Cloud Migration & Architecture Consulting for Mid-Market Companies
Cloud migration services cover the planning, execution, and post-migration optimization of moving applications, data, and infrastructure from on-premises or legacy environments to AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud. For mid-market companies, the right engagement is different from what the big-four consultancies sell to the Fortune 500 and different from what a generalist MSP delivers. That gap is what this practice is built for.
What you actually get
A cloud engagement with us is a scoped piece of work with a defined outcome, not a long open-ended retainer. Depending on where you are in the migration lifecycle, that usually looks like one of the following.
Cloud readiness assessment. A four-to-six-week structured review of your current infrastructure, application portfolio, data dependencies, compliance posture, and cost profile. Output is a migration roadmap that tells you which workloads move first, which need to be re-architected before they move, and which are better left where they are. We name specific applications, not just categories. The roadmap comes with a dollar figure range and a defensible timeline for each phase.
Migration execution. For organizations that have the roadmap but need senior technical leadership to run the actual migration, we embed with your team. We handle landing zone design, IAM architecture, network segmentation, data replication strategy, cutover planning, and the hundreds of small decisions that determine whether the migration actually completes or turns into a two-year war of attrition. We do not bring a junior team from offshore. The people talking to you about the design are the people writing the Terraform.
Cloud architecture consulting for new builds. If you are not migrating existing workloads but architecting something new — a data platform, a customer-facing product, a compliance-driven environment — we design the architecture with you. This includes reference architectures, cost modeling, security and compliance controls, and a build plan your own engineers can execute. We can also execute it if that is the cleaner path.
Post-migration optimization. Most organizations finish a cloud migration and then discover their bill is higher than expected, their performance is worse than expected, and nobody on the team knows how to tune FinOps. We fix that. Specifically: right-sizing, reserved instance and savings plan strategy, waste identification, architecture refactoring for the cloud-native patterns that actually save money.
Platform-specific expertise. We work across AWS, Azure, and GCP. We do not push a particular hyperscaler as a matter of policy. Where the workload, the compliance posture, the existing vendor relationships, and the skills on your team point, that is where we go. If you have already committed to a platform, we work within that choice.
Who this is for
The mid-market is where cloud migration gets interesting, because the tradeoffs are real in both directions. A Fortune 500 can absorb a messy migration and keep moving. A twenty-person startup can refactor anything on a weekend. Mid-market companies have production systems that genuinely cannot go down, compliance obligations that are not theoretical, and teams that are not large enough to have a dedicated platform engineering function. They need cloud migration work that respects those constraints.
We work well with:
- Companies between roughly one hundred and fifteen hundred employees.
- IT leadership that has already decided (or been told to decide) to move to cloud and needs senior help executing.
- Organizations with regulatory or contractual constraints — HIPAA, PCI, SOC 2, Canadian data residency, industry-specific frameworks — that require the migration plan to account for controls from day one.
- Teams that want knowledge transfer, not long-term dependency. Our engagements end. Your team should be running the environment after we leave.
We work less well with:
- Organizations looking for commodity lift-and-shift at the lowest possible hourly rate. That is a different market, and there are good firms for it.
- Companies that need thousands of hours of long-term managed services. We are a consulting firm, not an MSP. We can point you to the right MSP for the ongoing work.
How the work runs
Every engagement starts with a scoping conversation, not a proposal. We need to understand the shape of what you are asking for before we can tell you whether we are the right fit and what the engagement should cost. After that initial conversation:
Week one. We review your current state documentation, interview your IT leadership and a selection of application owners, and map the top workloads by risk, cost, and strategic value. If relevant data is missing, we collect it.
Weeks two to four (readiness engagement) or weeks two to twelve-plus (execution engagement). We deliver the actual work — roadmap document, architectural designs, Terraform or equivalent infrastructure-as-code, runbooks, cutover plans, whatever the scope requires.
Handoff and documentation. Every engagement ends with a handoff document your team can use without us. For execution engagements, this includes operational runbooks and post-cutover support that lasts for a defined window (typically thirty to ninety days).
