Cloud Computing Service Provider
Build Your Cloud Properly the First Time
Azure Migrations Delivered
100+
Years working on azure
15+
Managed Services for Migration and IaaS
Cloud migrations fail in predictable ways, we help you avoid them.
Most cloud migrations underperform. They come in over budget by month six, surface performance problems by month twelve, and produce an awkward audit finding by month eighteen. The cause is almost always the foundation, not the cloud itself; design decisions made too quickly, governance bolted on after go-live, costs left to drift because nobody set up FinOps before the bill arrived. We help UK organisations migrate to the cloud properly the first time, or rebuild the foundations of an environment that wasn’t.
Most cloud computing providers are pitching one of three things: a platform you can rent (the hyperscalers), a generalist agency reselling someone else’s platform, or a managed service for environments that have already migrated. We sit in a narrower space than any of those.
LA NET delivers cloud computing services to UK organisations that are either preparing to move to the cloud, mid-migration and looking for a steadier hand, or running a cloud environment that was migrated badly the first time and now needs to be rebuilt. We’ve been doing this since 2011 from a base in London, and we focus deliberately on regulated and high-stakes sectors where the cost of a botched migration extends well beyond the IT budget; NHS Trusts, government departments, financial services firms, national infrastructure programs, and SaaS businesses selling into them.
This page is about the work that gets you to a properly built cloud environment in the first place. If you’re already running on Microsoft Azure and looking for ongoing management of an environment that exists, our Azure Managed Service Provider page covers that side of the offering. They’re related but they’re different jobs, and confusing them is one of the reasons cloud spend gets out of control.
What We Mean by "Clound Computing Services"
We use the phrase to cover three connected disciplines:
Cloud strategy and advisory: The work that happens before any infrastructure gets built. Platform selection, sovereignty assessment, target operating model, business case construction, and (in regulated sectors) the compliance pathway. This is where the worst mistakes are cheapest to fix, and where most providers either skip past it or charge for it as a separate engagement that never connects to delivery.
Cloud migration as a service: A defined, accountable engagement to move workloads from where they currently live, on-premises, in a colocation facility, in another cloud, or in a managed hosting arrangement, into a properly designed cloud environment. Fixed scope, fixed milestones, named outcomes.
Cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS): The compute, storage, networking, identity, and governance foundation that the migrated workloads run on. We build it. You receive it documented, hardened, and instrumented. Whether your team or ours runs it after that is a separate decision.
Most engagements involve all three, in that order. Some clients come to us mid-stream and only need the latter two. We don’t insist on the full sequence if it’s not the right answer.
Cloud Migration as a Service: A Direct Definition
There’s a lot of marketing fog around “cloud migration as a service,” so it’s worth being plain about what the phrase should and shouldn’t mean.
A consulting engagement gives you advice and recommendations. Implementation might happen, or it might not, and if it does it’s frequently a separate scope. A managed service is an ongoing arrangement to run an environment that already exists. Cloud migration as a service is the bit in the middle, and it has a few specific characteristics that distinguish it from either.
It’s outcome-defined, not effort-defined. You’re paying for workloads to land in a target state that meets a defined set of criteria. You’re not paying for hours.
It’s bounded. Migration projects have a beginning and an end. Open-ended engagements drift, and drift is where the budget overruns happen.
It transfers risk to the provider. A real migration as a service shoulders the risk of the cutover going wrong. If your provider’s commercial model still leaves that risk with you, what you have is staff augmentation in different packaging.
It includes the foundations. Migration without a properly designed landing environment is just data transfer. Anyone can transfer data. The job is making sure what arrives at the other end works the way it needs to.
Why Most Cloud Migrations Underperform
We see a small number of patterns repeat across organisations of very different sizes. Three are worth being explicit about because they’re the ones the market doesn’t really discuss.
The Two Migration problem. Most organisations migrate to the cloud twice. The first migration is fast, cheap, and lifts the existing on-premises environment into a cloud account with minimal redesign. It looks like a success at month three. By month eighteen, the environment is costing 40 to 60 percent more than projected, performance is uneven, and the team is spending more time managing it than they spent managing the on-premises version it replaced. So a second migration project starts; this time to redesign properly. The second migration is the expensive one, and it’s the one that should have happened first. We’re called in for both situations roughly evenly. The first kind costs less in our fees and considerably more in everything else.
