Your Cloud. Your Terms.

Rightsizing and cleanup usually get you there before any commitment does. Idle resources, oversized instances, and abandoned environments are the biggest line items in most AWS bills we review — a FinOps pass that rightsizes compute, tiers storage, and closes forgotten environments typically lands in the 30-40% range on its own. Reserved Instances and Savings Plans are a second lever we layer in once the footprint itself is clean, under a continuous monthly FinOps model rather than a one-time exercise.

More than the GCC High license line item alone. GCC High licensing runs above standard Microsoft 365 pricing, and the migration itself adds work: validating U.S.-person access, aligning configuration to the CMMC/NIST 800-171 controls a defense contractor actually needs, and testing that day-to-day workflows still function after cutover. For a 100-person manufacturer, that number is rarely knowable until a workload and compliance-gap assessment scopes what's actually moving — that's what our Cloud Readiness Assessment does, usually scoped alongside My Compliance's CMMC/DFARS work rather than as a cloud-only project.

It depends on the workload, not a default answer. Line-of-business applications, VDI, and regulated data often run more predictably, and more affordably over time, in a private cloud with fixed OpEx pricing; bursty or customer-facing workloads tend to benefit from the elasticity of AWS or Azure. Our Assess step maps each workload against both models before any migration starts, and a hybrid architecture that runs both side by side is often the actual right answer, not a single-platform decision.

Yes. HIPAA-eligible architectures with BAA coverage are how we build regulated cloud workloads, whether the target is our own private cloud or a HIPAA-eligible service in Azure or AWS. That means encryption at rest and in transit, network segmentation, least-privilege IAM, and audit logging configured in from day one, not added after an auditor asks for it.

Yes — the Fractional Cloud Architect engagement puts a senior architect on retainer as your part-time cloud leader: architecture reviews, platform evaluation, roadmap planning, and mentoring for your internal team, without a full-time salary commitment. It fits organizations that need senior judgment on cloud decisions more often than they need a full-time hire.

A lift-and-shift moves a workload as-is onto new infrastructure — the fastest path off aging hardware, with the least architectural change. A re-platform restructures the application to actually use the target platform's services, which takes longer but pays off in performance and management going forward. Our Architect step designs the target state first, then recommends the phased mix of lift-shift and re-platform waves that fits your risk tolerance and timeline, not a one-size answer applied to every workload.

Yes. A secondary AWS or Azure environment provisioned as a ransomware-resilient DR target, with Veeam immutable backups and tested failover runbooks, is one of the more common ways we use public cloud even for organizations that keep their primary workloads on-prem or in a private cloud. The recovery time objective gets set against business criticality, then the failover gets tested, not just documented.