Cloud — Azure
Azure managed services for New York businesses
Azure rewards design and punishes drift. Stedholm builds the landing zone, keeps the bill explainable, and runs your workloads with the same change control we apply to any production system.
Most Azure environments grew. Few were designed.
The typical mid-market Azure estate started as one virtual machine somebody needed quickly. Three years later there are four subscriptions, resources in two regions nobody chose deliberately, permissions granted at whatever scope made the error go away, and a bill that grows a little every month for reasons nobody can name. None of it is broken, exactly. All of it is drift.
Our first move is a landing zone: management group and subscription structure, Azure Policy guardrails, role assignments at deliberate scopes, network topology, and tagging that makes every dollar attributable. New workloads land inside the structure; existing ones are migrated into it on a plan. From there, Azure becomes operable — monitored around the clock by our tooling, with engineer escalation, and changed only through change control.
And when a workload does not belong in Azure — because latency, licensing, or plain arithmetic says otherwise — we say so. The on-premises case is covered honestly under virtualization and servers.
What we manage
Landing zone
Management groups, subscription layout, Azure Policy, RBAC at deliberate scopes, and hub-and-spoke networking — the structure that makes everything after it governable.
Cost control
Tagging standards, budgets with alerts, rightsizing, reservations and savings plans where the usage justifies them, and scheduled cleanup of orphaned disks, IPs, and snapshots.
Azure Virtual Desktop
Session host and image lifecycle, FSLogix profiles, autoscaling tuned to your working hours — a fit for firms with contractors, seasonal staff, or strict data-residency needs.
Hybrid connectivity
Site-to-site VPN or ExpressRoute, Entra hybrid join, and Azure Arc so on-premises servers are governed by the same policies as cloud ones.
Backup and recovery
Azure Backup and Site Recovery configured, immutability where it belongs, and restores tested — the standards are set by our business continuity practice.
Security posture and monitoring
Defender for Cloud recommendations triaged rather than accumulated, activity and diagnostic logs feeding our monitoring, and findings escalated to security operations.
When Azure is the right answer — and when it isn’t
Azure earns its cost when workloads are elastic, when hardware refresh is due and capital is better spent elsewhere, when remote teams need desktops that follow them, or when a regulator or insurer expects geographic redundancy you cannot build in an office closet.
It loses on flat, predictable workloads that run hot around the clock, on latency-sensitive applications tied to office equipment, and on lift-and-shift moves priced from the migration slide instead of the third year’s invoices. We put the arithmetic in front of you per workload — including the option of staying put.
For financial services firms, the calculus often includes audit and residency requirements; we design for the evidence from the start, alongside our SOC 2 readiness work.
Signals worth a rethink
Server hardware leaving warranty this budget cycle
An Azure bill that grew every month for a year
Contractors or M&A staff who need desktops fast
A DR plan that amounts to “we would figure it out”
One person holds Owner on everything
How an Azure engagement starts
Assessment
Read-only review of subscriptions, identity and role assignments, network topology, cost history, and backup state. You keep the findings and the cost model regardless.
Landing zone and remediation
The governance structure goes in first; then workloads, permissions, and spending are brought inside it in priority order — each change scheduled, communicated, and reversible.
Steady-state operations
Monitoring with engineer escalation, monthly cost and posture reporting, quarterly reviews — and a standing answer to “what is this line item?”
Common questions
Our Azure bill keeps growing. Is that normal?
It is common, which is different from normal. Untagged resources, oversized VMs, orphaned disks, and forgotten test environments compound quietly. Cost control here is an operating practice with a monthly cadence, not a one-time cleanup.
Can we keep some servers on-premises?
Yes, and often you should. Hybrid is a design point, not a compromise: Arc and hybrid join extend governance to on-prem machines, and the placement decision is made per workload. See virtualization and servers for the other half of that conversation.
Can you move us into Azure?
Yes — as a scoped project with discovery, a pilot, staged cutover, and rollback thinking throughout. The method is described under cloud migration.
Who owns the subscription and the credentials?
You do. Tenancy, subscriptions, and break-glass credentials stay in your custody arrangements, and the documentation is yours. Leaving us should be a project, not a hostage negotiation.
Make Azure explainable again.
An engineer will review your subscriptions and cost history and tell you what is well placed, what is drifting, and what it should cost.