Azure infrastructure

Azure infrastructure: architecture, migration, and managed operations

Veratas delivers enterprise Azure infrastructure, from landing zone design and VM migration through to networking, backup, disaster recovery, Azure Virtual Desktop, and FinOps cost governance. We have run Azure data platforms for years; this is that expertise extended to the full Azure cloud estate.

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What we deliver

Azure infrastructure services

Landing zones, compute, networking, storage, backup, disaster recovery, Azure Virtual Desktop, FinOps, and DevOps automation, comprehensive Azure infrastructure for enterprise clients.

01.

Azure Landing Zone & architecture

Enterprise cloud foundations with security and governance built in

  • Hub-spoke landing zone design with Azure Policy, RBAC, and management groups
  • Network architecture: VNets, subnets, NSGs, Azure Firewall, and ExpressRoute or VPN
  • Identity integration: Entra ID, hybrid identity, and Azure AD Domain Services where required
  • Subscription design: billing boundaries, management hierarchy, and tagging strategy
  • Well-Architected Framework assessment across reliability, security, cost, performance, and operations
  • Governance baselines: Azure Policy, Defender for Cloud recommendations, and compliance reporting

02.

Virtual machines & compute

Windows and Linux VM deployments and lifecycle management

  • VM sizing, image management, and availability zone design for high availability
  • Azure Virtual Desktop: deployment, FSLogix profiles, scaling plans, and user access
  • Scale sets for elastic compute and autoscaling configuration
  • Azure Bastion for secure RDP and SSH access without public IP exposure
  • Spot VMs and reserved instances for cost-optimised compute workloads
  • VM migration from on-premises using Azure Migrate and lift-and-shift tooling

03.

Storage, networking & connectivity

Scalable, secure Azure storage and network design

  • Azure Storage: blob, file, queue, and table with lifecycle management policies
  • Azure Files and Azure NetApp Files for enterprise file share and NFS scenarios
  • Private endpoints, Private DNS zones, and service endpoints for network isolation
  • Azure Front Door, Application Gateway, and Load Balancer for traffic management
  • ExpressRoute and VPN Gateway for hybrid on-premises to Azure connectivity
  • Azure DNS and Traffic Manager for multi-region and failover routing

04.

Azure Backup & disaster recovery

RPO and RTO-aligned protection across all Azure workloads

  • Azure Backup for VMs, SQL databases, blobs, and Azure file shares
  • Azure Site Recovery for DR orchestration with automated failover and failback testing
  • Microsoft 365 backup: Exchange, SharePoint, OneDrive, and Teams via Azure
  • DR runbooks, incident response playbooks, and scheduled rehearsal exercises
  • RPO and RTO definition workshops and SLA alignment with business stakeholders
  • Multi-region active-active and active-passive architecture design

05.

Azure FinOps & cost governance

Controlling and optimising Azure spend at enterprise scale

  • Azure Cost Management: budgets, spending alerts, and cost allocation dashboards
  • Reserved instance and savings plan analysis with purchase recommendations
  • Azure Hybrid Benefit optimisation for Windows Server and SQL Server workloads
  • Idle resource detection, rightsizing, and automated cleanup runbooks
  • Tagging governance for chargeback, showback, and cost centre reporting
  • Quarterly FinOps review: spend trends, anomaly detection, and optimisation roadmap

06.

Azure DevOps & Infrastructure as Code

Automated and repeatable Azure deployments

  • Azure DevOps pipeline design for infrastructure and application deployments
  • Bicep and Terraform templates for version-controlled, repeatable environments
  • GitHub Actions integration for cloud-native CI/CD workflows
  • Environment strategy: dev, test, staging, and production with gated approvals
  • Infrastructure testing: policy compliance, security scanning, and drift detection
  • ARM to Bicep migration for existing infrastructure-as-code assets
Fixed-fee implementation

Azure, set up right, from $9,000

A fixed-scope Azure landing zone aligned to the Cloud Adoption Framework. You see exactly what the price covers, and a fair quote for anything more.

Fixed fee from $9,000   |   Live in 3 to 4 weeks   |   Price shown up front

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What $9,000 covers

A governed Azure foundation

A secure, well-governed landing zone, ready for your workloads.

  • Azure landing zone aligned to the Cloud Adoption Framework
  • Management groups, subscriptions and RBAC
  • Networking baseline: virtual network, subnets, NSGs
  • Identity integration with Microsoft Entra ID
  • Governance: policies, tags and naming standards
  • Cost management and budget alerts
  • Monitoring baseline: Azure Monitor and Log Analytics
  • Handover documentation and walkthrough

Azure consumption (compute, storage, networking) is billed directly by Microsoft. The $9,000 covers the implementation services.

No surprises

What is in the price, and what we quote separately

Anything beyond the standard package is optional, and always quoted before you commit.