We do not use offshore handoff teams. The senior consultant you speak with during scoping is the one who does the design work and reviews the execution. That is a deliberate staffing choice and it is why our engagement size per client is smaller than large consulting firms.
What this costs
We do not publish rates for the same reason good consulting firms do not: the cost of the engagement is a function of the scope, not an hourly rate you multiply by a guess. A cloud readiness assessment for a mid-market organization typically lands in a well-defined range that we will tell you during the scoping conversation. A full migration execution engagement is scoped by workload count, compliance complexity, and timeline.
What we can tell you up front: we are less expensive than Accenture, Deloitte, IBM, or Cognizant for equivalent work because our overhead is lower and we do not price-in global delivery infrastructure you do not need. We are more expensive than a typical regional MSP because our people are senior and the work we do is different.
Engagement archetypes
The engagement archetypes linked below describe the specific shapes of cloud work this practice is built to execute. Each is a representative engagement profile — the kind of situation, the approach, and the target outcomes — rather than a disclosure of individual past clients.
- SaaS migration from colocation to AWS under acquisition timeline. Growth-stage SaaS with 100-250 employees, moving off colocation infrastructure before a strategic acquisition closes.
- Unmanaged Azure estate remediation. Financial services or regulated firm with an Azure environment that has grown without governance — cost, security posture, and documentation all drifting.
- Stalled ERP-adjacent cloud migration recovery. Mid-market manufacturer that started a cloud migration with a previous vendor, stalled, and needs the remaining work diagnosed and completed.
Full writeups on the engagements page.
Frequently asked questions
Do you work with all three hyperscalers, or do you have a preference?
We work across AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, and we do not have a house preference. The right platform is a function of your existing vendor relationships, your team’s existing skills, your compliance posture, and the specific workloads. If you are already significantly invested in one platform, we work within that choice. If you are greenfield, the scoping conversation covers which platform makes sense for your specific situation.
We already started a cloud migration with another vendor and it stalled. Can you pick it up?
Yes, with the caveat that rescue engagements require a diagnostic phase first. We need to understand what was built, what is actually working, what the hidden assumptions are, and where the prior vendor left off before we can commit to a plan to finish. That diagnostic typically runs two to three weeks and precedes any commitment on the remaining migration.
How long does a typical mid-market cloud migration take?
Ranges widely. A straightforward migration of a well-documented application portfolio with no significant re-architecture can run three to six months. A migration that involves data platform modernization, compliance-driven redesign, or significant dependency untangling runs nine to eighteen months. The readiness assessment is where we can give you a defensible answer for your specific environment.
What happens to our existing infrastructure team during the engagement?
They are partners on the engagement, not bystanders. We bring senior cloud expertise; your team brings irreplaceable knowledge about your applications, your business processes, and your operational context. Every engagement includes a knowledge transfer component, because we are not interested in ongoing dependency — we want your team running the environment after we leave.
We have compliance obligations. Can you handle those?
Yes. Our methodology covers migrations under HIPAA, PCI DSS, SOC 2, Canadian data residency requirements (PIPEDA), and several industry-specific frameworks. Compliance is built into the architecture from day one, not retrofitted at the end. We will not take on an engagement where your compliance obligations are not clearly understood before work begins.
What cloud cost savings can we expect?
Honest answer: it depends, and anyone giving you a specific percentage without seeing your environment is making it up. Optimization engagements on mid-market cloud environments commonly recover fifteen to forty percent of annual cloud spend through right-sizing, commitment strategy, and architectural adjustments — a reasonable target range but not a guarantee. New migrations do not always cost less than on-prem in year one, but they usually cost less within three years when the full picture (capital versus operational expense, hardware refresh cycles, datacenter costs) is accounted for.
Do you sign NDAs?
Yes, as a matter of course. Engagements operate under a mutual NDA. The case study references on this page are composite engagement profiles — representative of the practice’s approach, not literal disclosures of specific clients.
What does a first conversation look like?
Thirty minutes on a video call. You describe the situation, we ask questions, you leave with at least one useful piece of insight about your own problem whether or not you engage us. If we are a fit, we send a scoping proposal within a week. If we are not a fit, we tell you and often point you toward someone who is.
Ready for the scoping conversation? Book a discovery call.