Cloud Migration Services | AWS, Azure, GCP
On-premises infrastructure has a fixed cost regardless of whether you use it: hardware refresh every 3-5 years, facilities costs, backup infrastructure, and the IT overhead of keeping it running. When a server fails at 2am, someone gets called. When you need to scale for a peak period, you are limited by what is in the rack.
We migrate businesses to cloud infrastructure on AWS, Azure, or GCP. From assessment and planning through application migration, data migration, and post-migration optimization. The transition from infrastructure you manage to infrastructure that manages itself.
Cloud readiness assessment that identifies what migrates as-is and what needs re-architecting first
Application and database migration executed in phases to minimize disruption to your operations
Infrastructure-as-code delivery so your cloud environment is reproducible, version-controlled, and auditable
Post-migration cost optimization that prevents cloud spend from replacing your on-prem bill with a larger one
Recent outcomes
Voice AI · Research
6× deeper insights
Text-based interviews converted to automated phone calls
AI Automation · Ops
20k+ txns day one
Manual invoice OCR across 40+ gas stations
Loyalty · Retail
1,062 users in 4 weeks
SuperValu & Centra loyalty platform with receipt validation
SaaS · Logistics
2,000+ shipments yr 1
Multi-carrier shipping hub for Indonesian eCommerce
The problem
Is your hardware refresh cycle coming up and the capital expenditure not justified for infrastructure that is already holding you back?
When you need to scale your application for demand spikes, how long does it take and what does it cost?
Short answer
RaftLabs migrates businesses to AWS, Azure, and GCP across the US, UK, Europe, Canada, GCC, South Africa, and Southeast Asia. Projects include lift-and-shift, database migration, and infrastructure-as-code delivery, scoped with a cost plan from day one so cloud spend doesn't quietly balloon (Flexera's 2026 State of the Cloud report found 29% of enterprise cloud spend goes to waste). Fixed price after a paid assessment, phased delivery.
Key takeaways
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When a server fails at 2am, someone on your team gets the call. When a peak period hits, you scale only as far as what is already in the rack. And every three to five years, the hardware refresh arrives whether the budget is there or not.
None of that moves the business forward. It is the cost of running infrastructure that runs itself everywhere except your building.
Cloud migration hands that whole burden to infrastructure that scales, backs itself up, and never calls you at 2am.
On-premises infrastructure has a fixed cost profile: capital expenditure on hardware, facilities (power, cooling, physical security), IT time for maintenance and upgrades, and the operational burden of running your own infrastructure. This cost is constant whether you are at 20% utilization or 100%.
Cloud infrastructure has a variable cost profile: you pay for what you use. Scaling up for demand peaks does not require a hardware purchase. Scaling down after a migration does not leave you with idle capacity. Backup, disaster recovery, and geographic redundancy are built-in services rather than separate infrastructure projects.
The migration is a project. The operational savings are permanent.
According to Gartner, worldwide end-user spending on public cloud services reached $595.7 billion in 2024 and is forecast to grow 21.5% to $723.4 billion in 2025. For businesses still running on-premises infrastructure, that market trajectory reflects something more immediate: the cost gap between self-managed hardware and cloud continues to widen every year.
RaftLabs has shipped 100+ software products since 2015 for businesses across the US, UK, Europe, Canada, the GCC, South Africa, and Southeast Asia, with work for Vodafone, T-Mobile, Aldi, Nike, Cisco, and Lockheed Martin, and a 4.9/5 rating from clients on Clutch. One team scopes the migration and executes it, with GDPR, HIPAA, and SOC 2 requirements designed in from week 1, not retrofitted before launch. The platform recommendation, AWS, Azure, or GCP, is based on your existing stack, team expertise, and licensing agreements, not on which one we're most comfortable selling.
Every workload in your environment maps to one of six migration strategies, a framework AWS itself uses to categorize the decision: rehost (lift-and-shift, move as-is), replatform (small optimizations without redesigning the app), refactor/re-architect (redesign to use managed cloud services), repurchase (move to a SaaS alternative instead of migrating the app), retire (decommission what nobody uses), or retain (leave it on-prem for now, deliberately). Most migrations mix all six across a workload inventory, not one strategy applied uniformly. We map every workload against these six before recommending anything, which is why the assessment comes before the price.
Flexera's 2026 State of the Cloud Report found wasted IaaS/PaaS spend rose to 29% in 2026, the first increase in five years, driven largely by AI-workload cost complexity. That's the data-backed version of the fear every infrastructure owner already has: the bill doesn't get more predictable just because the hardware moved, it gets more predictable when the migration is done with a cost plan and cleanup discipline from day one.
