Azure Migration Services for US & EU Enterprises

Yes — we start from the Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework Enterprise-Scale Landing Zone and customize, never write a landing zone from scratch. We deploy via the official Terraform AVM (Azure Verified Modules) or Bicep when the client prefers Microsoft-native tooling. Customizations are deliberate: management group hierarchy aligned to your business units (not Microsoft's defaults), Azure Policy initiatives for region pinning and resource locks, Defender for Cloud at Standard tier on every subscription, and a hub-spoke vNet topology with Azure Firewall Premium in the hub. Identity is Entra ID (formerly Azure AD) with Privileged Identity Management mandatory for any role above Reader on production subscriptions.

Azure Migrate for assessment and dependency mapping is genuinely good — agent-based or agentless depending on your security posture. We run it as the primary source for VM-right-sizing and SQL Server-to-SQL MI compatibility scoring. Where it falls short is on application-layer dependencies for distributed monoliths, so we supplement with Movere data where available, or stand up our own lightweight eBPF-based tracing for two weeks to capture east-west traffic. Output is one unified dependency graph that drives wave planning — not three competing spreadsheets.

Workloads with EU personal data land in West Europe (Netherlands), North Europe (Ireland), Sweden Central, or France Central depending on latency and sovereignty needs. We use Azure Policy at the management group level to deny resource creation outside approved regions — a developer cannot accidentally provision in East US. For Schrems II we use Customer Lockbox, Confidential Computing (Intel SGX / AMD SEV-SNP) on DCasv5/ECasv5 SKUs for attestable workloads, customer-managed keys in Azure Key Vault HSM (or Azure Key Vault Managed HSM FIPS 140-2 Level 3), and SCCs in the DPA. EU Data Boundary commitment from Microsoft is enforced at subscription tag level and audited monthly.

Decision is driven by team capability, not architectural fashion. Stateless web tiers with no need for sidecar mesh or custom networking go to App Service or Azure Container Apps (Dapr-enabled when we already have event-driven patterns). Anything with regulatory complexity, multi-tenant isolation requirements, or a meaningful service mesh need goes to AKS — with Azure CNI Overlay, Azure Policy add-on, Workload Identity (not pod identity), and a Karpenter-equivalent via NAP (Node Auto Provisioning, currently preview but production-ready in our experience). SQL Server consolidates to Azure SQL Managed Instance via the DMS online migration with near-zero downtime; PostgreSQL goes to Azure Database for PostgreSQL Flexible Server.

Cost Management + Billing exports to ADLS Gen2, then Synapse or Fabric for analytics — not raw Power BI on the API, which throttles. Tagging policy is enforced via Azure Policy with deny-on-missing-tag rules: cost-center, environment, app-id, owner. FinOps cadence is weekly: rightsizing via Azure Advisor, Reserved Instance and Savings Plan coverage tracking, Hybrid Benefit applied wherever Windows Server / SQL Server licenses allow (typical 40 percent saving on those SKUs alone), Spot VMs on AKS for batch workloads. Typical year-one savings versus lift-and-shift baseline is 25–35 percent.

Discovery sprint is 4 weeks fixed-fee at 35,000 EUR — Azure Migrate assessment, dependency mapping, CAF landing zone design, cost model and migration waves plan. Execution runs as dedicated team engagements from 12,000 EUR/month per pod (TPM + senior Azure engineer + SRE). A 250-VM estate with SQL Server consolidation typically completes in 5–7 months end-to-end. SQL MI cutovers and AKS replatform waves are quoted per wave. Post-cutover FinOps + Defender SOC retainer is available from 6,500 EUR/month.