In your priceBeyond the package, quoted at a fair rate
A governed landing zone foundationWorkload migrations: VMs, databases, applications
Standard networking baselineHub-and-spoke, multi-region, ExpressRoute
Identity and governance baselineInfrastructure-as-Code pipelines beyond baseline
Cost and monitoring setupDisaster recovery and backup design
Handover documentationOngoing managed operations

You pay $9,000 for the standard landing zone. Everything else is optional, scoped and quoted transparently at a reasonable rate, and always shown before you decide.

Why Veratas for Azure

What makes our Azure delivery different

Most Azure partners deliver one of: lift-and-shift migrations, FinOps, or managed services. Veratas delivers all three under one continuous engagement aligned to Microsoft’s Cloud Adoption Framework and Well-Architected Framework.

Cloud Adoption Framework-aligned

Every Azure landing zone we build is aligned to Microsoft’s Cloud Adoption Framework, proper management groups, subscription strategy, network topology, identity foundation, and policy baseline. The architecture Microsoft itself recommends for enterprise Azure.

Well-Architected Framework reviews

Quarterly Well-Architected Framework reviews across the five pillars: Reliability, Security, Cost Optimisation, Operational Excellence, Performance Efficiency. Documented scoring with remediation backlog, not a one-off architecture review.

FinOps from day one

Azure FinOps practice built in: tagging strategy, cost management dashboards, anomaly alerts, reservation and savings plan optimisation, Azure Hybrid Benefit application, and regular cost reviews. Typical engagement reclaims 20-40% of Azure spend in the first 90 days.

Migration playbooks for AWS, GCP, on-prem

Documented migration playbooks for AWS-to-Azure (workload-by-workload), GCP-to-Azure (BigQuery to Fabric, GKE to AKS, etc.), and on-premises VMware/Hyper-V to Azure. Veratas has run more than 50 migrations using Azure Migrate, ASR, and Database Migration Service.

Azure landing zone

What we deploy in an Azure landing zone

An Azure landing zone is the enterprise-ready foundation on which workloads run. We deploy CAF-aligned landing zones in 6-10 weeks, then migrate workloads against this baseline.

01

Identity foundation

Microsoft Entra ID tenant configured with custom domains, Conditional Access policies, MFA enforcement, Privileged Identity Management for admin elevation, Identity Protection risk policies, and hybrid identity (Entra Connect / Cloud Sync) if hybrid AD.

02

Management groups

Hierarchical management group structure (Tenant Root → Platform / Landing Zones → Production / Non-Production → workload subscriptions). Policy assignments at the right level for tag enforcement, allowed regions, allowed resource types.

03

Network topology

Hub-and-spoke virtual network design with Azure Firewall or NVAs at the hub. Network segmentation by trust boundary. Private DNS zones. ExpressRoute or VPN for on-premises connectivity. Defender for Cloud DDoS protection where appropriate.

04

Security baseline

Microsoft Defender for Cloud enabled (all plans for production). Microsoft Sentinel deployed at the hub. Azure Key Vault baseline. Tag-based RBAC. Just-in-time VM access. Centralised logging to Log Analytics workspaces. Microsoft Secure Score baseline.

05

Operations baseline

Azure Monitor and Application Insights baseline. Backup vaults with policy-aligned retention. ASR for DR. FinOps cost management views and budgets. Tag governance enforced via Azure Policy. Service Health alerts to Teams/email.

FinOps savings

Azure cost optimisation mechanisms

Five primary Azure cost-optimisation levers. Most enterprises combine them, Reservations + Hybrid Benefit + Spot for the right workload types reclaims 30-50% of total Azure spend over 90 days.

Mechanism
Best for
Typical savings
Pay-as-you-go
Workloads with unpredictable demand or short lifespan
0% (list price)
Azure Reservations (1-year)
Predictable VMs, databases, App Services
~20-40%
Azure Reservations (3-year)
Stable long-running workloads with high confidence on instance type
~30-50%
Azure Savings Plan (1-year)
Predictable compute spend with instance-type flexibility
~10-25%
Azure Savings Plan (3-year)
Predictable compute spend with long horizon
~25-40%
Azure Hybrid Benefit
Bring existing Windows Server / SQL Server licences with Software Assurance
~40% Windows VMs, 55%+ SQL Server
Spot VMs
Fault-tolerant workloads (batch processing, dev/test, CI/CD)
~60-90%
Dev/Test pricing
Dev/test subscriptions for non-production workloads
~40% off VMs, free Windows licensing
Industries

Azure deployment patterns by industry

Azure landing zones look different in a regulated bank than in a media company. We bring industry-specific Azure architecture patterns, compliance baselines, and PaaS service selection.

