What do you want to move?
Cloud Solutions South Africa covers moving what you run onto someone else's infrastructure and keeping it working there. Describe what you run now and compare migration plans, monthly hosting costs and who manages it afterwards.
Describe what you run now and get cloud quotes. We pass your request to LEADERR APPROVED providers who cover the area.
Get the Best QuoteWhat Businesses Usually Move First
- Email. Almost always the first move, and the easiest to undo if you dislike it.
- Files. From a file server to SharePoint, OneDrive or Google Drive.
- Backup. Cheap to move and immediately safer off site.
- Line of business applications. Either hosted as they are or replaced with the vendor's own cloud version.
- Servers. Lifted into Azure or AWS where a rewrite is not practical.
- Desktops. Virtual desktops where people need a controlled environment from anywhere.
What to Weigh Up
- Connectivity. Cloud makes your internet line a single point of failure. Budget for a second one.
- Local latency. Both major providers have South African regions, which matters for interactive workloads.
- Running cost versus capital. Monthly spend replaces a server purchase every five years, and it does not stop.
- Licensing. Some software is cheaper, some considerably dearer, once it runs in a hosted environment.
- Data egress. Getting data out again is charged for. Ask what leaving would cost.
- Who manages it. Cloud removes the hardware, not the administration.
Cloud Solutions Prices
Ballpark figures so you can check a quotation.
| Item | Ballpark price |
|---|---|
| Email migration to Microsoft 365, per mailbox | R350 - R900 |
| File server migration to SharePoint, 20 users | R18,000 - R65,000 |
| Server lift and shift to Azure or AWS, per server | R12,000 - R45,000 |
| Cloud server hosting, small workload, per month | R1,200 - R4,500 |
| Virtual desktop, per user per month | R450 - R1,400 |
| Cloud management, per workload per month | R850 - R2,800 |
| Cloud readiness assessment | R15,000 - R55,000 |
Prices JUST UPDATED. Ballpark figures, rounded, excluding VAT. They reflect typical South African IT support and technology rates. They are not our prices or quotations, and no provider is bound by them. Confirm what each quotation includes, such as how many users or devices are covered, the response times, after-hours cover and licence fees.
Get a migration price for your own workloads rather than a range.
Get the Best QuoteWhat Affects the Price
- How much data. Both the migration time and the ongoing storage bill.
- How many users. Per mailbox and per seat pricing dominate most quotes.
- How messy the current setup is. Shared mailboxes, public folders and deep folder structures all add hours.
- Whether anything has to be rewritten. Old applications may not run in a hosted environment unchanged.
- The cutover window. A weekend cutover costs more than a staged one.
- Who runs it afterwards. A managed cloud bill is not the same as the raw hosting bill.
What to Include in Your Request
- What you run today. Servers, applications, where email and files live.
- How many users. And how many work remotely.
- How much data. Mailbox sizes and the size of the file share.
- Your internet line. Speed, and whether there is a backup line.
- What is driving the move. Ageing hardware, remote work, a lease ending or a growth plan.
- Your timeline. And whether there are periods you cannot be down.
Before the Provider Quotes
- Ask for the monthly run cost, not just the project. The migration is once; the bill is forever.
- Ask whose tenant it is. You want to own the subscription, not rent it through the provider.
- Ask what the rollback plan is. And how long the old environment stays available.
- Ask what the second internet line costs. Cloud without redundancy moves your risk rather than removing it.
- Ask about data residency. Where the data physically sits, and whether that matters to your clients.
- Ask what leaving would involve. Egress charges and the effort to extract are worth knowing up front.
Cloud Solutions FAQs
Will moving to the cloud save money?
Sometimes, and rarely as much as the first pitch suggests. It reliably removes capital purchases, hardware failure and most of the maintenance, and it reliably adds a monthly bill and a hard dependency on your internet line. Ask for a five year comparison rather than a first year one.
Is my data safe in the cloud?
The underlying platforms are run to a standard almost no small business can match on its own. The common failures are not the platform but the configuration: no multi-factor authentication, over-shared files and the assumption that the provider backs up your data for you. Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace do not replace a backup.
Do I still need a backup if everything is in the cloud?
Yes. A deleted file, a ransomware event in a synced folder or a departed employee's mailbox are all your problem, not the platform's. Third party backup for cloud workloads is inexpensive and is the most commonly missed control.
Can my old software run in the cloud?
Often yes, hosted on a cloud server much as it ran on your own. Whether it should is another question: software that needs a specific old operating system is a risk wherever it runs. Ask the vendor what they support before paying to move it.
What happens when the internet goes down?
Nothing works, which is the honest answer and the reason to plan for it. A second line from a different provider, ideally over a different technology, is the standard answer and costs far less than the downtime it prevents.
How long does a migration take?
A small email migration is a weekend. Files and a server or two is usually two to six weeks of elapsed time, most of it preparation and user communication rather than copying. Anything involving a line of business application depends entirely on that vendor.
Cloud work is quoted by most of the providers listed on IT Support South Africa often together with the support contract that follows the migration.
Related Services
Get the Best Quote, Fast
Client Reviews
Powered by leaderr
