Cloud
Cloud where it helps. And a straight answer where it does not.
Migration, management and security across AWS, Azure and Google Cloud for Houston area businesses. Including the part most providers leave out: what should stay where it is.
What we do
Six pieces of the same job
Migration
Moving applications and data across, in a sequence that keeps people working. The planning is the part that matters: what moves, what stays, what gets retired instead of migrated.
Infrastructure management
Ongoing management and monitoring across AWS, Azure and Google Cloud, inside the same 24 hour cover as the rest of the service rather than as a separate arrangement.
Multi cloud architecture
Using more than one provider where it earns its complexity, usually to avoid a single point of dependence. Where it does not earn it, we will say so.
Cloud security
Encryption, access control, compliance monitoring and threat detection applied to cloud assets, reporting into the same security stack as your endpoints.
Cost optimization
Right sizing, reserved capacity and removing what nobody uses. Cloud bills grow quietly, and the first review usually finds something that has been running unnoticed for a year.
Backup and disaster recovery
Automated backup with recovery that has been tested rather than assumed, and a written plan for what happens when a region or a service goes down.
The unfashionable view
Migrating the wrong thing costs twice
A migration that should not have happened is expensive when you do it and expensive again when you undo it. The usual candidates are a workload with flat, predictable demand, hardware with three good years left, and an application whose vendor prices the hosted version above the licence you already own.
None of that makes cloud a bad idea. It makes an unexamined migration a bad idea. The review is where the decision gets made, system by system, and some of those decisions will be to leave things alone. A provider whose revenue depends on the project tends to find fewer of those.
Questions about cloud
Straight answers
Should we move to the cloud at all?
Often, but rarely all of it, and sometimes not yet. Cloud is a good answer where you need elasticity, remote access or resilience you cannot afford to build. It is a poor answer where you have hardware with years of life left, a workload with steady predictable demand, or an application whose vendor charges more to run it hosted. We would rather work that out with you than assume the answer, because migrating something that should have stayed put is expensive twice.
How much downtime does a migration involve?
It depends on what is moving, and anyone quoting you a number before looking at your environment is guessing. What we can commit to is the shape: the migration is staged rather than done in one weekend, each stage is reversible until it is proven, and the switch for any given system happens once its replacement has been tested with your data in it. Most of the risk in a migration comes from doing too much at once.
Which cloud providers do you work with?
AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud. Hosted services we run for clients sit on Microsoft and AWS infrastructure at 99.99% uptime. Which one suits you is usually decided by what your applications already expect and where your licensing already sits, rather than by a preference of ours.
How do we stop cloud costs running away?
By reviewing them on a schedule rather than when the bill surprises someone. The usual causes are dull: oversized instances chosen during migration and never revisited, storage nobody deleted, environments spun up for a project that finished. Cost optimization is part of the ongoing management, not a separate consulting engagement.
Is our data safer in the cloud or on a server in our office?
Neither, inherently. A well run cloud environment is safer than a neglected server in a cupboard, and a well run server is safer than a cloud tenancy with weak access control and no monitoring. The variable is not the location, it is whether anyone is watching it and whether the backups have been restored recently. That is true in both places, and it is what the security stack is for.
Can you manage cloud we already have, or only what you build?
Either. Taking over an existing environment is common, and the first thing we do is review access, backups and cost before changing anything else. Cloud management sits inside the managed plans rather than being priced separately, so it is covered from Cybersecurity & Compliance upward.
Book a 30 minute review
30 minutes. We tell you what we would change first, and you keep the notes.