Cloud Migration & Cost Optimisation
Service Pillar:
Cloud & Workspace ArchitectureEngagement Type:
Cloud & Workspace Health Check + full migration
Before → After
Before
- •£4,200/month in unpredictable IT costs
- •Manual patching and maintenance burden
- •2-3 unplanned downtime incidents per year
- •No disaster recovery plan
- •Mixed license confusion across the team
After
- •£2,900/month with predictable costs (30% reduction)
- •15 hours/week freed up for strategic work
- •Zero unplanned downtime in 12 months
- •Cyber Essentials-ready security baseline
- •Clear visibility of all IT resources and costs
Client & Context
A UK professional services consultancy with 50 employees working in a hybrid model (office and remote). The company had grown organically over 10 years and accumulated a mix of on-premises servers, cloud services, and SaaS tools with no coherent strategy.
The Challenge
The company's IT infrastructure had several pain points:
- On-premises file server requiring manual patching and maintenance
- Email hosted on an ageing Exchange server with no disaster recovery plan
- Mix of Office 2016 licenses and Office 365 subscriptions creating confusion
- Unpredictable monthly costs due to ad-hoc Azure resources
- Two-person IT team spending most time on maintenance instead of strategic work
- No clear security baseline or documented procedures
The Managing Director wanted to modernise but was concerned about disruption to client-facing work and worried about hidden costs.
What We Did
We approached this as a consulting and delivery project with clear milestones:
- Current state assessment: Documented all infrastructure, licenses, and monthly costs to create a baseline
- Options and recommendations: Presented three approaches (lift-and-shift, hybrid, full cloud) with honest trade-offs
- Phased migration: Moved to Microsoft 365 E3 for all users, migrated files to SharePoint and OneDrive, decommissioned on-premises servers
- Security baseline: Implemented conditional access, MFA, and basic threat protection
- Cost optimisation: Cleaned up unused Azure resources and documented a process for approving new cloud spending
- Documentation and training: Created runbooks for common tasks and trained the IT team on managing the new environment
Outcomes and Metrics
- 30% reduction in monthly IT costs (£4,200 to £2,900 per month) after first 6 months
- 15 hours per week of IT time freed up from reduced maintenance burden
- Zero unplanned downtime in the 12 months following migration (previously 2-3 incidents per year)
- Documented security baseline meeting Cyber Essentials requirements
- Clear visibility of all IT costs and resources
"CloudWorks helped us get our IT house in order. We now have predictable costs, better security, and our IT team can focus on helping the business instead of babysitting servers. The documentation they provided means we're not dependent on them, which was important to us."
What Happens Next
The company's IT team now manages the Microsoft 365 environment independently, with quarterly check-ins from CloudWorks to review security reports and discuss any upcoming changes. The success of this project has built confidence for future modernisation work.
Key Takeaways
- 1.Baseline first: Understanding current costs and infrastructure before making recommendations prevented surprises and set realistic expectations.
- 2.Phased approach reduces risk: Breaking the migration into stages (assessment, pilot, migration, optimisation) meant the business could continue serving clients throughout.
- 3.Cost savings came from cleanup, not just migration: A third of the savings came from simply removing unused Azure resources and rationalising licenses.
- 4.Independence through documentation: Thorough runbooks and training meant the client wasn't locked into ongoing CloudWorks support – exactly what they wanted.
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