Adopting Azure the way Microsoft designed it — from business strategy down to deployed workloads, with governance and security in place from the start.
The most common Azure problem we see isn't technical. It's that someone created a Virtual Machine three years ago, then someone else made a new subscription, then a third team did the same. No management groups. No policy. No naming convention. Six months later, no one knows who owns what, costs have crept up, and the security team can't get a clear picture of anything.
The Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework — CAF — is what Microsoft wrote after watching this happen thousands of times. It's a sequence of decisions you make in order, before you start deploying. Strategy first. Then planning. Then readiness. Then adoption. Then governance, security, and management as continuous practices.
Most of this work isn't installation. Most of it is helping you make decisions you didn't know you needed to make until later, when undoing them is expensive.
A cloud strategy your business sponsors can actually defend in front of the board — with business outcomes mapped to specific Azure capabilities, and measurable KPIs you can report on.
An Azure environment ready for workloads — billing scopes, Entra tenant, management group hierarchy, platform and application landing zones — all deployed via Infrastructure as Code, so changes from this point onward go through review, not by clicking around in the portal.
Workloads pilot-migrated using Azure Migrate, with a clear pattern for the rest. And the Govern, Secure, and Manage disciplines running in parallel — Azure Policy, Defender for Cloud, Microsoft Sentinel — so you're operating cloud, not just hosting in it.
Weeks 1–2. Workshops with executive sponsors and business leaders. We map real business drivers — cost, speed, new markets, resilience — to specific cloud outcomes. By the end of this phase, you have a strategy document that someone non-technical can read and sign off on. That document becomes the reference for every decision after this.
Weeks 3–5. Application inventory across the portfolio, classified by the 5Rs — Retire, Retain, Rehost, Replatform, Refactor. Cost estimation against current spend. Operating model your IT team will actually live with. Skills gap identified, upskilling plan written. This is where most "cloud strategy" projects end. We're using it to set up what comes next.
Weeks 6–10. Azure billing setup, Microsoft Entra tenant configuration, management group hierarchy, platform landing zone, application landing zones — all deployed via Infrastructure as Code using Azure Verified Modules. By the end of this phase, Azure is ready to receive workloads, with governance and security wired in from day one.
Weeks 11 onwards. We start with low-risk workloads — somewhere you can learn the patterns without business pressure. Once those are stable, we work through the rest in priority order. Govern, Secure, and Manage activate in parallel — Azure Policy enforcing standards, Defender for Cloud watching for misconfiguration, Sentinel collecting signal.
If you want to talk through where you're starting from — current Azure state, business pressure, what's worked and what hasn't — write to us.
We usually reply the same day.