Bills that grow faster than the business
Unmanaged estates accumulate idle workloads, oversized instances and forgotten environments. The cloud bill becomes a line item nobody can explain and everybody pays.
Cloud Services
Cloud that respects where your data has to live.
Migration, sovereign cloud and cost optimisation across AWS, Azure and Google Cloud. Data residency, in whatever jurisdiction your regulators draw it, is a design input from the first architecture diagram, never a retrofit.
The problem
What standing still costs
Residency answers that stall deals
When procurement asks where the data lives and the answer takes a week, tenders slip. Regulated buyers treat an unclear answer as a no.
Foundations not ready for AI
Every AI initiative that starts with six months of data plumbing is an initiative that starts late. The state of your pipelines sets the pace of everything built on them.
What the practice covers
Migration and re-platforming
Workloads moved from data centres to cloud without stopping the business, sequenced around your operational calendar.
Sovereign and hybrid cloud
Architectures that keep regulated data inside the borders your regulators require, on sovereign cloud or on-premise, while the rest of your estate benefits from public cloud.
Cloud cost optimisation
FinOps reviews that pay for themselves: rightsizing, reservations and architectural fixes with the savings evidenced in your bill.
Data platforms
The data foundations AI systems depend on: pipelines, warehouses and governance built for both analytics and production AI.
Proof, not promises
A data centre revamp and Commvault backup estate for Al Ghurair Investments, and full IT buildouts including cloud foundations for new Middle East offices.
How we work
What this looks like in practice
Deciding where each workload lives
Residency is a workload-by-workload decision, not a single platform choice. Customer records under PDPL, card data under scheme rules and board papers under internal policy each carry a different constraint, and treating them as one policy either over-constrains the whole estate or leaves a gap somebody finds later. We start by classifying your data against the obligations you actually carry, then place each class deliberately: regulated data on sovereign or on-premise infrastructure inside the required border, everything else on public cloud where the economics are better. The output is a placement map your architects can apply and your compliance team can defend. That is what turns “where does the data live” from a week of internal emails into a one-line answer in a tender response.
Migrating without stopping the business
The technical part of a migration is rarely what goes wrong. Sequencing is. We map dependencies first, then schedule around your operational calendar rather than ours: month-end and quarter-end closes, audit windows, peak trading periods, and the systems that cannot take a big-bang cutover at all. Those move incrementally, with both estates running in parallel for a defined window and reconciliation between them, so rollback is a decision rather than an emergency. The Al Ghurair Investments data centre revamp and Commvault backup deployment ran with no operational interruption. That was a sequencing outcome, not a lucky one.
Why the bill grows, and what actually brings it down
Cloud bills rarely grow because of one bad decision. They grow because nothing is ever switched off. The findings repeat across almost every estate we review: non-production environments running at production size, instances sized for a launch-day peak that never came back, storage sitting in hot tiers years after anyone last read it, commitment coverage well below steady-state usage, and egress charges from architectures that cross regions without needing to. We report each saving against your actual bill, in your currency, with the change that produced it. A FinOps claim that cannot be traced to a line item is marketing.
The foundation production AI actually needs
Most AI programmes that stall do not stall on the model. They stall on six months of data work nobody scoped. What production AI needs from a cloud estate is specific and testable: identity-aware access, so an agent inherits the permissions of the person it acts for rather than running on a service account with keys to everything; lineage, so you can answer where an answer came from when somebody asks; retention and deletion rules that survive an audit; unstructured content indexed alongside the structured records, because most of the answers live in documents; and latency budgets that hold when a person is waiting rather than only in a batch job. Building this once is what makes the second and third AI system take weeks instead of quarters.
Client results
Where this practice has delivered
Data centre modernisation and enterprise backup
A data centre modernisation and Commvault backup estate for one of the UAE's largest diversified groups, delivered without operational interruption.
ZeroOperational interruption
18+Specialists on the engagement
Full IT buildout for a new Middle East office
The complete technology estate for Burns & Wilcox's new Dubai insurance office: infrastructure, security and operations from a standing start, delivered ahead of schedule.
EarlyDelivered ahead of schedule
ZeroBusiness disruption
Before you book
Common questions
Sovereign cloud or public cloud?
Usually both. Regulated data stays inside the borders your regulators draw, on sovereign or on-premise infrastructure, while the rest of the estate takes the economics of public cloud.
Can you migrate without stopping the business?
Migrations are sequenced around your operational calendar. The Al Ghurair data centre revamp and backup deployment was delivered with zero operational interruption.
Which platforms do you work across?
AWS, Azure and Google Cloud, with residency and workload placement decided by your regulatory position rather than by vendor preference.
How do you evidence cost savings?
In your bill. FinOps reviews end with rightsizing, reservations and architectural fixes whose savings are measured against the invoices you were already paying.
Do we have to start with the two-week diagnostic?
No. The diagnostic is where transformation programmes begin. A migration, a FinOps review or a residency architecture starts with a scoping conversation about your estate and your dates.
How do you choose between AWS, Azure and Google Cloud?
By workload, not preference. The deciding factors are usually which provider has the in-region footprint your residency position requires, what you are already licensed for, what your team can operate without new hires, and where the specific managed services your workloads depend on are strongest. Most estates we design end up using more than one, deliberately.
What does sovereign cloud actually mean here?
The term is used loosely by vendors, so we define it against your obligation rather than the brochure. Depending on your sector and regulator it can mean data stored in-country, processed in-country, operated by locally vetted personnel, or all three, with controls over who can access it and from where. We establish which of those you are actually required to meet before choosing infrastructure, because each additional constraint narrows the options and raises the cost.
We are mid-contract with our current provider. Is it worth reviewing now?
Usually yes, because most of the savings come from architecture and commitment shape rather than from switching provider. A review that finds oversized environments and poor commitment coverage pays back inside the contract you already have. The residency placement map is portable regardless of what you decide at renewal.
Who owns the estate after you leave?
You do, and that is the point. Infrastructure as code lives in your repositories, not ours. Runbooks, architecture decision records and the placement map are handed over and walked through with your team. If you want us to keep running it, that is a managed service you choose, never a dependency you inherit by accident.
How quickly does a cost review pay for itself?
The first findings usually land inside one billing cycle, because the obvious items are idle environments and oversized instances. We do not promise a percentage upfront. Anyone who does is quoting an average rather than reading your bill.
One accountable team
Works alongside
Managed Services
Your IT estate run around the clock from Dubai
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Bring us the workload
Not every engagement needs the two-week diagnostic. A migration, a build or a support contract starts with a scoping conversation about your estate and your dates. Tell us what you are running and we reply within one business day.