Most firms still have a server doing work nobody has questioned in six years. The question is which parts of it should move, what it costs to leave them where they are, and what your files will do when they get there.
The purchase price is the smallest part of what a server costs you. There is also its replacement on a cycle, a maintenance contract, a share of the backup, a monitoring seat, and the hours somebody spends on all of it.
9 to 1
Dean Lewis Associates. Nine servers consolidated to one, and between twenty-five and thirty thousand dollars a year stopped going out the door.
11 to 2
V&A Consulting Engineers. Eleven servers down to two, with the files moved into Egnyte. Tens of thousands saved across hardware, maintenance, backup and downtime.
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Weekends either firm spent standing over a migration. Cutovers run in stages, and the old system stays reachable until the new one has carried a full week of real work.
The decision
What moves, and what earns its keep on site
We usually do move everything, and we say so plainly because most providers hedge. But the answer is decided case by case, and a few workloads earn their place in the building. Open the ones that apply to you.
Email and the Microsoft 365 tenant
This one is settled for almost everybody. If mail still runs on a box in your office, moving it removes a single point of failure that takes the whole firm offline when it fails. The work worth doing alongside it is the permissions tidy-up, because a tenant inherits whatever sharing habits the old file server had.
The file server
This is the decision your staff will feel most. Small documents go to SharePoint or OneDrive without much drama. Large working sets behave differently, and picking wrong here is expensive in a way you notice for years. The band below covers it properly.
Applications with a database behind them
Accounting packages, project systems, the estimating tool somebody bought in 2014. Some have a hosted version the vendor supports, and taking it is usually the right move. Others run in Azure on a virtual machine that behaves exactly like the one you have now, with somebody else owning the hardware underneath. We check what the vendor will support before anything moves, because a vendor will decline to help with a configuration they never certified.
Identity, and who your systems trust
The domain controller in the closet is doing more than most owners realize. It decides who can sign in to what. Moving that to Microsoft Entra is the step that lets people work from anywhere without a tunnel back to the office, and it is also the step that most needs planning, since every device and application checking in against the old one has to be pointed somewhere new.
Equipment that has to stay
A plotter, a survey instrument, a machine on a bench with a controller that shipped with Windows 7 and a vendor who will not certify anything newer. These stay, and the honest plan puts them on their own segment where they can stay old safely, watched, and reachable by the people who need them and nobody else.
The internet circuit you are about to lean on
Once the files leave the building, your connection stops being a convenience. Upload speed matters more than the number in the advertisement, and a second circuit from a different carrier costs less than most firms assume. We size it before the move begins.
Backups, which do not come with it
Moving to Microsoft 365 does not back your data up, and the retention windows are shorter than most people believe. Anything that moves needs its own backup arranged deliberately. The recovery page sets out what the platforms keep and for how long, with the vendor documentation cited.
The licenses you already pay for
Most firms on Microsoft 365 Business Premium are paying for security and device management they have never switched on. Before anybody quotes you a new product, the first pass is finding what your existing subscription already covers. That review usually pays for a chunk of the migration.
The part that goes wrong
Big files behave differently, and that decides the platform
A firm with a thousand small documents and a firm with a hundred enormous ones need different answers, and the second firm often gets sold the first answer.
Mostly small documents
Proposals, contracts, spreadsheets, the ordinary paperwork of a professional firm. SharePoint and OneDrive handle these well, they are already inside the subscription you pay for, and version history comes with them. For most firms the file server ends up here and nothing further is needed.
Large working sets
Drawing sets, models, point clouds, renders, video, instrument output. These need a platform built to keep a local copy in step with a cloud copy, so opening a file feels like opening it off a drive. Egnyte is what we use for this, and it is why V&A could leave nine servers behind without changing how anybody works.
The question to ask any provider. Put your largest working folder in front of them and ask what happens when four people open it at once from three locations. A provider who answers that with a product name and no follow-up questions has not done this on a file set your size.
The money
Where the saving actually comes from
Four lines, and the hardware is the smallest of them. This is the arithmetic we put in front of you before recommending anything.
The refresh cycle you stop paying into
A server behaves like a subscription with a five year billing cycle and a large invoice at the end of it. Nine servers means nine of those invoices, staggered across the years. Most firms have never seen that number added up across a decade.
Maintenance, monitoring and patching per box
Every machine carries a monitoring seat, a patch window, a warranty and somebody's attention. Nine fewer machines is nine fewer of each, and it is the line most owners have never added up, because it never arrived as a single invoice.
The backup footprint
Fewer machines means less to protect, less to store and a shorter restore. It also means a simpler answer when an insurance carrier asks what your recovery looks like, which has its own value at renewal.
