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.

Fixed-scope, all-in USD pricing: individual services from $200, a lift-and-shift from $1,800, a re-platform from $4,100, and a full exit off AWS/Azure/GCP from $5,800. You see the line-item budget at the end of discovery and sign off before any code is written — no recruitment markup, no tool surcharges, and cloud fees run on your own accounts so you keep the cost lever. Timelines scale with estate size: a 250-VM estate with SQL Server consolidation typically completes in 5–7 months end-to-end, with SQL MI cutovers and AKS replatform waves quoted per wave.

Databases are the part clients worry about most, so we default to online migration with Azure Database Migration Service: continuous replication runs while the source stays live, and the actual cutover is a short maintenance window measured in minutes, not hours. For SQL Server-to-SQL Managed Instance we use the DMS online mode with Log Replay Service as a fallback for edge cases; for very large or chatty databases we add a transactional-replication bridge so the delta at cutover is negligible. Every cutover has a written rollback runbook and a performance-validation step against the pre-migration baseline before we point production traffic at the new instance. If validation fails, we roll back and reschedule — we never leave a half-cut database in production.

Yes, and for regulated or industrial clients it is often the right answer. We connect on-prem to Azure with ExpressRoute (or Site-to-Site VPN for smaller estates), extend identity with Entra ID Connect, and manage on-prem and Azure resources through a single control plane with Azure Arc — so servers, Kubernetes clusters and SQL instances outside Azure still get Azure Policy, Defender for Cloud and update management. That lets you move analytics, ERP and customer-facing tiers to Azure while MES, SCADA or latency-sensitive control systems stay on the plant floor. The CAF landing zone is designed for that hybrid boundary from the start rather than retrofitted later.

DR is part of the landing zone, not an afterthought. VMs use Azure Backup with policy-enforced retention and, where RPO/RTO demands it, Azure Site Recovery for cross-region failover with documented, tested runbooks. Azure SQL Managed Instance runs with zone-redundant or geo-replicated configurations depending on tier, PostgreSQL Flexible Server with HA and cross-region read replicas. We set RPO and RTO targets per workload during discovery, map them to the right resiliency tier so you are not paying for geo-redundancy on a dev box, and run at least one failover drill before handover so the runbook is proven, not theoretical.

Yes — cloud-to-cloud is a large share of our work. The discovery is the same 7Rs exercise, but the levers differ: we map managed-service equivalents (RDS to Azure SQL MI or PostgreSQL Flex, EKS/GKE to AKS, S3 to Blob/ADLS Gen2, Lambda to Functions or Container Apps), re-express IaC (Terraform state migrated, CloudFormation rebuilt on Bicep or Terraform AVM), and plan data egress carefully because the source cloud bills for it. Because we containerise and define everything as code, the same engagement leaves you portable rather than swapping one lock-in for another — that is the explicit deliverable of our "Exit AWS/Azure/GCP" model.

It does, and it is one of the strongest cost cases for moving. Workloads that cannot be upgraded in place before an end-of-support date get free Extended Security Updates when they run on Azure — on Azure VMs, Azure VMware Solution or Arc-enabled hybrid — which buys time to replatform properly instead of paying for ESU on-prem. In practice we lift-and-shift the at-risk servers first to remove the security exposure, then replatform the database to Azure SQL Managed Instance (which is evergreen, so the end-of-support clock stops entirely) as a fast-follow wave. Hybrid Benefit on those same licenses usually offsets a large part of the compute cost.

Every engagement ends with a 30-day shadow on-call: your team owns operations while we stay on the incident bridge, so knowledge transfer is real rather than a slide deck. After that you can take full ownership — runbooks, IaC and dashboards are all yours — or continue with a managed-services retainer covering Defender secure-score maintenance, monthly Hybrid Benefit and Reserved Instance audits, FinOps optimisation and platform upgrades. There is no vendor-lock-out clause: because the estate is CAF-standard and defined in code, another partner (or your own hires) can pick it up without a rebuild.