Cloud and Azure
Your server is nearing end of life and your people now work from everywhere. OKTO Solutions plans and runs your cloud migration, then manages your Microsoft Azure environment day to day: identities, networking, monitoring and backups. You keep control of your data, without the hardware to replace.
Azure cloud hosting means a company’s servers, applications and files run inside Microsoft’s infrastructure instead of a machine sitting in a back room. For a Quebec SMB, that removes the hardware replacement cycle, lets capacity follow real activity, and keeps data at rest in a Canadian region.
In short
A managed Azure environment comes in two halves. Setup covers the inventory of your servers, applications and licences, the choice of hosting region, the build of the networks and resources, then a migration run in waves so your operations do not stop for a day. Ongoing management takes over from there: patching, security alerts, consumption tracking and architecture reviews as the company grows. Security is designed in from the start rather than bolted on afterwards, because an environment built in a hurry is very hard to harden later. The split matters at budget time too. The build is a project with an end date and a fixed scope; the management side is a running cost that replaces the hours somebody on your side used to spend babysitting hardware. Both halves are written down before anything moves.
The real question
A provider who answers "always" to that question is selling a platform, not advice. Some companies have everything to gain from moving. Others are better off waiting a year, or keeping part of their IT in the building. Here is how the call gets made.
Comparison
Three ways to host your systems, compared on what still matters once the first year is behind you. An on-site server means a purchase every few years and maintenance time that few small companies actually have. Azure removes the hardware but asks for discipline on consumption. Hybrid keeps what has to stay inside your walls and moves the rest. The table below puts the three side by side on cost, control, disaster recovery, scalability and where the data lives.
| Criterion | On-site server | Azure managed by OKTO | Hybrid |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cost | A server, storage and licences bought every few years, plus power, floor space and the hours spent maintaining it | No hardware to buy, a recurring cost that follows real usage and can be put in a budget | A smaller purchase on site, the rest as an operating expense |
| Control | Full control of the hardware, as long as somebody on your side has the time to look after it | Control of access, roles and configuration; the hardware and its replacement belong to Microsoft | The sensitive system stays inside your walls, everything else moves to Azure |
| Disaster recovery | Yours to build, document and test, usually with a second site to find first | A documented and tested plan, replication to another region, a restore that has been proven | The backup copy of the local system lives in Azure, outside the building |
| Scalability | Fixed on the day you bought it, so sized for your worst week of the year | Capacity added when you need it, then removed once the peak has passed | The on-site part stays fixed, the cloud part absorbs the peaks |
| Where data lives | On your premises, in the server room | Canada Central or Canada East regions, data at rest in Canada | Split, and documented system by system |
The recovery plan builds on our backup and disaster recovery service, and the day-to-day work on our managed IT services.
Three paths
At inventory time, every system falls into one of three categories. That sorting is what sets the order of the waves, the effort to plan for and the budget. A file server and a 2009 accounting package do not travel the same road.
The server is rebuilt in Azure exactly as it was, same operating system, same applications. This is the fastest and most predictable path. It suits the file server, the domain controller, the application that works fine but happens to live on hardware at the end of its life.
The system is replaced by a managed service: a hosted database instead of a SQL server to maintain, a SharePoint library instead of a network drive, an application repackaged. More work up front, far less upkeep afterwards. This is also what makes a system reachable by automation.
Some systems stay where they are, and that is a decision rather than a surrender. A controller, a line-of-business application supported nowhere else, a latency constraint. The server stays in your building, but it joins the same monitoring and its backup copy goes off to Azure.
How it runs
Five steps, in this order. Nothing moves until the destination environment is ready, and the rollback procedure stays available until each wave has been signed off.
We do not quote a standard duration. It depends on the number of servers, the number of users and above all on your line-of-business applications. It gets set with you at the plan stage, once the inventory is finished.
A list of the servers, applications, licences and their dependencies. We note what can move as is, what should be modernized and what is better off staying on site.
The order of the waves, the hosting region chosen, the maintenance windows, the rollback procedure and who does what between your team and ours.
Networks, identities, role-based permissions, logging, monitoring and backups. Nothing migrates into an environment that was improvised.
One group at a time, from the least critical to the most. Each wave is validated with the people who use it before the next one starts.
Patching, consumption tracking, resources resized and the architecture revisited as the company grows.
Data residency
Azure has hosting regions in Canada, and that is the default choice for every client. Data at rest then stays on Canadian soil, in the Canada Central or Canada East regions, and Microsoft 365 is deployed in the Canadian tenant. For a Quebec SMB, that settles a good part of what an institutional customer, an insurer or an auditor will ask. It does not settle everything. Quebec’s Law 25 also asks you to know who has access to what, how long personal information is kept, and what happens when there is an incident.
The costs
This is the most common complaint about the cloud, and it is fair whenever nobody is watching. A virtual machine switched on for a test in February is still running in November. A disk keeps billing after the server it belonged to was deleted. A resource sized for the yearly peak runs at that size all twelve months. Consumption tracking is part of the mandate, exactly like patching, because a bill that drifts always ends up poisoning the relationship.
The cloud is not expensive because it is expensive. It gets expensive when nobody looks at the bill before year end.
Our own experience
OKTO Solutions is a Microsoft Partner and builds its own management tooling, including OKTO RMM, instead of reselling somebody else’s. The cloud infrastructure we hand you is the kind we use every day.
The service is available across Quebec, remotely and on site when the job calls for it. Our office is in Trois-Rivières: see our IT services in the Mauricie and our IT services in Quebec City. On the productivity side, our Microsoft 365 services cover email, licensing and security, and the virtual CIO module puts the migration in the right spot in your budget.
Questions and answers
We look at your current environment, your servers, your licences and your backups, then hand you a plain recommendation: migrate, modernize on site, or wait.
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