Downtime, and the honest caveat
A room full of aging hardware fails in ways a hosted platform mostly does not, and every hour of that has a cost you can estimate. The caveat: for a firm with two healthy servers and modest storage, moving may cost about the same or slightly more per month. You would be buying resilience and reach, and if that is your situation we will say so.
Already all cloud?
Six jobs the move did not take off your hands
Firms that finished a migration two years ago often assume the watching came with it. Microsoft and Google run the platform. They do not run your tenant, and they will not call you when something in it looks wrong.
Your perimeter is now a login
There is no building to break into any more, so the way in is somebody's password. That puts weight on details nobody checks by default: which accounts hold administrator roles, whether multifactor covers every one of them, how many external guests are still in the tenant, and which third-party applications a member of staff granted access to two years ago. None of that appears on an invoice, and none of it improves on its own.
Nobody is on shift for your tenant
When a mailbox starts forwarding to an outside address at two in the morning, or somebody signs in from a country none of your staff have visited, the platform records it and carries on. It is your tenant and your responsibility to notice. That is what the monitoring page covers, and it applies to a cloud-only firm exactly as much as to one with a server room.
The laptops did not move anywhere
A cloud migration moves servers. Every machine your staff actually touch is still sitting on a desk or in a bag, needing patches, disk encryption with the keys held somewhere you can reach them, and detection software that somebody reads the output of. A firm with no servers left often has the weakest endpoint protection we see, because the migration felt like the finish.
Sharing spreads and never contracts
The old file server made sharing awkward, which quietly limited it. Now anybody can send a link to anybody in four seconds, and those links outlive the project, the contract and sometimes the company that received them. Somebody has to go through periodically and close what should have closed itself, and nobody does it unless it is on a schedule with a name against it.
The bill drifts upward on its own
A monthly subscription hides what a capital purchase made obvious. Seats stay assigned to people who left, storage grows because deleting is nobody's job, and firms buy a product that duplicates something their existing plan already includes. A license review twice a year usually pays for itself, and it is the least interesting hour anybody spends.
You are in a queue when it breaks
A platform outage is out of everybody's hands, and those are rare. More often it is a problem inside your own tenant, and you open a ticket with a vendor who does not know who you are and has no obligation to explain what changed. Somebody who holds the partner relationship, knows your configuration, and can tell you within an hour whether the fault is yours or theirs earns the fee on an ordinary bad morning.
Why this gets missed. The servers go, and the work moves into the tenant: accounts, permissions, licenses, devices. None of that has a blinking light or a fan you can hear, so it quietly stops getting checked.
Common questions
How long does a migration take, and how much of it do we feel?
Six to twelve weeks for a firm of twenty to a hundred people, and the felt part is a fraction of that. Data copies in the background for days or weeks while everybody keeps working off the old system. The cutover itself is one evening per workload, and the old copy stays reachable afterward until nobody has asked for it in two weeks of use.
Will our drawings open as fast as they do now?
On the right platform, yes, because the file you open is a local copy kept in step with the cloud, so nothing is pulled down when you open it. On the wrong platform, no, and your staff will tell you within a week. This is the single question worth testing with your own files before you commit, and we set that test up rather than asking you to take it on trust.
What happens if the internet goes down?
People keep working on the files already synced to their machines, and changes catch up when the circuit returns. Mail keeps arriving on phones. Anything running live in a browser stops. The mitigation is a backup connection on another carrier, cheap enough that we recommend it for any firm putting its files in the cloud.
Is our data safe there, and who can reach it?
The platforms run better physical security than any office in the Bay Area. The real exposure moves to who holds a login, which is why multifactor and a permissions review are part of the migration, priced in from the start. Where you carry export control, client confidentiality or regulated data, the location and the encryption terms need checking against your obligations before anything moves, and we do that alongside your counsel.
Can we move in stages instead of all at once?
That is how we prefer to do it. Mail first, then files, then applications, then identity, with a gap between each for ordinary work to prove the last step. Firms that try to land all four on one weekend are the ones you hear horror stories about. Staging adds a few project hours and removes most of the risk.
We just bought servers. Have we wasted the money?
No, and this is a bad reason to move early. Run them out. The right time to have the conversation is twelve to eighteen months before the warranty ends, which is when a decision can be made calmly and the budget can be planned. Ask us then, and in the meantime there is usually plenty worth fixing that costs nothing to change.
Start with what you are paying for now
Tell us how many servers you have and how big your largest working folder is. That is enough for a first answer on whether a move is worth it, and if it is not we will say so.
