Cloud & infrastructure
Everyone has a story about the migration that ran three weeks over, or the Monday morning when nobody could print and the accounts system was gone. That's usually not a technology failure. It's a planning failure, and it's avoidable.
The clock that's already running
If you're still running Windows 10 machines, you're either paying for Extended Security Updates or you're running unpatched. Both are decisions. Only one of them was made on purpose.
US$61
Per device, commercial ESU year one — bought through Volume Licensing. Year one started November 2025.
US$122
Roughly what year two costs from November 2026. Microsoft has stated the price doubles every consecutive year.
3 years
The maximum. ESU is a bridge with a hard end, not a way to keep Windows 10 indefinitely.
The exception worth knowing
There's no charge for Windows 10 virtual machines running in Windows 365, Azure Virtual Desktop, Azure VMs or Azure Local. It's also free for Windows 10 endpoints connecting to a Windows 365 Cloud PC with an active subscription.
That occasionally changes the maths entirely — for a business already considering Cloud PC, the ESU cost quietly disappears from the comparison. It's not a reason to move to Azure on its own. It is a number that belongs in the spreadsheet.
The quieter second wave
The desktop fleet gets attention because staff can see it. The server room doesn't, and that's where the more expensive problem usually is. We still walk into builders and manufacturers still running an on-premises Exchange 2016 that nobody has thought about since it was installed.
| Out of support since 14/10/2025 | What it usually means in practice |
|---|---|
| Office 2016 and Office 2019 | Perpetual licences still working fine on desktops, quietly unpatched. The most common one we find. |
| Exchange Server 2016 and 2019 | An on-premises mail server holding every email the business has ever sent, with no more security updates. This is the urgent one. |
| Skype for Business Server 2015 and 2019 | Usually still running because it's tied to the phone system. Normally replaced with Teams Phone. |
| Visio and Project 2016 and 2019 | Low risk, but they tend to be the reason an old machine can't be retired. |
If you've got an Exchange server in a cupboard, deal with that before you worry about the laptops. An internet-facing mail server with no security updates is a different class of risk to an unpatched desktop. The move to Exchange Online is well-trodden and usually takes a weekend.
The work
01
Moving servers into Azure where it makes sense, and leaving them where they are where it doesn't. Cloud PC suits businesses with contractors, seasonal staff or people working from sites and home — you hand someone a login rather than a laptop image.
We'll also tell you when Azure will cost you more than the server you've got. That happens more often than the marketing suggests, particularly for a single well-specced server doing one steady job.
02
The systems that actually run the business: practice management, ERP, job costing, estimating, the accounts package. These moves fail when nobody has asked the software vendor the right questions early enough, so we start there, weeks before anything is touched.
Then a test run, a documented cutover with times against each step, and a written rollback point. Every migration needs a moment where we can still say "stop, put it back".
03
Getting a construction site working from day one, not week three. Temporary connectivity, a network that handles a demountable office and a dozen devices, and a plan for the site that's about to open in a paddock with no fixed line anywhere near it.
Also the permanent stuff: office networks, Wi-Fi that reaches the warehouse, firewalls, and segmenting the plant floor from the office network so a machine controller can't reach the accounts system.
04
Two questions most businesses have never been asked properly. How much data can you afford to lose — an hour, a day, a week? And how long can you be down before it really hurts?
Those are your RPO and RTO, and they determine what the backup should cost. Then we test the restore, on a schedule, and show you the result. An untested backup is a hope with an invoice attached.
05
Buying the right machines for the work rather than whatever was on special, keeping a replacement schedule so the cost is predictable, and retiring old devices properly with the data wiped. Nothing clever. Just done consistently.
06
Working out which machines can take Windows 11, which need replacing, and which need a year of ESU while you budget. Then rolling it out in waves, starting with the people most likely to tell us honestly when something is broken.
One thing we've changed our mind about
For years our website advertised cloud hosting and VPS as a headline service. It was honest at the time, and we can still host things where there's a good reason to. But competing with Azure and AWS on raw hosting is a losing position for a firm our size, and pretending otherwise would just cost you money.
Microsoft and Amazon will always sell the tin cheaper than we can, with more redundancy and better availability numbers. What they won't do is work out which of your systems belongs where, move it without breaking your month-end, sit on hold to your ERP vendor, or ring you when a backup fails at 11pm.
That's the part worth paying for. The value is in designing, migrating and running the thing — not in reselling the hardware it sits on.
Tell us roughly how many devices you have and how old they are. We'll come back with what it costs to replace them, what it costs to buy another year, and which is actually cheaper for you.
Someone picks up. The problem gets fixed. You get on with your day.
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