Services
Cloud that costs what it should and stays up when it matters.
Designed, migrated, secured and managed on AWS, Azure or Google Cloud, with the bill explained by workload rather than by account.
Symptoms, not specifications
Where this usually starts
Cloud work rarely begins with a strategy document. It begins with one of these.
- The monthly bill has grown faster than usage and nobody can name the workload responsible.
- A migration was half-finished, and the old environment is still switched on.
- Backups run, but a restore has never been tested end to end.
- Reporting is only current when somebody remembers to refresh it.
- One person understands how the environment is wired together.
- An auditor has asked where the data is held, and the honest answer is a shrug.
Where we help
What this covers
Cloud strategy and readiness
Workload assessment, landing zone design, and an honest view of what should move, what should stay and what should be retired. Some workloads cost more in the cloud, and we will show you which of yours those are before you commit to moving them.
Migration and modernisation
Phased migration with rollback paths, not a weekend cutover and a hope. Workloads are grouped into waves, lowest risk first, so the team learns on something recoverable rather than on your finance system.
Cost optimisation (FinOps)
Right-sizing, reserved and savings-plan commitment, storage tiering, idle environment shutdown, and the recurring spend nobody has looked at since it was provisioned. Findings come with the annual figure attached, so you can rank them.
Security and resilience
Identity and access, network segmentation, secrets handling, backup and recovery, monitoring and alerting. Recovery time and recovery point are agreed as numbers, then tested against those numbers rather than assumed.
Data platform and pipelines
BigQuery and equivalent warehouses, event-driven and batch pipelines, and reporting that stays current without manual refreshes. Where a number comes from, and when it last updated, stays visible.
Managed cloud operations
Ongoing monitoring, patching, monthly cost review and a named support contact. Runbooks for the failures that page someone at 2am are written before they happen, not during.
How we design it
Three layers, in that order.
Most expensive cloud environments were built middle-out: workloads first, foundation retrofitted, operations improvised. Identity, network, tagging and recovery are cheap to decide at the start and costly to unpick afterwards. That is why almost every runaway bill we are asked to review traces back to a decision made in the first fortnight.
Where the money actually goes
A FinOps review can run on its own, without a migration attached. In practice, the same handful of causes account for most of the surprise on a cloud invoice.
Compute provisioned for a peak that never comes
Instances sized for a launch-week estimate and never revisited. Right-sizing against real utilisation is usually the single largest line item we recover.
Storage that never tiers
Snapshots, logs and backups accumulating on hot storage for years because no lifecycle rule was ever written.
Environments nobody switched off
Test, staging and proof-of-concept resources running at full rate outside business hours, often owned by people who have since left.
Egress and cross-region traffic
Data moving between regions or out to the internet because of an architecture decision, not a business requirement.
Commitment bought at the wrong shape
Reserved capacity and savings plans locked to instance families you have since moved away from, or not bought at all on workloads that never change.
No tags, so no accountability
Spend that cannot be attributed to a team, product or client cannot be questioned by anyone. Tagging is a governance control before it is a reporting one.
On cloud bills
A runaway cloud bill is rarely a pricing problem. It is a design decision somebody made under time pressure two years ago, charged to you again every month since.
On your side of the table
What you actually receive
Enough to run the environment without us, and enough to hold us to account while we are still on it. Each item is a document or a tested result rather than a verbal assurance.
- A workload inventory with dependencies mapped, not just a resource list
- A cost baseline broken down by workload and owner rather than by account
- Landing zone design: identity, network, tagging, guardrails and logging
- A migration plan sequenced into waves, each with a tested rollback path
- Recovery time and recovery point objectives, measured against a real restore
- Runbooks for the failure modes that would otherwise page someone at 2am
- A monthly cost and capacity review with a named contact attached
Delivery lifecycle
How an engagement runs
Assess
Workload inventory, dependency mapping, cost baseline and a risk-ranked order of movement.
Design
Landing zone, identity, network, recovery targets and guardrails agreed in writing before anything moves.
Migrate
Wave by wave, lowest risk first, each wave with a tested rollback and a decommission decision.
Operate
Monitoring, patching, monthly cost review and a named support contact who knows the environment.
Realistic timelines
A cost and resilience review runs two to three weeks and stands alone. Migrations are sized by wave rather than quoted as one number. A first wave typically lands six to eight weeks after design sign-off. We would rather run five waves than one weekend.
Frequently asked
Questions buyers actually ask
Which cloud platforms do you work with?
AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, including BigQuery and Australian data residency options, chosen on what fits your stack rather than a single-vendor preference.
Do you do cost optimisation without a full migration?
Yes. A FinOps review (right-sizing, commitment shape, storage tiering, idle environments and stale spend) runs as a standalone two-to-three week engagement, and each finding comes with the annual saving attached so you can decide what is worth acting on.
Can you take over reporting that currently needs manual refreshes?
Yes. Our data platform and pipelines work, event-driven and batch, is built to keep reporting current automatically, and absorbs the kind of data-intelligence work a dedicated reporting page used to cover.
Will you work alongside our existing managed service provider?
Regularly. In those engagements we scope the split in writing first: who holds which credentials, who is paged for what, and where the boundary of responsibility sits. Unclear ownership is the thing that actually causes outages to run long.
Can our data stay in Australia?
Yes. AWS, Azure and Google Cloud all offer Australian regions, and residency is a design decision we make explicitly at landing-zone stage, including for backups, logs and any managed service that might otherwise process data elsewhere.
What if part of our environment should not move at all?
Then we will say so. Some workloads are cheaper, faster or lower risk where they are, and a readiness assessment that returns 'move six of these nine' is a more useful answer than one that endorses everything.
Further reading
We've written this argument out at length.
Some of the organisations we work with
Start with a conversation, not a proposal.
Tell us the problem. We’ll tell you honestly whether it’s worth solving, and what solving it would take.