Financial services

Azure landing zones with FCA/MAS/MiFID alignment. Microsoft Sentinel SOC. Confidential Computing for sensitive workloads. Multi-region active-active for trading platforms.

Manufacturing

Azure IoT Hub for connected factory. Azure Digital Twins for digital factory models. Microsoft Fabric Real-Time Intelligence for shop-floor analytics. AVS for legacy VMware workloads.

Healthcare

HIPAA-compliant Azure landing zones. Confidential Computing for clinical data. Azure Health Data Services for FHIR. Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare integration patterns.

Retail

Azure CDN for storefronts. AKS for microservices retail platforms. Azure Synapse / Microsoft Fabric for retail analytics. Real-time inventory and pricing via Azure Functions and Service Bus.

Media

Azure Media Services for streaming. Azure Front Door for global content delivery. AKS for transcoding pipelines. Spot VMs for non-realtime rendering jobs.

Public sector

Azure Government regions. Compliance with FedRAMP / IRAP / G-Cloud. Microsoft Sentinel with extended logging retention. Sovereign Azure deployments where required.

FAQ

Azure questions answered

The landing zone, migration, FinOps, and managed services questions enterprises ask most often.

An Azure Landing Zone is the foundational Azure environment, management groups, subscriptions, network topology, identity, security baseline, and operations baseline, onto which workloads are deployed. Without a landing zone, every workload reinvents foundations; with one, workloads inherit consistent governance, security, and cost controls. Microsoft's Cloud Adoption Framework documents the standard.
Landing zone design + deploy: 6-10 weeks. Migration of first set of workloads (10-30 VMs/PaaS services): another 8-16 weeks. Full enterprise migration (200+ workloads): typically 12-24 months in waves. We design wave plans by workload complexity, dependency, and business risk.
Reserved Instances: commit to specific VM type/region for 1 or 3 years; deep discount (20-50%); inflexible to instance type changes. Savings Plans: commit to dollar amount per hour for 1 or 3 years; less deep discount (10-40%); flexible across instance types, regions, and even Azure services. Reservations win for stable workloads; Savings Plans win for evolving estates.
Yes. Most engagements involve adopting existing Azure estates, refactoring them to landing zone patterns where possible, fixing the most pressing security/cost issues first, then iterating toward CAF alignment. We don't insist on greenfield landing zones if you already have production workloads.
Region selection depends on: where your users are, where your data must reside (data residency), what regulatory requirements apply (e.g. EU Data Boundary), what services you need (some services lag in older regions), and disaster recovery pairing. We typically recommend pairs of regions (e.g. East US / West US, UK South / UK West) for active-passive or active-active resilience.
Azure FinOps is a continuous discipline of cost visibility, allocation, and optimisation. First-pass FinOps engagement typically reclaims 20-40% of total Azure spend within 90 days through right-sizing, reservations, Hybrid Benefit, dev/test pricing, Spot for fault-tolerant workloads, idle resource cleanup, and storage tier optimisation.
Both. Most enterprise clients move from project delivery into managed services covering 24×7 monitoring, incident management, patching and updates, FinOps reviews, security operations (Microsoft Sentinel), and quarterly Well-Architected Framework reviews. Pricing per-subscription or per-workload depending on shape.
Microsoft Defender for Cloud enabled with all relevant plans. Microsoft Sentinel for SIEM. Azure Policy for compliance enforcement against initiatives (CIS, NIST, ISO 27001, PCI DSS, HIPAA, etc.). Continuous Microsoft Secure Score improvement. Microsoft Purview for data classification. Annual penetration testing optional.
Yes. AWS-to-Azure: EC2 to Azure VMs (Azure Migrate), RDS to Azure SQL (Database Migration Service), S3 to Azure Blob (AzCopy / Data Box), Lambda to Azure Functions, EKS to AKS. GCP-to-Azure: similar workload-by-workload mapping. We document migration playbooks and run pilots before full migration.
Tenant configuration: custom domains, branding, password policies. Hybrid identity setup: Microsoft Entra Connect or Cloud Sync. Conditional Access policies covering MFA, device compliance, location, risk. Identity Protection. Privileged Identity Management for admin elevation. External identity (B2B/B2C) where needed. Application integration via SAML/OIDC/SCIM.
A landing zone aligned to the Cloud Adoption Framework: management groups, subscriptions and RBAC, a networking baseline, Microsoft Entra ID integration, governance policies, cost management, a monitoring baseline, and a documented handover. Typically 3 to 4 weeks.
Workload migrations (VMs, databases, applications), hub-and-spoke or multi-region networking, Infrastructure-as-Code pipelines beyond the baseline, disaster recovery design, and ongoing managed operations are scoped and quoted separately. Azure consumption is billed directly by Microsoft.
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Landing zones, VMs, networking, backup, DR, and FinOps, enterprise Azure infrastructure from Veratas.

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