Most cloud migrations fail the cost test in month four. Yours doesn't have to.

Because you're paying retail hourly rates for VMs sized like physical servers, with EBS provisioned for peak IOPS that never materialize, plus NAT Gateway egress, cross-AZ traffic, and snapshot sprawl nobody owns. A typical rehosted portfolio runs 1.6-2.2x the on-prem TCO for the first year. Replatforming the top 20% of workloads onto managed services — RDS, Fargate, S3 — is what flips the math. Lift-and-shift is a valid tactic for a datacenter exit deadline, not a destination.

We stand up AWS Managed Microsoft AD or Azure AD DS in the landing zone and establish a one-way or two-way forest trust to your on-prem AD. Domain-joined EC2 or Azure VMs authenticate against the cloud directory, but users and group policies still flow from corp. For apps that hardcode SPNs or rely on constrained delegation, we map those out in the wave plan before cutover — surprises here are what cause 3 a.m. rollbacks.

Mandatory tagging enforced by SCP or Azure Policy (env, app, owner, cost_center, data_class), per-team budgets with anomaly alerts wired to Slack or Teams, Savings Plan and Reserved Instance modeling refreshed monthly, and a weekly unit-cost review — cost per transaction, per tenant, per claim processed. Dashboards in CUR + Athena or Azure Cost Management. The point is to make engineers see cost in the same place they see latency, not three weeks later in a finance report.

For commercial work, no — you're hiring us for the engineering. For federal agencies and prime contractors with small-business subcontracting goals, our SDVOSB status lets us be sourced sole-source up to the SDVOSB threshold and counts toward Section 15 goals. We also carry the operating muscle for FedRAMP Moderate and High boundaries, GovCloud and Azure Government landing zones, and the SSP and POA&M artifacts that come with them.

For 80-150 applications, plan on 9-15 months end to end. The first 6-8 weeks is discovery, disposition, and landing zone build — no workloads move. Waves of 8-15 apps then ship every 3-4 weeks, with the hardest 10% (mainframe-adjacent, COTS with vendor lock, anything with regulatory data flow questions) saved for the back half. Anyone promising a 90-day cutover for a portfolio that size is selling a rehost that you'll pay for twice.

Workload fit and existing licensing usually decide it before preference does. Heavy Microsoft estates with EA discounts, Power Platform, and Entra integration trend Azure. Data and ML-heavy workloads, BigQuery dependencies, or Anthos footprints trend GCP. Broadest service catalog, deepest FedRAMP coverage, and the largest managed-service surface area trend AWS. We've shipped on all three and will tell you when a multi-cloud posture is justified versus when it just doubles your operational burden.

Yes, and you should. AWS GovCloud and Azure Government provide inheritable controls at the FedRAMP High and IL4/5 levels — we map your SSP to the CSP's responsibility matrix so your team only authors the controls you actually own (typically 30-40% of the total). We generate SSP narratives, POA&M entries, and continuous monitoring evidence as part of the build, not as a documentation sprint after go-live.

By treating the hybrid period as a designed state, not an accident. Direct Connect or ExpressRoute with redundant VIFs, a routable IP plan that doesn't overlap, DNS resolver endpoints both directions, and a single identity plane. We also enforce that no new workload gets built on-prem after the landing zone is live — every team has to justify why they're not deploying to the target. Otherwise you carry both bills for years.

Three options, and the math differs by workload. License-included RDS or Azure SQL MI is simplest but most expensive at scale. BYOL via Microsoft's Azure Hybrid Benefit or AWS dedicated hosts can cut SQL costs 40-55% if you have Software Assurance. Or you migrate to PostgreSQL on Aurora or Azure Database — viable for maybe 30% of SQL Server workloads, painful for the rest. We model all three before cutover so the decision is financial, not accidental.