Cloud & Azure

Most Australian businesses did not arrive in Azure through a single decision. A file server was retired, a line-of-business application was lifted into a virtual machine to get off ageing hardware, backup moved to the cloud after a near miss, and somewhere along the way the monthly invoice became a line item nobody could fully explain. The articles in this topic are written for that reality rather than for a greenfield build: what to do with the estate you already have, and how to make the next decision better than the last one.

The technical ground covered here is Azure infrastructure as we manage it day to day — virtual machines and the sizing decisions that drive most of the bill, Azure Virtual Desktop as a replacement for Citrix and on-premises terminal servers, virtual network gateways and site-to-site connectivity, storage accounts and their access tiers, and Azure Backup with the retention and recovery testing that makes it worth paying for. Where a topic touches recovery objectives, we cover RTO and RPO in the terms a board will ask about rather than as abstractions.

Cost is treated as an engineering problem, not a procurement one. Reserved instances, right-sizing, auto-shutdown on non-production, storage tiering and the cost of leaving orphaned disks and public IP addresses attached to nothing all get more attention here than vendor marketing usually gives them. Australian context matters too: data residency in the Australia East and Australia Southeast regions, latency for remote and regional sites, and the sovereignty questions that come up whenever a government or defence-adjacent client is in the supply chain.

If you are earlier in the journey, the migration articles set out how we sequence a move — discovery, dependency mapping, a pilot wave, then production cutover out of hours with a documented rollback. If you are already running in Azure and want the estate reviewed rather than rebuilt, the managed Azure material explains what ongoing management actually covers: patching, monitoring, backup verification, identity hygiene and a monthly cost review.