cloud migration services Pacific Northwest
Moving to the cloud sounds simple until you're in the middle of it. Migrated email but lost six months of shared calendar data. Moved file shares but nobody can find anything because the folder structure didn't translate. Lifted a legacy server to Azure and now paying three times more than on-prem because nobody right-sized the VM.
The Craftwork Group has been doing infrastructure work since 1999, and we've seen what goes wrong when a migration runs without a plan. We help Kent, King County, and broader PNW businesses migrate thoughtfully, with minimal disruption and a clear outcome in mind.
Cloud migration isn't one thing. It's a category that covers several distinct projects:
Email and productivity to Microsoft 365: Moving from on-prem Exchange, Google Workspace, or legacy email providers. This includes mailbox migration, calendar sync, contact migration, and Teams setup.
File shares and document management: Moving from on-prem file servers or legacy NAS to SharePoint and OneDrive, with proper permission mapping and folder structure planning.
Line-of-business applications: Assessing which on-prem apps can move to SaaS alternatives, which need to run in Azure, and which should stay local. Not everything belongs in the cloud.
Server consolidation and decommission: Identifying aging on-prem servers, virtualizing or migrating workloads, and safely retiring hardware that's past end-of-life.
Here's the part most migration pitches skip: the cloud can cost you more than your server room if you move the wrong workloads the wrong way. A lift-and-shift of an oversized VM into Azure means you're now renting capacity you never used on-prem. Licensing that was a sunk cost becomes a monthly line item. Egress charges show up on workloads nobody modeled.
We run the numbers before we move anything. Total cost of ownership over three to five years, on-prem versus cloud versus hybrid, including the costs vendors don't volunteer: bandwidth, backup storage tiers, license true-ups. Sometimes the answer is "keep that server." A migration partner who never says that is selling you cloud, not advising you.
We plan migrations in phases, with rollback capability at each stage. We do dry runs. We communicate to your staff exactly what's changing and when. We schedule cutovers during low-traffic windows.
The goal isn't to be done fast. The goal is to be done right, with your business running normally on the other side. A migration that finishes a week early but leaves your team unable to find their files for a month didn't save anyone anything.
Cloud migrations are a moment where security gaps often get introduced. New environments, new permissions models, new integration points: all of it expands your attack surface if not managed carefully. We build security controls into the migration plan, not as an afterthought.
For regulated businesses (healthcare, legal, finance, defense contractors) we map compliance requirements before the migration starts so nothing gets accidentally misconfigured.
We're based in Kent, WA and serve businesses throughout King County, Pierce County, Thurston County, and beyond. If you have a cloud migration on your roadmap, or you're staring at an aging server room and not sure where to start, let's talk. Learn more about our cloud services.
Email hello@craftworkgrp.com or call 425-648-5250 for a free migration assessment.