A physical server is a single machine your whole business leans on. It needs cooling, it needs a UPS that somebody remembers to test and it needs replacing every few years whether the budget allows it or not. When it fails your team stops working until an engineer arrives. Growing means buying capacity ahead of need and hoping the sizing was right.
A cloud server does the same job on Microsoft Azure instead of on hardware you own. Your applications and data sit on infrastructure with redundancy built in, reachable from any location, sized to what you use and adjusted when that changes. There is no hardware refresh to budget for and no single box whose failure takes the business offline. IT365 moves your systems across, manages them once they are there and keeps the cost matched to what you are actually using.
The purchase price of a server is the part everybody sees. The rest arrives quietly: the maintenance contract, the power and cooling, the licence renewals, the hours your IT support spends nursing hardware past its warranty and the capacity you paid for and never used. Then there is the cost nobody budgets for, which is the day it fails and forty people cannot work.
Moving to Azure turns most of that into a monthly figure you can see and plan around. Performance stops being limited by a machine bought years ago, and adding resource is a change rather than a purchase. The saving is not automatic. An unmanaged cloud environment can cost more than the server it replaced, which is why right-sizing is part of the service rather than a project you pay for later.
The reason businesses put this off is not that they doubt the cloud. It is that they cannot afford a week of chaos, and they have heard about migrations that ran over. So the work starts with an assessment, which is part of onboarding rather than a separate piece of work: what runs on the server, what each application needs, which systems talk to each other and what the sensible order is. That assessment is also where you find out if something will not move, which is far better learned before the project than during it.
The migration itself is planned around your working week, usually with the cut-over outside it. Your old environment is not switched off to a deadline. It can be left available for as long as you want it there, and it only goes when you are ready to decommission it. Once you are across, your servers are monitored, patched and backed up as part of the service, with a named route to a person when something needs attention.
Your servers run on Microsoft Azure with redundancy built into the platform, so a hardware fault is Microsoft’s problem rather than yours. Performance is not capped by the age of a machine, and there is no refresh cycle to budget for.
Your line-of-business applications are hosted centrally and reached from any location, which suits multi-site teams and anyone working away from an office. Performance is usually better than it was over a VPN to a server in one building.
Data and applications are moved across to a plan, and several ageing servers often consolidate into fewer, better-used cloud ones. That reduces what you are maintaining as well as what you are paying for.
Resource is added when you need it and taken back when you do not, and your environment is reviewed so you are not paying for capacity nobody is using.
From Elevate, your Customer Success Manager owns that review and reports on it alongside your licensing and budget.
Usually not. Most businesses we move to Azure end up with no on-premise server at all. The few that keep one do it for a specific reason, such as a machine on the factory floor that has to talk to something local. We will tell you which situation you are in during the assessment rather than after the invoice.
Most do. Some need hosting in a particular way. A small number are tied to hardware or an operating system that cannot come with you, in which case there are hybrid options. Occasionally the honest answer is that the application needs replacing first. Checking compatibility is part of the assessment, so nobody finds out mid-migration.
Planned properly, most of it happens without your team noticing, with the cut-over scheduled outside working hours. Your old environment is kept available for as long as you want it rather than decommissioned on a date that suits the project plan, so there is a way back if something unexpected turns up.
No, and the difference is worth knowing. Microsoft 365 covers email, Teams, SharePoint and the applications your staff use day to day. Cloud servers and apps cover the infrastructure your business systems run on, the things that used to live on a server in your building. Plenty of businesses need both, and both are managed by the same team.
Backup and Disaster comes packaged with Infinite Assurance, which includes Cyber Security, Cloud Services and Fully Managed IT Services.
Speak to our team and we will look at what your server is running today, what it would take to move it and what it would cost you monthly. If keeping it another year is the better decision, we will say so.
