AWS Cloud Services Sydney | Migration, Backup and Cost

In short

What Altitudo does on AWS

Altitudo designs, migrates and manages Amazon Web Services environments for Australian organisations. The work covers four things: working out whether a move to AWS is worth making, moving the workloads that are, protecting and governing them once they are there, and keeping the running cost under control. Most engagements start with backup and archive, then extend to servers and applications as the case for each one is proven.

A senior engineer reviews the environment that exists before anything is priced. No proposal is built from a phone call.
Utilisation data is collected from the live estate, so sizing reflects what workloads consume rather than what was provisioned for them.
Options are modelled side by side, including the option of staying where you are. Sometimes that is the right answer and we will tell you.
Migration runs in waves, each with acceptance criteria and a tested rollback agreed before the window opens.
As-built documentation, an asset register and runbooks are handed over at the end, not promised for later.
Australian engineers during business hours, with after-hours priority response for organisations on a support agreement.

Altitudo and AWS

The platform is the easy part. The decisions are not.

Anyone can open an AWS account in ten minutes. What takes longer is deciding which workloads belong there, how they are protected, who is allowed to change them and what the bill looks like in year three. That is the part we do.

AWS supplies the platform. We supply the decision.
AWS publishes more than two hundred services. Almost none of the value is in the list, and almost all of it is in choosing correctly for one organisation. We size against what your workloads actually consume, not against what was provisioned for them years ago.
One partner across the whole path
The cloud environment, the network that reaches it, the identity layer that governs it, the endpoints that use it and the backup that protects it are quoted, built and supported by the same team. Nothing is handed between suppliers at the point it breaks.
Hybrid treated as a destination, not a failure
Most Australian organisations run on premises and in cloud at the same time, and will for years. We design for that deliberately rather than treating anything still in the server room as unfinished business.
Cost is engineered in, not apologised for later
Storage class, instance family, commitment term and retention policy are cost decisions made at design time. Reviewing the bill afterwards is a much weaker position than sizing it correctly at the start.

Why AWS

Six reasons it holds up in an Australian environment.

Australian data residency

The Asia Pacific (Sydney) and Asia Pacific (Melbourne) regions keep data inside Australia. A region is a hard boundary, which turns a difficult procurement question into a one-line answer backed by policy.

Security you inherit

Encryption, key management, threat detection, audit logging and fine-grained identity are platform services rather than products you have to buy, deploy and then keep patched yourself.

Capacity that follows demand

Enrolment periods, reporting cycles, end of financial year and exam weeks all spike. Capacity scales to meet them and scales back afterwards, instead of being bought once for the worst day of the year.

Resilience as a design choice

Availability zones are physically separate facilities within a region. Running across them is a configuration decision rather than a second data centre and a second capital request.

Breadth without lock-in to one shape

Lift and shift, re-platform, containerise or run managed databases. The same platform supports every step, so the first move does not dictate the second.

Spend that matches consumption

Pay for what runs, commit where the workload is steady, and tier archive data down as it ages. Infrastructure becomes an operating cost you can forecast rather than a capital cycle you have to defend.

What we build on AWS

Six engagements that come up again and again.

Migration assessment and TCO analysis

We export the real configuration and utilisation of your current environment, size the AWS equivalent against measured CPU, memory, storage and IOPS, then model lift and shift, re-platforming and hybrid side by side over three years with licensing, support and egress included.

Backup, archive and disaster recovery

Backups replicate to Amazon S3 with object lock, so a retained copy cannot be deleted or encrypted inside its retention period. Older restore points tier to colder storage automatically, and recovery is tested rather than assumed.

Server and application migration

Dependency mapping first, then workloads moved in waves with a rollback written before the first cut-over. Line-of-business applications move one at a time, in a window that suits your calendar rather than ours.

Hybrid connectivity

Site-to-site VPN or dedicated circuits joining your sites to an Amazon VPC, with routing, DNS and firewall policy designed as one piece of work alongside the on-premises network we already look after.

Security baseline and governance

Multi-account structure, least-privilege identity, centralised audit logging, threat detection and guardrails that stop a resource being created outside an approved region. Mapped to the Essential Eight where that is the framework you are measured against.

Cost review and rationalisation

Idle instances, orphaned volumes, over-provisioned storage classes and archive copies still running on a platform the workload has already left. We map what is consuming spend and give you a written recommendation on what to retire.

AWS services we work with

The parts of the platform we design, deploy and support.

Not every environment uses all of these. This is the working set we specify from, chosen because they cover the problems Australian organisations of this size actually bring us.

