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Cloud Architecture & Migration

Cloud migration services that keep a rollback within reach

BinaryBrill provides cloud migration services that design the target platform — accounts, networking, identity, data placement — and then move each workload across in slices small enough to reverse. In-house senior engineers run the assessment, the landing zone build and the cutover itself, so the plan and the execution sit with the same people.

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A senior engineer replies within 24 hours — not a sales rep.

Where cloud migrations go wrong before they start

Nobody has decided re-host, re-platform or rebuild — per application

A migration plan that treats every workload the same way is not a plan, it is a lift. Some applications genuinely just need moving; others will cost you for years if they land on the new platform in their current shape. Without that decision written down per application, the default becomes re-host everything, which is how the bill goes up on day one.

The cutover window is the entire risk budget

An offline copy-and-switch approach means the business absorbs one large, irreversible event: stop the old system, copy the data, hope the new one works. If it doesn't, there is no quiet way back. That single high-stakes weekend is where most migration horror stories come from, and it is avoidable with a different mechanism.

The landing zone gets designed while production is already moving onto it

Account structure, network segmentation and identity federation are the decisions that are expensive to change later. Building them as you go, under the pressure of a migration deadline, means the first production workload sets the pattern the rest have to live with — often not the pattern you would have chosen with time to think.

There's no way back once you've cut over

A migration that only works forwards makes every cutover a one-way door. If the new environment behaves differently under real traffic than it did in testing, the honest options are fix forward under pressure or explain the outage — because nobody built a rollback position into the plan.

How we deliver cloud migration services

The architecture decisions get made first and deliberately, because they are the ones that are expensive to revisit. The migration itself happens in slices, each with a way back, so a bad move costs hours rather than a weekend.

A landing zone before a single workload lands

Multi-account structure, network segmentation, identity federation and centralised logging are built and reviewed before anything of consequence moves onto the platform. Retrofitting an account boundary around a running production system is some of the worst work in this field, and it's entirely avoidable by sequencing it first.

Every application gets a disposition, with the reasoning written down

Re-host, re-platform, rebuild or retain — assessed per application against what it actually needs, not a blanket policy. Some workloads have no business case for moving at all, and we'll say so rather than migrating them because the programme has momentum.

Replication instead of an offline copy

Databases and large datasets migrate using ongoing replication, so the cutover itself is a short switch of traffic rather than a stop-the-world copy. We verify the new system against the old one before the old one is switched off, which is what makes the cutover window minutes rather than hours.

A documented rollback position at every slice

Each migrated workload has a way back that's been thought through in advance, not improvised during an incident. That's the difference between a bad move costing you an afternoon and it costing you a weekend and an apology to customers.

What this covers

Pick the piece you need, or bring us the problem and we'll tell you which applies.

Cloud Architecture & Landing Zone Design

The account structure, network segmentation, identity federation and logging that everything else gets built on. Cloud architecture consulting at this stage is where the expensive-to-reverse decisions live, so we settle them deliberately before any workload depends on them.

Multi-account or multi-subscription structure matched to how your teams and environments actually separate
Network segmentation and centralised logging designed in from the start, not retrofitted around live traffic
Identity federation so access follows your existing directory rather than a second set of credentials
Guardrails and policy-as-code that stop a misconfiguration from becoming a production incident

Application & Workload Migration Assessment

A per-application recommendation — re-host, re-platform, rebuild or retain — with the reasoning written down rather than asserted. This is the step an enterprise cloud migration partner should insist on before quoting a timeline, because the disposition mix is what actually determines the effort.

Dependency mapping that surfaces the integrations nobody documented
A disposition and justification for every workload in scope, including the ones we recommend leaving alone
Compliance and data-residency constraints identified before they become a blocker mid-migration
A sequencing plan that starts with something recoverable, not your highest-risk system

Database & Large Dataset Migration

Moving data is usually the hard part of an AWS, Azure or GCP migration, so we treat it as its own workstream. Replication runs ahead of the cutover so the switch itself is short, verified, and reversible.

Ongoing replication into the target platform rather than a single offline copy
Cutover windows measured in minutes for most workloads, not a scheduled outage
Verification against the source system before the old one is switched off
Handling for large unstructured datasets alongside relational and managed database engines

AWS, Azure & GCP Migration

Migrations between providers, out of a data centre, or consolidating multiple accounts after an acquisition. We work across AWS, Azure and GCP and will recommend the provider that fits your existing estate rather than the one we'd prefer to build on.

Data centre exit planning, including hardware decommissioning and contract wind-down timing
Cross-cloud migration where a merger or licensing change forces a provider switch
Provider selection guidance grounded in your existing tooling, team skills and compliance needs
Consolidation of inherited or acquired accounts into a single, auditable structure

Cutover Sequencing & Rollback Planning

The mechanics that turn a migration from a single high-stakes event into a series of small, reversible moves. Every slice gets a rehearsed way back before it gets a cutover date.

A documented rollback position for every workload before it moves, not improvised afterwards
Cutover runbooks with explicit go/no-go checkpoints against measured verification results
Traffic-switch mechanisms — DNS, load balancer weighting or feature flags — chosen per workload
A quiet-period sequencing plan so the riskiest cutovers don't land during peak trading or reporting

The stack we build on

Chosen to fit the problem — not because it's what we used last time.

