Move to Azure in an order that pays for itself as it goes.
Databases, data workloads, and the estate around them — migrated onto a governed Azure landing zone in waves, sequenced so each wave retires real cost and risk before the next begins.
Landing zone first. Everything else lands on it.
Most migration pain is estates that moved before the foundation existed — subscriptions sprawl, access is ad hoc, costs are unowned. We build the foundation once, then migrate onto it.
Landing zone & governance
Subscription structure, identity, network, policy, and cost management — the guardrails every migrated workload inherits automatically, instead of being secured one by one.
Databases
SQL Server and other databases move via assessment-led paths — Azure SQL, Managed Instance, or VMs where compatibility demands it. Data is validated against source before anything cuts over.
Data workloads
Warehousing, ETL, and file estates follow — onto Synapse, Data Factory, and ADLS — repointing consumers wave by wave, with the legacy path alive until numbers reconcile.
Decommission & optimize
Old servers switch off — that's when licence, hardware, and maintenance costs actually stop. Then right-sizing and reserved capacity bring the Azure bill down to its steady state.
Beyond the moved workloads
An estate map
What exists, what moved where, and what was retired — the inventory most organizations never had for their on-prem estate.
Governance by default
Policies that new workloads inherit on creation. The estate stays governed after the migration, not just during it.
Costs with owners
Tagging and budgets per business area, so the cloud bill is a set of accountable lines instead of one alarming total.
Lift-and-shift isn't a dirty word. Moving everything as-is, sometimes is.
Some workloads should move unchanged; some should move to a managed service; some shouldn't move at all. The assessment tells us which is which — a migration plan that treats every server the same way is a sign nobody looked.
Start with the assessment.
An inventory of your estate with a wave plan and the decommission list — the migration decided before anything moves.