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Wisely

IT Services

Cloud

Cloud strategy, architecture, migration and ongoing management across AWS and Microsoft Azure, right-sized for your business, not over-engineered.

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Cloud done well gives your business flexibility, resilience and cost efficiency. Cloud done badly costs a fortune and creates new problems. We design cloud environments that are properly architected from the start, and manage them so they stay that way.

Cloud strategy & migration

We help businesses move to cloud, whether that's a lift-and-shift of existing infrastructure or a full cloud-native redesign.

  • Cloud readiness assessment and migration planning
  • AWS and Azure architecture design
  • Server and workload migration with minimal downtime
  • Cost optimisation and right-sizing analysis
  • Hybrid cloud design for businesses that need both on-prem and cloud

Managed cloud services

After migration, we manage your cloud environment so you get the benefits without the operational overhead.

  • Infrastructure monitoring and alerting
  • Cost management and monthly billing reviews
  • Security baseline management and compliance
  • Backup and disaster recovery in cloud
  • Scaling and capacity planning

Data residency

Your data can now stay in New Zealand

Both hyperscalers opened Auckland regions inside the last two years, and it changed what is possible here. Until then the nearest AWS or Azure region was Sydney, so an organisation that had to keep data in the country had to keep it on its own hardware. It matters because the Privacy Act 2020 holds you accountable for personal information wherever it ends up, and because some customers, insurers and agencies simply require onshore. A good deal of cloud advice still in circulation predates both regions.

AWS Asia Pacific (New Zealand)

Auckland · ap-southeast-6

Three availability zones in Auckland, opened on 2 September 2025. Before that date the nearest AWS region was Sydney, so any requirement to keep data in the country ruled AWS out entirely.

Azure New Zealand North

Auckland · since Dec 2024

Three availability zones in Auckland, live since December 2024. For an organisation already standardised on Microsoft 365 and Entra ID, it removed the last structural reason to keep a server room.

Australia

Sydney · Melbourne

AWS ap-southeast-2 and Azure Australia East in Sydney, with ap-southeast-4 and Australia Southeast in Melbourne, so an Australian business can hold its disaster recovery in-country. Also the natural pair for a New Zealand primary. Two countries, one architecture.

How it gets reviewed

Well-Architected, by the framework's own definition

AWS and Microsoft each publish a Well-Architected Framework, and they agree almost exactly. Five pillars are common to both, which makes them the closest thing cloud has to an industry definition of built properly, rather than a vendor opinion. A review against them is the difference between an environment that was designed and one that accumulated.

Reliability

Whether the thing stays up when a component does not. Availability zones, health checks, automated recovery, and a restore somebody has actually performed rather than assumed. For latency-sensitive workloads it also means a private circuit into the region rather than the public internet.

Connectivity

Security

Least privilege, encryption, network segmentation and an audit trail. Most of this sits on your side of the line rather than the provider's, which is the part buyers are most often surprised by.

Cybersecurity

Cost optimisation

Right-sizing, committed-use discounts, storage tiering and turning off what nobody uses. Cloud bills rarely grow because of one large mistake; they grow because nothing is ever switched off.

Operational excellence

Infrastructure defined in code, changes that can be reviewed and reversed, and monitoring that tells you something is wrong before a customer does. Someone has to watch it afterwards, which is the part most migrations forget to budget for.

Managed IT

Performance efficiency

Matching the service to the job rather than running everything on virtual machines because that is what the old servers looked like. Often the largest single saving in a cloud migration, and the point at which rebuilding an application starts to pay for itself.

Software Development

Sustainability

AWS added this as a sixth pillar in 2021. Microsoft restructured to five in 2023 and folded the same considerations into the others, so the two frameworks differ on presentation rather than on substance.

Who secures what

Where the provider's responsibility ends

Both providers publish a shared responsibility model, and it is the single most consequential thing a cloud buyer can misunderstand. The line moves depending on which services you use, but it never moves far enough to make your configuration somebody else's problem. Knowing where it falls is the easy part. Staying on the right side of it every day is what a managed service is for.

Data centres and hardware

AWS and Microsoft

Physical security, power, cooling, the hypervisor, and the network between regions.

You

Nothing. This is the part you stop employing people to worry about.

Operating systems

AWS and Microsoft

Patched for you on managed services such as RDS, App Service and Lambda.

You

Patched by you on anything you chose to run yourself on a virtual machine.

Identity and access

AWS and Microsoft

The identity service itself, and keeping it available.

You

Who has access, how they prove it, and removing them the day they leave.

Configuration

AWS and Microsoft

Secure defaults on most services, and the tooling to check them.

You

Every setting you change. Publicised cloud breaches are usually a storage permission or a firewall rule, not a provider failure.

Your data

AWS and Microsoft

Encryption at rest and in transit, once you enable it.

You

Classifying it, deciding which country it sits in, and proving you can restore it.

FAQ

Questions we are asked most

Will cloud cost less than the servers we have now?
Not if you move them as they are. A like-for-like lift and shift usually costs more per month than the hardware it replaced, because you are now renting capacity you previously bought once and ran at ten per cent utilisation. The savings come from what happens next: right-sizing to actual load, moving databases and applications onto managed services, committing to one or three year terms on the steady-state workloads, which AWS sells as Savings Plans and Azure as Reservations, and retiring the machines nobody could previously justify switching off. The honest comparison is also not the invoice alone, but the invoice plus the hardware refresh you no longer fund, the floor space, and the weekend somebody spends on a failed power supply.
Lift and shift, or redesign?
Usually both, in that order, and a cloud migration is easier to justify when it is split that way. Lift and shift gets you out of the data centre quickly and stops the clock on ageing hardware, which is often the real deadline. Redesigning as you go sounds efficient and tends to turn a three month project into a year. The pattern that works is to move first, stabilise, then modernise the workloads where it pays: the database onto a managed service, the batch job onto something that only runs when it needs to, the file server into storage that tiers itself.
AWS or Azure, and how would we choose?
For most businesses the deciding factors are not technical. If your identity, email and desktop estate already run on Microsoft 365 and Entra ID, Azure removes a category of integration work and licensing complexity, and existing Windows Server and SQL Server licences may carry across. If your team is already fluent in one of them, that fluency is worth more than any feature comparison. Both are credible, both now run from Auckland, and the wrong answer is the one nobody in your organisation can operate.
Who is responsible if something in the cloud is breached?
You are, for almost everything that actually goes wrong. AWS and Microsoft secure the cloud itself and publish a shared responsibility model setting out where their obligation stops. Yours begins at identity, configuration, and your data. That division is not a technicality: it is the reason a provider's compliance certifications do not transfer to you, and why an audit will ask about your controls rather than theirs. See Cybersecurity
What if we want to move away later?
Plan for it at the start, because the cost of leaving is decided by decisions made on day one rather than on the day you leave. Data stored in open formats, infrastructure defined in code, and containers rather than provider-specific runtimes all keep the door open. The charge people forget is egress: moving data out is billed, and a large dataset can make the exit meaningfully expensive. None of that is a reason to avoid cloud, but it is a reason to know the number before you need it.

Move to cloud with confidence

Talk to our cloud team about your current infrastructure and goals.

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