Cloud Strategy

What to Expect from a Well-Architected Review

A Well-Architected Review isn’t an audit. It’s not a pass/fail exam. It’s a structured conversation about your cloud workloads that identifies risks, highlights improvements, and gives you a clear plan to make things better.

How it works

The review is built around six pillars:

1. Operational Excellence - how you run and monitor your workloads
2. Security - protecting your data and systems
3. Reliability - recovering from failures and meeting demand
4. Performance Efficiency - using resources effectively
5. Cost Optimisation - avoiding unnecessary spend
6. Sustainability - minimising environmental impact

For each pillar, we work through a series of questions about your architecture, processes, and practices. It’s collaborative - we’re not there to judge, we’re there to find opportunities.

What Does Cloud Migration Actually Cost?

One of the first questions we get asked is “how much will it cost to move to the cloud?” The honest answer is: it depends. But that’s not very helpful, so here’s a more practical breakdown.

The three types of cost

Cloud migration costs fall into three buckets:

1. The migration itself - the work to plan, build, and move your workloads. This includes architecture design, landing zone setup, application assessment, and the actual migration execution. For most organisations, this is the biggest upfront cost.