Cloud Migration and Landing Zone for a Regional Accountancy Practice

The firm was running critical financial applications and client data on ageing on-premises infrastructure. Hardware was approaching end-of-life, backup processes were manual and inconsistent, and the IT team had limited cloud expertise. The practice needed to migrate without disrupting month-end and tax return submission cycles.

We began with a full discovery exercise to catalogue all workloads, dependencies, and data classifications. A secure Azure landing zone was designed and deployed using Terraform, incorporating management groups, policy assignments, and a hub-and-spoke network topology.

Workloads were migrated in three waves, prioritised by business criticality and dependency complexity. Azure Migrate was used for lift-and-shift of compatible VMs, while older applications were replatformed to Azure-native equivalents. A phased cutover approach meant no single migration event carried unacceptable risk.

All workloads were successfully migrated within the agreed 12-week timeline. The new environment provides significantly improved resilience, with geo-redundant backups and automated patching. Monthly infrastructure costs were reduced by 22% compared to the equivalent on-premises operating cost when hardware refresh was factored in.

• Zero unplanned downtime during migration
• 22% reduction in infrastructure operating cost
• Recovery Time Objective (RTO) reduced from 4 hours to under 30 minutes
• Full compliance with data residency requirements maintained throughout