The second risk is what happens to your backups. In May 2024, Google Cloud accidentally deleted the entire private-cloud subscription of UniSuper, an Australian pension fund managing AU$135 billion for roughly 647,000 members, due to what Google called a "one-of-a-kind" misconfiguration during environment provisioning. The deletion took out UniSuper's backups along with production. Member accounts were inaccessible for roughly two weeks. UniSuper recovered only because it also held backups with an independent, non-Google provider outside the deleted environment, a second-provider backup strategy is what saved them, not anything inside the primary cloud account.
The same lesson shows up from the opposite direction: in March 2021, a fire destroyed OVHcloud's SBG2 data center in Strasbourg, France, a five-story facility capable of housing up to 30,000 servers, and severely damaged the adjacent SBG1 building. Customers whose backups sat in the same physical facility as production, a common cost-saving default, lost that data permanently. A backup strategy that lives in the same account, region, or building as production isn't a backup strategy. It's a delay on the same failure.
Everything on the left should already be true for your operation. Even one thing on the right, and a migration is not the smarter first move yet.
On-premises infrastructure with a hardware refresh cycle coming up that the capital expenditure no longer justifies.
Applications that need to scale for demand spikes faster and cheaper than a server purchase allows.
Compliance requirements such as HIPAA, GDPR, or SOC 2 that your current environment makes harder to evidence.
What we build
Bring us your current infrastructure details and operational constraints. We will assess the migration scope and give you an honest cost and timeline estimate.
How it works
Every migration follows the same four phases. Scope is locked and price is fixed before any migration work starts.
We map every workload, database, and dependency in your current environment. You leave week 1 with a written migration roadmap, a risk register, and a fixed-price quote. No migration starts without your sign-off.
We build the target cloud environment before touching a single production workload. Account structure, network topology, security controls, and IAM policies are set up and reviewed before migration begins.
Workloads migrate in dependency order. Each application and database goes through staging validation before production cutover. Automated checks compare source and destination at the record level. We do not declare success until validation passes.
Production cutover in a planned low-traffic window. Monitoring active from day one. 8 weeks of post-migration support and cost optimization included in every project.
We'll say this plainly: RaftLabs doesn't yet have a published case study for a full on-prem-to-cloud infrastructure migration. What we do have is the same operational discipline a migration needs, proven on projects that moved production systems without breaking them. UrShipper's platform migration ran account-by-account, on a fixed cutover schedule, with zero shipments interrupted during the move, the same staged-validation, rollback-ready approach we use for a database cutover. That discipline, not a specific case study, is what a migration actually depends on: a written runbook, automated validation at every step, and a rollback plan that's tested before it's needed, not improvised during a live cutover.
What clients say
Three-year average engagement. Founders and operators describing the work in their own words. No marketing varnish.
USAAll of the sprints were completed on schedule and on budget. We highly recommend RaftLabs!
01 / 02
Rarely the headline pitch. Always the difference between a clean cutover and a 2am rollback.
UniSuper survived a full account deletion because their backup lived with an independent provider, outside the environment that got wiped. We design the backup and DR plan to survive the loss of the primary environment, not just a single server.
Databases replicate continuously until the cutover moment, when replication lag is typically seconds. The switch happens in a planned low-traffic window, not a full-system blackout announced to your users in advance.
Every resource is defined in version-controlled code before it exists in production. You leave the engagement with infrastructure your own team can read, diff, and reproduce, not a console full of resources nobody remembers the reason for.
Account structure, network topology, and IAM policies are set up and reviewed first. Workloads migrate into guardrails that already exist, not into an environment being configured around them mid-migration.
Where you land in that range depends on scope, not negotiation:
What it costs
Assessment, landing zone, phased migration, and 8 weeks of post-migration optimization, scoped and priced before the work begins.
A paid assessment sets the scope and price for phase one. Phased delivery, and cloud cost typically drops 20-40% within 12 months.
Every engagement starts with a paid assessment that produces a firm quote for phase one. Migrate your highest-priority workloads first, then expand scope once the pattern is proven.
No hourly billing
Once the assessment sets your price, it's locked in writing. No hourly billing, and a scope change is a priced request you approve before work begins.
Team continuity
The team that scopes your migration is the team that executes it. No offshore handoff after the contract is signed, so the people who assessed your infrastructure in week 1 are the ones who cut it over.
Azure Consulting
Azure architecture design, cost optimization, and managed Azure migration.
DevOps as a Service
CI/CD, containerization, and infrastructure automation post-migration.
Data Engineering
data pipelines that live in the cloud environment you migrate to.
