in waves, against an inventory agreed before the first move. Exclusions are written down and signed, each wave is reversible, and the workloads that should be rebuilt rather than moved are identified before anyone commits a date.
Migrations rarely fail on the technical work. They fail because the inventory was a spreadsheet somebody built in a week, the exclusions were never agreed, and every wave turns up three services nobody remembered owning. The date moves twice and the business stops believing the plan.
- Who it is for
- Infrastructure and platform leaders with a deadline and a partial inventory
- Bench
- 115+ engineers, 80 Databricks-certified
What the assessment covers
- Every application, its dependencies, and who currently owns it
- What is explicitly not coming, written down so it can be signed
- Which workloads should be rebuilt rather than moved, and what that costs against moving them
- Data gravity: what has to move together and what can follow later
- Licensing that changes price on the other side, which is where budgets usually break
- The rollback position for each wave, before the wave runs
How the work runs
- A wave plan built on the inventory, ordered so the risky things happen while attention is high
- Infrastructure as code, so the second environment costs a fraction of the first
- Each wave reversible until it is signed off, rather than a one-way door
- The operational runbook written during the migration and not after it
- Cost measured against the old estate monthly, so the business case survives contact with the bill
- Your team running it by the last wave, because we would rather leave than stay
FAQ
Cloud migration: common questions
How long does a cloud migration take?
The honest answer is that the assessment tells you, and anyone quoting a duration before seeing the estate is guessing. What we can say is that the assessment itself is weeks rather than months, and it is the part that makes the rest of the schedule mean anything.
Do you do lift-and-shift or rebuild?
Both, chosen per workload rather than as a programme-wide position. Most estates have a long tail that should move as it is and a small number of systems where the running cost or the release cadence justifies rebuilding. Deciding that per workload is most of the value in the assessment.
What happens if a wave goes wrong?
You go back. Each wave stays reversible until it is signed off, which costs a little more to set up and is the difference between a bad weekend and a bad quarter. A migration where rollback was never built is one where the first serious problem becomes a negotiation.
Can you work with our existing cloud team?
That is the usual shape. Our engineers embed alongside yours, and the aim is that your team runs the last wave with us mostly watching. Where you would rather we took the whole thing, we will.