The Cost Inversion Rule. Every pound saved by under-investing in the design and discovery phase tends to cost three to five pounds in the first 24 months of operation. The savings are visible. The costs aren’t, until they show up in monthly bills, performance incidents, security findings, and unplanned remediation work. The maths almost always favours doing the design phase properly the first time, but the maths almost never appears in the comparison spreadsheet because the second-order costs aren’t on it.
The Refactoring Threshold. The right migration approach for any given application depends on a calculation involving how long it will continue to be used, how it’s currently performing, what its licensing model looks like, and how much of its codebase the team still understands. Most organisations get this wrong in one of two ways: they refactor everything (slow, expensive, and many of the candidates didn’t warrant it), or they rehost everything (cheap migration, expensive operation, and the worst candidates would have benefited from being retired or replaced instead). The right answer is almost always a mix, and the mix is what discovery is for.
These aren’t insights drawn from a single project. They’re patterns we’ve watched repeat over more than a decade of working with organisations on Azure migrations, including some of the more complex regulated environments in the UK.
The Six Paths to Cloud & When Each One is Right
The industry has settled around a framework called the 6 Rs of cloud migration: rehost, replatform, repurchase, refactor, retain, and retire. Most providers will recite the list. Fewer will tell you when each one is actually the right call. Here’s our short version:
Rehost (move it as-is): Right when the application is stable, has a meaningful remaining life, and the organisation needs to clear an on-premises commitment quickly. Wrong when the application is ten years old, written for an OS that’s reaching end of support, or running on licensing that doesn’t transfer cleanly to cloud.
Replatform (move it with light changes): Right when small adjustments (moving a database to a managed service, switching to a supported runtime, replacing a homegrown component with a cloud-native equivalent) produce disproportionate operational benefit. This is where most projects undershoot. The temptation to “just lift it” leaves savings on the table.
Repurchase (replace it with a SaaS product): Right when the application is generic enough that an off-the-shelf SaaS product covers 90 percent of the requirement at a fraction of the operational cost. Wrong when the application encodes genuine business differentiation, in which case repurchasing strips out the thing the business actually competes on.
Refactor (rewrite parts of it for cloud-native architecture): Right when the application has long remaining life, performance problems that won’t be solved by rehosting, and an internal team capable of taking ownership of the rewritten components. Wrong as a default. Refactoring is expensive, slow, and often ends with an architecture that’s harder to operate than the one it replaced.
Retain (leave it where it is, for now): Right when the application has fewer than two years of remaining life, sits behind a regulatory constraint that hasn’t been resolved, or depends on hardware that genuinely doesn’t have a cloud equivalent yet. Wrong when “retain” is being used as a polite way of saying “we don’t want to think about it.”
Retire (decommission it): The most underused of the six. Discovery typically surfaces a meaningful percentage of applications that nobody is actively using and nobody wants to be the one to switch off. Migration is a good moment to retire them, because the discovery work has already been done.
A well-designed migration usually distributes workloads across all six paths in different proportions. A migration that puts everything in one bucket is almost always either lazy or politically constrained.
Cloud IaaS: What We Actually Build
When we talk about cloud infrastructure as a service in delivery terms, we don’t mean reselling Azure compute on a markup. We mean building the foundations that determine whether your cloud environment is going to be cheap to run or expensive, easy to govern or impossible, audit-ready or audit-vulnerable.
The foundations that matter, in our view:
Landing zone architecture: A defined structure for subscriptions, management groups, networks, and policy inheritance, set up before any production workloads land. Get this right and you can scale the environment for years without rebuilding it. Get it wrong and you’ll either pay for a remediation project later or accept that costs and security posture will both drift.
Identity and access foundation: Identity is the new perimeter, and it’s where most regulated organisations have the largest gaps. Centralised identity, role-based access, conditional access, privileged identity management, and a clean separation between human and service identities; built in from day one rather than retrofitted.
Network design: Hub-and-spoke topology, firewall positioning, private endpoints, DNS strategy, and the connectivity model back to whatever’s left on-premises. The choices here are difficult to reverse later.
Governance baseline: Policies that prevent the environment from drifting out of compliance: naming standards, tagging requirements, region restrictions, allowed SKUs, mandatory encryption, audit logging. Defined once, enforced continuously.
Cost controls and FinOps tooling: Budgets, alerts, reservation strategy, and the dashboards that make spend visible to the people who can do something about it. We set this up before go-live, not after, because by the time the first surprise bill arrives the bad patterns are already established.
