Service

Cloud Architecture & Migration

Moving to the cloud should reduce complexity and cost – not just move the same mess to a new location. We design environments that match your workload, your budget, and your team's ability to run them.

AWSAzureGCPCloud MigrationRender InfrastructureM&E / VFX

Cloud bills that grow, performance that doesn't

Cloud migrations that aren't properly designed tend to produce the same result: higher costs, the same reliability problems as on-premise, and a team that doesn't understand what they're running. A lift-and-shift is not a cloud strategy.

In M&E and VFX, cloud infrastructure requirements are demanding and variable – burst render capacity, large-scale media storage, high-throughput transcoding, global content delivery. Getting the architecture wrong costs real money. Getting it right unlocks workflows that weren't possible on-premise.

The goal is a cloud environment that's right-sized, secure, observable, and that your team can actually manage day-to-day.

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Runaway cloud costs

Over-provisioned instances, forgotten resources, and no tagging strategy – cloud spend grows without clear visibility into where it's going.

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Fragile migrations

Systems moved without re-architecture – the same single points of failure, the same backup gaps, just hosted somewhere else.

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Security as an afterthought

Permissions too broad, public S3 buckets, no network segmentation. Security misconfiguration is the leading cause of cloud breaches.

Cloud design that starts with your workload

We design and review cloud environments across AWS, Azure, and GCP. The starting point is always your workload and your team – not a vendor framework or a reference architecture that doesn't fit your situation.

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Cloud strategy & migration planning

What moves first, what gets re-architected, what stays on-premise. A migration plan with realistic sequencing, risk assessment, and cutover strategy.

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Architecture design

Well-architected cloud environments – multi-region resilience, network design, identity, secrets management, and observability baked in from the start.

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Render & compute infrastructure

Burst render capacity design for VFX and post-production – spot instances, autoscaling, deadline integration, and cost controls that prevent bill shock.

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Cost optimisation

Right-sizing, reserved instance planning, spot strategy, and tagging governance. Getting cloud spend to a level that makes sense for the business value delivered.

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Security architecture

Least-privilege IAM, network segmentation, encryption in transit and at rest, audit logging, and CSPM tooling to catch drift before it becomes a breach.

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Infrastructure as Code

Terraform or CDK-based infrastructure – so environments are repeatable, version-controlled, and not dependent on one person's institutional knowledge.

From current state to working cloud environment

01

Workload analysis

We map what you're running – on-premise, existing cloud, or both – with a focus on dependencies, performance requirements, storage patterns, and cost. In M&E contexts, this includes pipeline tools, render software, and asset management systems.

02

Architecture design

We produce a target architecture with networking, compute, storage, identity, and security components designed together. We review against the AWS/Azure/GCP Well-Architected Frameworks and adapt where they don't fit your situation.

03

Migration planning

A phased migration plan – what moves in which order, how you handle cutover, how you test, and how you roll back if something goes wrong. No big-bang migrations.

04

Build & validate

We can build the environment directly or work alongside your team. Automated testing of infrastructure, security controls, and performance baselines before anything production-critical moves.

05

Knowledge transfer

Your team needs to run this. We document everything – architecture decisions, runbooks, cost governance, and incident response. And we make sure the people running it understand what they've got.

Common questions

Which cloud provider do you recommend?
It depends on your workload, existing tooling, and team skills. AWS is the most mature for M&E workloads (Deadline, Thinkbox, Nimble Studio). Azure is strong if you're already in the Microsoft ecosystem. We don't have a preference – we'll tell you what makes sense for your situation.
We're already in the cloud but costs are out of control. Can you help?
Yes – this is one of the most common engagements we run. Cloud cost optimisation typically finds 20–40% in savings in unoptimised environments. We start with a spend analysis, identify the biggest opportunities, and give you a prioritised remediation plan.
Do you handle the migration itself, or just the design?
Both. We can design and let your team execute, design and execute jointly, or run the full migration ourselves. We're flexible – the right approach depends on your team's capacity and the complexity of what's moving.
How do you handle render farm migration for VFX?
We've worked through on-premise to cloud render migrations – licensing (Deadline, Arnold, Nuke), licence server placement, spot instance strategy, autoscaling triggers, and cost caps. It's a specialist area and the economics need to be worked through carefully before committing.

Often paired with

Get your cloud architecture right

Tell us what you're running and what's not working. We'll be straight about what needs to change and what it'll take.