Compute and end-user computing

Amazon EC2
Amazon EBS
EC2 Auto Scaling
Elastic Load Balancing
Amazon WorkSpaces

Storage, backup and archive

Amazon S3
S3 Object Lock
S3 Glacier storage classes
Amazon FSx
AWS Storage Gateway
AWS Backup

Networking and connectivity

Amazon VPC
AWS Site-to-Site VPN
AWS Direct Connect
Amazon Route 53
AWS Transit Gateway

Identity, security and governance

AWS IAM
IAM Identity Center
AWS Organizations
Amazon GuardDuty
AWS CloudTrail
AWS Config
AWS Key Management Service

Migration and databases

AWS Application Migration Service
AWS Database Migration Service
AWS Migration Hub
Amazon RDS

Operations and cost management

Amazon CloudWatch
AWS Systems Manager
AWS Cost Explorer
AWS Budgets

Who this suits

Organisations with real constraints, not greenfield startups.

Schools and colleges

Independent, Catholic and Islamic schools across Sydney and NSW, where archive growth is relentless, capital cycles are fixed and the only safe window for a cut-over is a school holiday. There is more on our IT services for schools page.

Professional services

Legal, accounting, actuarial and consulting firms carrying long client-file retention obligations and client security questionnaires that ask exactly where the data sits.

Healthcare and not-for-profit

Organisations holding sensitive records under the Australian Privacy Principles, usually with a small internal team and no appetite for a second data centre.

Manufacturing and multi-site

Businesses with equipment and systems that will stay on site for years, needing cloud that extends the environment rather than replacing it.

Common questions

What organisations ask us about AWS.

Does our data stay in Australia if we move to AWS?

Yes, provided the workload is deployed into an Australian region and kept there. AWS operates the Asia Pacific (Sydney) and Asia Pacific (Melbourne) regions, and a region is a hard boundary: AWS does not move your data out of it unless you configure it to. We set the region at design time, restrict deployment to it with a service control policy, and write the answer into your as-built documentation so procurement questionnaires can be answered from a document rather than from memory.

How do you work out whether AWS will cost more or less than what we run now?

With measurements rather than estimates. We export the actual configuration and utilisation of your current environment, size the AWS equivalent against real CPU, memory, storage and IOPS figures rather than against what was provisioned, then model the options side by side over a three-year horizon including licensing, support and egress. Some workloads come out cheaper on AWS. Some do not, and we say so.

Do we have to move everything at once?

No, and very few organisations should. Most of our AWS work is hybrid for a period: some workloads stay on premises, some move, and the two are joined by a site-to-site VPN or a dedicated circuit. Archive and backup are usually the first things to move because the case is clear and the risk is low. Line-of-business applications move later, one at a time, each with a tested rollback.

Can we use AWS just for backup without migrating servers?

Yes, and it is one of the most common places to start. Backups replicate to Amazon S3, with object lock applied so a copy cannot be deleted or encrypted inside its retention period, even by an administrator account. Older restore points tier down to colder storage classes automatically. Your servers stay exactly where they are.

We already pay for both AWS and Microsoft Azure. Is that a problem?

It is common and it is not automatically wrong, but it is worth checking. Paying twice usually happens when an archive or backup copy was left running on a platform after the workload it protected moved somewhere else. We map what is actually consuming spend on each platform, identify the duplication, and give you a written recommendation on what to retire, what to consolidate and what genuinely earns its place on both.

Who supports the environment once it is running?

We do. Altitudo remains your point of contact for the AWS environment, the network that reaches it, the endpoints that use it and the backup that protects it. You are not handed a console login and left to work out which layer a fault sits in.

Are you an AWS partner?

Yes. Altitudo is a member of the AWS Partner Network. We hold accreditations across the AWS platform alongside our Microsoft, HPE, Palo Alto Networks and Veeam accreditations, which is what lets us quote and design a hybrid environment as one piece of work rather than three.

What size organisation does this suit?

Our AWS work runs from single-site organisations of around twenty staff through to multi-campus schools with several hundred devices. The engagement model does not change with size. What changes is the number of workloads in scope and the length of the migration window.

Where AWS fits with the rest of the stack.

AWS is one platform among several we hold accreditations with. Cloud work almost never arrives on its own, so these are the pages it usually connects to.

Cloud services

Microsoft 365, Azure and cloud design alongside AWS, assessed workload by workload.

Backup and disaster recovery

Immutable backup and tested restores, on premises and to AWS object storage.

Migration and upgrades

Dependency mapping, wave planning and a tested rollback at every milestone.

Managed security services

Identity, endpoint, firewall and Essential Eight alignment across cloud and on premises.

Find out what AWS would actually cost you.

A senior engineer will review your current environment and model the options side by side, including staying put. You get a written view either way. No lock-in, no obligation.

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AWS, designed and run by people you can call.