Active Directory to Entra ID. On-premises Exchange to Exchange Online. A SharePoint farm to SharePoint Online. File servers to OneDrive and SharePoint. Usually all four at once, because the reason for the project is rarely the technology — it is a lease ending, a server refresh nobody wants to fund, or an acquisition that made the estate somebody else’s problem.
The mechanics are well understood. What makes these projects go wrong is what the audit misses: the application that authenticates against a domain controller, the finance system that writes to a UNC path, the scanner that emails via the on-premises relay, the licence server nobody has logged into since 2019.
We have moved clients off on-premises Active Directory entirely, replaced servers whose only remaining job was serving LDAP to one application, and decommissioned farms after the content had been out of them for months. Hybrid stays running until you choose to switch it off, not until we do.
Read-only. Every server and every dependency, including the ones not in the documentation. This stage takes longer than clients expect and saves more than any other.
Entra ID design agreed, directory synchronisation established, sign-in tested with a pilot group before anyone else is affected.
Mailboxes move to Exchange Online in batches, hybrid mail flow maintained throughout.
File server and farm content moves into the agreed structure. Users keep working from the old location until each wave completes.
Each item on the dependency register is resolved, worked around or explicitly accepted. Nothing is switched off with an open item against it.
Servers retired one at a time against the checklist, after verification. Hybrid identity is usually the last thing to go, and only when you decide.
A list of servers and what you think they do is enough to start. The audit finds the rest — and the servers that should be retired rather than moved.
From £800 / €950 / $1,000 · 1–4 monthsYes, and sometimes you should. The point is that whatever stays does so because someone decided, not because it was forgotten. The dependency register makes that explicit.
They are found during the audit and each gets a resolution. Where the application only needs LDAP, Entra Domain Services can replace the server entirely — we have done that on a live project rather than in theory.
Four to six weeks for a small estate. Two to four months for a mid-sized one with Exchange, file servers and SharePoint. The audit and the dependency remediation vary far more than the data movement does.
From £800 / €950 / $1,000, quoted as a fixed price after the audit. Scoping costs nothing. The audit itself is where the price becomes accurate, which is why we do not quote before it.
Sign-in should behave the same way on day one, which is the design goal of the identity work. What users do notice is where files live, so that is where the communication effort goes.
We produce the checklist, verify against it, and confirm what is safe to retire. You press the button, because switching off a server should always be a client decision.
Scoping costs nothing
Answer the form or write to us. You get back a written scope, a sequence and a fixed price — usually within one business day, and nobody rings you unless you ask.