Azure architecture that runs in production, and holds up to an audit.

Azure migration and modernisation

Even when every server is ready to move, one undocumented link between two systems can hold up the whole move. It surfaces late, after the switch-over date is booked.

• Migration at scale: we have moved 1,000+ servers and 300+ applications to Azure across multiple datacentres.
• A recovery path when a move is already at risk. We took a national airline’s stalled datacentre-to-cloud migration onto a site-reliability-engineering (SRE) model and brought it back on track.
• Dependency mapping and a cutover sequence agreed before anything moves.

Azure landing zone and governance

Set up your Azure foundation by hand and it drifts within weeks. New projects get spun up outside the rules, and you find the gaps when an auditor does, not before.

• A hub-and-spoke landing zone with the infrastructure defined as code in Terraform, 85% of it on the last build.
• Governance measured against the CIS security benchmark and held there by the policy set. We have taken subscriptions to 94%.
• Governance enforced in code, not described in a slide.

Cloud networking and connectivity

Run part of a system on-premises and part in Azure, and the link between them becomes the weak point: delay you cannot tune away and failures no one can trace.

• ExpressRoute and Azure Virtual WAN designs that keep latency under 10ms over hybrid links.
• A network topology that production workloads can sit on.
• The same hub-and-spoke landing zone we govern in Terraform carries the network design, so routing changes ship through the same policy pipeline as the rest of the platform.

FinOps and Azure cost optimisation

Azure bills climb quietly: machines sized too big, capacity booked and never used. By the time finance asks, the cost is built into the architecture, and no setting will bring it down.

• Rightsizing and reserved capacity to bring the bill down. On one estate that took 34% off the three-year total cost of ownership. What yours holds depends on where the spend sits.
• On the same work we took 22% off live spend and secured a 28% Microsoft EA discount through Reserved Instances and Hybrid Benefit.
• A FinOps practice with automated cost monitoring, not a one-off cleanup.

Platform reliability and managed services

The first serious incident finds out whether anyone designed the recovery. With no runbook and no owner, the uptime target on paper does not hold.

• An SRE operating model for the workloads that need it. It has held a 99.95% uptime SLA and cut mean time to recovery by 65%.
• Up to 99.999% uptime achieved where the workload justified the design.
• A reliability retainer, so the platform stays governed after handover.

Cloud security and identity

Security that lives outside the architecture is a checklist. A flat network lets a single compromised device on the operational-technology (OT) network reach the domain controller in one hop. Built inside the architecture, the control is enforced.

• Zero Trust and PKI across both IT and OT, which saved one client €750k a year.
• Entra ID and Key Vault designs built and run by engineers holding AZ-500, Microsoft’s Azure security certification.
• A security review that maps each finding to the named control it answers to.

Power BI and Microsoft Fabric

Two dashboards disagree because the same number is defined twice, in two places, and neither is the agreed source of truth.

• Enterprise Microsoft Fabric and Power BI architectures with governed semantic models.
• Data integration on Azure SQL and Data Factory, built to a single source of truth.
• A platform review that fixes the model, not just the visuals.