Zero-Downtime Azure Migration for a City of London Financial Services Firm
Zero downtime during business hours throughout the entire 8-week migration. We delivered this outcome for City of London Financial Services Firm (120 users) by combining Azure, Azure Site Recovery, Azure Backup into a single strategic engagement.
What City of London Financial Services Firm was facing
A City of London financial services firm was running 8 on-premises servers approaching end of life, with hardware maintenance costs exceeding £48,000 per year and a data centre lease renewal looming. They needed to migrate their entire infrastructure — including a critical trading platform, CRM, and compliance archive — to Azure with zero downtime, no data loss, and full FCA compliance throughout the transition. Their previous provider had quoted a 12-week migration with two weekend outages, which the firm's board rejected as unacceptable.
How we solved it
We designed a six-phase zero-downtime migration strategy using Azure Site Recovery for continuous replication, meaning the firm's systems remained fully operational throughout the entire 8-week project. We began with a full infrastructure assessment and dependency mapping, then established Azure Site Recovery replication for all workloads. We migrated in phased waves — non-critical systems first, then the CRM, then the compliance archive, and finally the trading platform during a 90-minute maintenance window on a Saturday night. We implemented Azure Backup with 99-year retention for compliance archives, configured Azure Firewall and Network Security Groups to FCA standards, and ran parallel operations for two weeks before final cutover. Post-migration, we implemented cost optimisation with reserved instances and auto-scaling, reducing ongoing Azure spend by 35%.
What we delivered
Tools and skills applied
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Common questions about the project, timeline, and results.
Related services & insights
The financial services expertise and technical capabilities behind this engagement.
Services
IT & Cloud Infrastructure Migrations
End-to-end IT and cloud infrastructure migration services — from assessment and planning to zero-downtime execution and post-migration optimisation.
Cloud Services & Support
Cloud services and support — architecture design, migration, and ongoing management of Azure, AWS, and hybrid cloud infrastructure.
Server Backup & Disaster Recovery
Comprehensive server backup and disaster recovery solutions to protect your data and minimise downtime.
Tech Insights
Azure Site Recovery: Zero-Downtime Disaster Recovery for UK Businesses
How Azure Site Recovery delivers automated, tested disaster recovery with recovery times under 2 hours — and why every UK business with on-premises servers should implement it before disaster strikes.
Microsoft 365 Migration: A Step-by-Step Guide for SMEs
Migrating to Microsoft 365 without downtime or data loss. The exact phased approach our engineers follow, from audit to go-live.
IT Budget Planning: A Complete Guide for UK SMEs in 2026
How to plan, forecast, and optimise your IT budget for 2026 — with real cost benchmarks for managed support, cloud infrastructure, cybersecurity, and Microsoft 365 licensing for UK small businesses.
Sources & further reading
Independent guidance from UK regulators, standards bodies and technology vendors that underpins the advice on this page.
- Microsoft LearnAzure documentationReference documentation for the Microsoft cloud platform.(opens in a new tab)
- Microsoft LearnAzure Well-Architected FrameworkMicrosoft's guidance for building reliable, secure and cost-efficient cloud workloads.(opens in a new tab)
- National Cyber Security CentreCloud security guidancePrinciples for selecting, configuring and operating cloud services securely.(opens in a new tab)
- National Cyber Security Centre10 Steps to Cyber SecurityThe UK's baseline framework for protecting business systems, people and data.(opens in a new tab)
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