Can we keep some systems on-premises?

Yes, and Azure handles this better than the alternatives. Workloads that must stay on your own hardware for regulatory or latency reasons can be governed, monitored, and secured through the same tooling as everything running in the cloud.

How does Azure pricing compare to AWS?

On raw compute, closely enough that it rarely decides anything. What separates them is licensing, commitment discounts, and existing agreements. For a Microsoft organization Azure usually wins on total cost; for a Linux estate that advantage vanishes.

Can you migrate us from AWS or Google Cloud?

Yes, though we would ask why first. Consolidating vendors is a weaker reason than most people expect, and migrations cost real money. Where licensing or identity makes a genuine case, we plan it in stages rather than as one cutover.

Do we need an Enterprise Agreement?

Only at meaningful scale. Below that, pay-as-you-go with reservations on predictable workloads is simpler and often cheaper. Agreements suit committed long-term spend, and we would rather you reached that point before signing one.

Custom Azure
Development Services

Stateside Digitals provides custom Azure development services for organizations already invested in Microsoft, building and migrating workloads that fit the identity, licensing, and systems you already run.

Azure is Microsoft’s cloud platform, offering the same broad categories as its competitors: compute, storage, databases, networking, and a long list of managed services on top. What separates it in practice is rarely a single feature. It is that Azure assumes you are already running Microsoft software, and prices, integrates, and licenses accordingly.

For a business, that means the comparison against other clouds often turns on things unrelated to the technology itself. Identity your staff already sign into, agreements your procurement team already holds, and licences you have already paid for all move the numbers. Two companies running identical workloads can end up facing genuinely different bills.

One Identity Everywhere

Entra ID Across The Estate

Staff sign in once for cloud resources, internal tools, and Microsoft 365, so access management stops being three separate jobs.

Runs In Your Building Too

Hybrid Without Two Systems

Workloads that must stay on your own hardware are managed the same way as the ones in the cloud, rather than through a parallel process.

Licences You Already Own

Existing Windows And SQL Count

Licences with active Software Assurance can be applied against Azure compute, which is a discount unavailable on any other platform.

Windows Workload Migration

Moving .NET applications and SQL Server estates off ageing hardware, in stages, without rewriting software that already works well.

Hybrid And Private Cloud

Systems that have to remain in your own data centre for regulatory or latency reasons, run and governed alongside cloud workloads instead of managed as a separate estate.

Line-Of-Business Apps

Internal applications built around the tools your staff already use daily, reading from and writing to systems they never leave.

Most cloud comparisons put equivalent machines beside each other and compare hourly rates. That misses the thing which most often decides it for a Microsoft organization. If you already hold Windows Server or SQL Server licences with active Software Assurance, Azure lets you apply them against your compute cost rather than paying for the same licence a second time.

On a substantial SQL Server estate the difference is not marginal, and it applies nowhere else. So we check what you hold before recommending anything, because a comparison ignoring licensing can point in entirely the wrong direction. It works in reverse too: if you own no Microsoft licences and run mostly Linux, that advantage disappears and we will tell you so plainly.

We build across App Service, Azure Functions, Container Apps, and AKS, with data in Azure SQL or Cosmos DB. Identity runs through Entra ID and secrets through Key Vault, with Defender for Cloud and Azure Policy applied from the start rather than after an audit. Infrastructure is defined in Bicep or Terraform and deployed through Azure DevOps or GitHub Actions.

Azure
App Service
Azure Functions
Container Apps
AKS
Azure SQL
Cosmos DB
Entra ID
Key Vault
Defender for Cloud
Bicep
Azure DevOps

Landing Zone First

Licences Audited Upfront

Identity Before Infrastructure

Reservations Where They Fit

Subscriptions, naming, networking and policy are decided before the first workload lands, because retrofitting governance is the expensive version.

We ask what Windows and SQL Server licences you hold before sizing anything, since that single answer can change the cost comparison entirely.

Entra ID groups and role assignments come first, so access is designed rather than accumulated one exception at a time.

Predictable workloads go on reserved capacity and variable ones stay flexible, rather than committing the whole estate to one pricing model.

Landing Zone First

Licences Audited Upfront

Identity Before Infrastructure

Reservations Where They Fit

Not automatic, though usually favoured. The licensing and identity advantages are real, but so is your team’s existing experience, and a cloud developer working in Azure daily is worth more than a platform preference. We would rather check than assume.

Custom Azure
Development Services