When you receive an environment from us at the end of a migration, this is what gets handed over: not just a working set of VMs, but the architectural foundations that determine how cheaply and safely the environment will run for the next several years. For a worked example of what this foundation looks like in practice, see our Zertus Case-study
The Hidden Costs of Cloud Migration
There’s a recurring conversation we have with clients in month four or five of a migration that didn’t go through us. It usually starts with “we didn’t budget for…” and ends with a number that’s a meaningful percentage of the original migration spend. The categories that catch organisations out:
Egress fees and data gravity: Moving data into a cloud is generally free. Moving it out, between regions, or between cloud providers is not. Architectures that involve significant cross-region or cross-cloud data movement can rack up egress fees that nobody costed in advance.
Licensing inversions: A surprising number of workloads cost more to run on cloud than on-premises if licensing is structured naively. Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, certain Linux distributions, and per-core Windows licensing can all flip from cheap to expensive depending on how the migration is built. Azure Hybrid Benefit, reserved instances, and correct VM sizing change the maths considerably, but only if they’re applied. Most organisations leave at least one of those levers unpulled.
Parallel running: During the migration window, you’re paying for both environments. The duration of that window is largely a function of how confident the team is in the cutover, which is largely a function of how rigorous the testing has been. Compressed migration timelines often mean longer parallel running, which often costs more than the time saved.
The 90-day cost surprise window: The first 90 days post-migration is when most cost surprises emerge. Resources that auto-provisioned, environments left running because nobody knew they could be turned off, log retention defaults eating storage, untuned databases consuming more compute than they need. FinOps practices established before go-live catch most of this. Established after go-live, the fixes still work but you’ve already paid for the lesson.
Sovereignty and data residency assumptions: UK regulated organisations increasingly need genuine UK data residency, with the legal pathway to back it up. Several of the cloud regions branded as “UK” don’t deliver this in the way regulated sectors require, and the differences only become visible when a regulator or auditor asks the right question. Sovereignty is a design decision, not a checkbox.
These aren’t reasons not to migrate. They’re reasons to migrate properly.
Why Businesses Choose Us
A cloud migration delivered properly for the first time; secure foundations, predictable costs and engineers who do the work themselves rather than pass it on
Built Right the First Time
Most cloud environments need rebuilding within two years because the foundation wasn’t designed properly. We build landing zones, identity, governance, and FinOps in from day one, so the cloud environment you receive is ready to run for the long term, not just ready to demo.
15-30%
Lower Azure Spend Post-Migration
100+
Azure Environemts Delivered
Cloud Computing Services for Regulated & High-Stakes Sectors
The migration questions for a 200-person SaaS business are different from those for an NHS Trust, which are different again from those for a fintech regulated by the FCA or a public sector supplier operating under Government security frameworks.
For NHS organisations, the central considerations are typically the application of NHS-aligned security controls, the audit trail required to demonstrate them, and integration with existing identity and patient data systems. The discovery phase usually surfaces a long tail of clinical systems that need careful handling and a smaller core of corporate workloads that migrate more conventionally.
For government departments and public sector suppliers, procurement pathway and security framework alignment are usually the gating items. Being a HM Government G-Cloud Supplier means our services are available through the Crown Commercial Service marketplace, which simplifies procurement considerably. Beyond that, the security framework alignment work is where most of the effort sits. Our work with the National Institute of Teaching is one example of a national-scale, secure Azure platform delivered under those constraints
For financial services, the FCA’s expectations around resilience, exit planning, and operational continuity shape the architecture in specific ways; particularly around the assumption that cloud failure scenarios need credible mitigation, not just credible documentation.
For SaaS businesses selling into any of the above, the migration is often less about your own operational improvement and more about meeting the security expectations of the customers you’re selling to. That changes the priority order: the controls customers ask for in security questionnaires get demonstrated first.
We’re selective about who we work with because the depth of attention required for a genuinely well-built cloud environment in these sectors isn’t compatible with a high-volume client list. There are providers who will take any migration that comes through the door. We’re not one of them.
How We Run a Cloud Migration
A LA NET migration engagement runs through five phases. The proportions vary by environment but the structure is consistent.
Discovery and assessment. Two to four weeks for most environments. We map what you have, how it’s interconnected, what it costs to run today, where the licensing sits, and where the risks are. The output is a discovery report that surfaces things most internal teams genuinely didn’t know — undocumented dependencies, dormant systems, expired certificates, security gaps, licensing exposure. This is often the most valuable single deliverable in the engagement, regardless of what comes after.