Cloud providers

Amazon Web Services
Microsoft Azure
Google Cloud Platform
AWS Migration Hub
Azure Migrate

Landing zone & identity

AWS Control Tower
Azure Landing Zones
AWS Organizations
AWS IAM
Microsoft Entra ID
AWS Transit Gateway

Migration & replication

AWS Database Migration Service
Azure Database Migration Service
AWS DataSync
Rclone
Debezium
AWS Snowball

Infrastructure as code

Terraform
AWS CloudFormation
Azure Resource Manager
Ansible
Packer

How we'll work together

Every stage ends with something in your hands — not a status update.

01
Estate assessment and disposition
We inventory every workload, map its dependencies, and assign each one a disposition — re-host, re-platform, rebuild or retain — with the reasoning recorded. Dependency mapping is where the surprises usually live, particularly the reporting job that quietly reads a production database nobody remembers connecting it to.
You get: A workload inventory with dependency map, a disposition and rationale per application, and an indicative running cost on the target platform.
02
Landing zone design and build
Account structure, network topology, identity federation and logging designed and stood up as code before any workload moves. Your team reviews the design and the pull requests as the landing zone is built, so it's never a black box handed over at the end.
You get: An architecture decision record, an account and network diagram, and a working landing zone defined in Terraform inside your own repositories.
03
Migrate in slices, verify, then cut over
Workloads move in the agreed sequence. Data-heavy systems replicate in parallel so the actual cutover is a short traffic switch, verified against the old system before it's decommissioned. Each slice has a rehearsed rollback.
You get: Each workload live on the target platform with a cutover record, verification results, and a documented rollback path for that slice.
04
Decommission and hand over
Once a workload is verified and stable on the new platform, the old infrastructure is retired and the licence or contract tail is closed out. You get a written account of what moved, what changed, and what to watch.
You get: A migration summary per application, updated architecture documentation, and either a handover session or a transition into a managed infrastructure arrangement.

Where we've applied this

Healthcare

Data residency and encryption requirements built into the landing zone's account and network layout from the first design review, not added after the migration lands.

Financial services

Segregated environments and immutable audit logging carried across the cutover, so the new platform satisfies the same regulatory evidence the old one did.

Retail & e-commerce

Migrations sequenced around the trading calendar, with the highest-traffic services moved outside peak season and the payment path given its own account boundary.

Logistics

Dependency mapping that catches the tracking and dispatch integrations built on top of a legacy database, so they're re-pointed deliberately rather than broken on cutover day.

Manufacturing

Hybrid target architectures where plant systems stay on-site and everything else — analytics, integration, backup — moves to cloud over a private link.

Professional services

Consolidation of infrastructure inherited through an acquisition into a single landing zone, replacing several inconsistent account setups with one you can actually audit.

Questions buyers ask us

Is our estate too small, or too tangled, for a proper migration project?

Neither is usually the blocker. A handful of applications with a messy dependency map benefits from the same assessment discipline as a large estate — it just takes days instead of weeks. The exception is a single simple application with no data of consequence, where a straightforward re-host may not need a full landing zone built around it. We'll tell you during the assessment if your estate is a case like that.

Should we re-host as-is or re-platform during the move?

It depends on the workload, and we decide per application rather than as a blanket policy. Re-hosting is faster and lower-risk when the application is stable and the current architecture isn't costing you anything meaningful. Re-platforming to managed services makes sense when the operational burden of running it yourself is the actual problem. Rebuilding is rare, and reserved for applications where the current architecture is the constraint on the business, not just the infrastructure underneath it.

What drives the cost of a cloud migration, and how long does it take?

Three things: how many workloads are in scope, how much each one needs changing rather than simply moving, and how tangled the dependencies between them are. Data volume affects the migration mechanics — replication time, cutover sequencing — more than it affects the price directly. A single application with a clean landing zone can move in a few weeks; a full data-centre exit with dozens of interdependent systems is typically a multi-month programme sequenced in phases. We scope this properly in a paid assessment rather than pricing an estate we haven't looked inside.

What happens to our data during the migration, and where does it live afterwards?

It stays inside your own cloud accounts throughout — we build and migrate inside your tenancy rather than a reseller or shared environment. Replication runs over encrypted connections, and for regulated data we design the account and network layout to satisfy the residency and access requirements your compliance team specifies before any data moves.

When is a cloud migration the wrong move right now?

When the current environment isn't actually the constraint. If an application is stable, cheap to run, and nobody on the team is spending time firefighting it, moving it is a cost with no corresponding benefit — and we'll say so during the assessment rather than migrating it for the sake of the programme. Migrations also aren't the fix for a bad release process; if the pain is how slowly changes reach production rather than where the servers sit, that's a DevOps question, not a migration one.

How is this different from your DevOps services?

Cloud is the platform — the accounts, networks, data stores and capacity your applications run on. DevOps is the route a change takes from a developer's branch to production once that platform exists. A migration gets your workloads onto solid ground; it doesn't by itself make your releases faster or safer. Plenty of clients do both, often back to back, but they're different problems with different fixes.

Can you migrate an environment someone else built, without documentation?

Regularly. The estate assessment starts by reading what actually exists — infrastructure, access, backups, invoices — rather than trusting a diagram that may not match reality. You get a written account of what we found, including the risks, before any migration planning starts.

Who does the migration work, and where are they based?

Our own in-house engineers in Sahibzada Ajit Singh Nagar, Punjab — 45+ of them, with over a decade of combined delivery experience, delivering for clients in 15+ countries. Nothing is subcontracted. The engineer who designs your landing zone is the one running the cutover, and you own the code, the repository and the pipeline from day one.

Tell us what you're running and where it needs to end up

Send us a short description of your current estate and the provider you're considering. A senior cloud engineer replies within 24 hours with an honest read on the disposition mix and what the migration would actually involve.

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