Legacy Modernisation
re-architecting legacy applications alongside or after migration.
Software Modernisation
modernizing the applications you migrate to the cloud.
Enterprise Software Development
building new applications for your cloud environment.
Tell us what's broken. Within one business day you get a straight take on cost, timeline, and the right first step. No deck, no pressure.
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Read moreLift-and-shift (also called rehosting) moves your existing application to cloud infrastructure without changing the application itself. Your application runs on cloud VMs instead of physical servers. It gets the operational benefits of cloud, no hardware to manage, easier backup, faster provisioning, without the full cost and disruption of rebuilding the application. Lift-and-shift is faster, lower risk, and lower cost than a full re-architecture. It is the right approach for applications that are stable, not cloud-optimized, and where the operational benefits of cloud are the primary goal. Cloud-native migration (re-platforming or re-architecting) redesigns the application to use managed cloud services: containerization with Kubernetes, serverless functions for appropriate workloads, managed databases instead of self-managed database servers, and auto-scaling infrastructure. It costs more and takes longer than lift-and-shift but delivers better ongoing scalability, resilience, and operational efficiency. For most migrations, we recommend a phased approach: lift-and-shift first to get off on-prem, then re-platform specific components where the cost-benefit of redesigning is clear.
Data migration is the highest-risk part of any cloud migration. Our approach has four phases. Assessment: we document every database, its size, schema, relationships, and data quality issues before touching anything. Planning: we design the migration strategy for each database, which managed service it moves to, the migration method (dump and restore, CDC replication, or native migration tooling), and the cutover plan. Validation: we run the migration in a staging environment and run automated validation checks that compare row counts, checksums, and data samples between source and destination. Cutover: the production cutover uses a defined runbook with rollback steps if any validation check fails at any point. Data migration validation is not a manual spot-check. It is automated comparison of source and destination at the record level. We do not declare migration complete until validation passes.
AWS is the most mature platform with the broadest service selection and the largest ecosystem of third-party tools and integration partners. It is the default choice for organizations without a strong existing relationship with Microsoft or Google. Azure is the natural fit for organizations deep in the Microsoft ecosystem: Windows Server, Active Directory, MSSQL, Office 365. The integration between Azure and Microsoft's enterprise tools is tighter than what AWS or GCP offers, and licensing benefits for existing Microsoft customers are meaningful. GCP has the strongest managed data and analytics services (BigQuery, Dataflow, Vertex AI) and is worth considering for organizations where data processing and AI are central workloads. We assess your existing infrastructure, team expertise, existing licensing agreements, and primary use cases before recommending a platform. The recommendation is based on what fits your situation, not our familiarity.
For most migrations, taking systems offline for the full migration duration is not acceptable. We use phased migration and cutover strategies that minimize downtime. For applications, we run source and destination in parallel during a validation period and switch traffic when confidence is high, then decommission the source. For databases, we use replication: the destination database receives an ongoing stream of changes from the source until the cutover moment, at which point the replication lag is typically seconds. The cutover window, when write traffic switches from source to destination, is planned for the lowest-traffic period and is measured in minutes, not hours. The specific cutover strategy depends on your application architecture, acceptable downtime window, and business criticality. We design and document the cutover plan before migration starts and dry-run it in a staging environment.
Cloud migration cost depends on the number of applications and databases, the complexity of dependencies, and the target cloud environment. A focused migration of 2-3 applications with a single database typically runs $25,000-$60,000. A full infrastructure migration with 10+ workloads, schema conversions, and compliance requirements is typically $80,000-$200,000+. Every engagement starts with a paid assessment that produces a fixed-price quote before any migration work begins. You will know the full cost and timeline before you commit to the project.
A focused lift-and-shift of 1-3 applications takes 6-10 weeks from assessment sign-off to production cutover. A migration involving multiple applications, database schema conversions, or a new landing zone build typically takes 12-20 weeks. The timeline depends on application complexity, the number of dependencies, and your team's availability for validation and testing. We set the timeline at the end of the assessment phase, not at the start of the sales process.
Work with us
We scope Cloud Migration Services in 30 minutes. You walk away with a clear cost, timeline, and approach. No commitment required.
FinTech
Compliance-first financial software for lending, payments, and wealth management.
Healthcare
HIPAA-compliant platforms for clinical workflows and patient engagement.
Retail and e-commerce
Custom storefronts, inventory management, and loyalty programs.
Logistics and supply chain
Dispatch automation, fleet management, and supply chain visibility.
SaaS products
Multi-tenant SaaS platforms built to scale without a rewrite.
Hospitality
Booking engines, PMS integrations, and guest-facing platforms.