Design and target architecture. Three to six weeks, running in parallel with the latter end of discovery. Landing zone design, identity model, network architecture, governance baseline, migration wave plan, cutover strategy, exit plan. Signed off before any build work starts.
Build and validate. The landing zone gets stood up and validated against the design. Pilot workloads migrate in early to surface issues that only show up under real conditions. Governance, monitoring, and cost controls go live before production workloads land.
Migrate in waves. Workloads move in planned tranches, with each wave validated before the next begins. Wave size is calibrated to risk: low-risk workloads in larger groups, business-critical systems in their own waves with extended validation windows. Cutover plans, rollback plans, and communication plans are written before any wave begins.
Stabilise and hand over. Two to six weeks after the final wave, depending on the size of the environment. Performance baselines are established, cost patterns are observed and corrected, documentation is finalised, runbooks are written. The environment is then either handed over to your internal team or transitioned to our managed service — that handover is a deliberate decision, not a default.
The total elapsed time for a typical mid-sized migration is four to nine months. Larger or more regulated environments run longer. We can give you a credible range after discovery, not before.
Our Anantara Accounting case study is a worked example of this methodology delivering an environment that runs smoothly and securely from the first day in production
What Done Looks Like
At the end of a LA NET migration engagement, you receive a cloud environment that is architecturally sound, operationally documented, financially understood, and ready to run for the long term. Specifically:
A landing zone built to a defined architecture, with policies enforced and audit logging in place. A migrated workload set that has been performance-tested under realistic load. Cost dashboards showing actual spend against budget, with alerting on the breaches that matter. An identity model with role-based access, privileged access management, and conditional access in place. A governance baseline that prevents the most common patterns of configuration drift. Runbooks and documentation that allow either your team or ours to operate the environment without rediscovery.
You also receive a written exit plan. We think that’s worth saying out loud: every engagement we deliver includes a documented path for transitioning the environment to a different provider if you ever choose to. It’s a regulatory requirement in financial services and an increasingly common procurement requirement elsewhere, and we’d rather build it in from the start than treat it as an afterthought.
What Done Looks Like
The market for cloud computing services is broad and the credentials get repetitive. ISO 27001, ISO 9001, Cyber Essentials Plus, Microsoft Solutions Partner status, we hold all four, and you should expect any serious provider to. The differentiator beyond credentials is depth and delivery model.
We’re a smaller, deliberately specialist team. Every technical staff member holds at least Microsoft Azure Administrator Associate certification, with most holding considerably more, and we don’t put junior engineers on architectural decisions. Our team speaks regularly at Microsoft Ignite, partner events, and industry conferences, not as a credential to namecheck but as a reasonable proxy for whether the people doing the work are genuinely current with a platform that changes constantly.
We’ve delivered migration and IaaS engagements across more than a hundred Azure environments, including some of the more complex regulated environments in the UK. We’re a HM Government G-Cloud Supplier, which simplifies public sector procurement materially.
The size question is worth being explicit about. Large managed service providers spread their senior people thinly across hundreds of clients. The people who showed up to the pitch are rarely the people who do the work. A specialist of our size doesn’t have that problem, because there isn’t a layer of bench engineers to hide behind. The engineer scoping your migration is going to be one of the engineers doing it.
Examples of the work that depth produces include our Logistyx case study, where our brief was a highly resilient and secure platform for a global logistics business, and our Schoolgrid SaaS case study, where the priority was meeting the security expectations of customers in regulated education environments.
What Our Clients Are Saying
See measurable improvements in security, performance, and cost efficiency within 90 days. Plus, enjoy a free 60-minute consulting session—no risk, just results.
Daniel Cook
"The team at LA NET displayed a deep understanding of our specific needs and requirements. Their attention to detail extended far beyond the original scope and showed us how to start our cloud journey correctly. We now have peace of mind knowing that we have a secure cloud platform and a knowledgeable team we can trust and rely on."
Jack Hanison
LA NET provides best-practice guidance and a first-class support service. The team are responsive and friendly and always happy to help. We have achieved significant efficiency gains through adopting LA NET’s cloud automation tools.”
Julie Pascal
"LA NET implemented a secure and solid Microsoft 365 and Azure cloud platform for our business that our consultants use globally. From the migration process to automation of common tasks and support, LA NET has been reliable, responsive and a pleasure to work with.”
Mark Nicholls
"LA NET worked with us to ensure our cloud infrastructure was optimal in terms of security, cost, performance, resilience and high availability. We see LA NET as our extended team and a trusted advisor. The team are highly responsive and capable!”
Frequently Asked Questions
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