Retire the ageing server without making Monday morning a disaster.
Your team keeps its files, familiar ways of working and secure access from home or the office. We plan and run practical cloud and hybrid projects for Northern Beaches businesses, including server retirement, safer remote work and backups stored away from the building.
Move the problem, not just the server.
A useful cloud project removes an old risk or a daily frustration. It should not swap a box in the office for a more complicated problem online.
Keep the folders your team knows
Move shared files to SharePoint without making staff relearn where everything lives.
Work from anywhere without workarounds
Microsoft 365 and Azure give staff secure access across the office, home and multiple sites.
Keep a backup outside the building
An offsite copy protects you when theft, fire, flood or ransomware affects the office.
Keep sensitive work controlled
Azure Virtual Desktop gives legal, accounting and finance teams a managed workspace for sensitive data.
Make two sites work as one
Cloud-managed networking connects the office, workshop and remote staff without separate workarounds.
Know what happens when systems are down
A recovery plan sets the order, owners and fallbacks before ransomware, a flood or an NBN outage.
Done properly, it quietly solves problems before you feel them.
Productivity that follows your team
Files, email and apps secure from anywhere, whether staff are home, onsite at clients, or in the office.
Less downtime, fewer surprises
Redundancy and automatic failover built in, so hardware failures and updates stop costing a day’s work.
Scales as you hire
Add a user in 30 seconds, drop a licence when someone leaves. No oversized servers, no surprise hardware bills.
Compliance evidence ready
The access logs and audit trail your auditor or insurer asks for are built into the platform, not bolted on.
A new PC should not take half a day to prepare.
Microsoft Intune and Windows Autopilot apply the business setup when a new starter signs in. Apps, security and access arrive in a consistent way without rebuilding every computer by hand.
A faster first day
The new starter follows a short guided sign-in and gets the apps their role needs.
A lost laptop does not expose the business
Device encryption, secure sign-in and restricted administrator access are applied from the start.
Replacement without the rebuild
Ship the new device, let the user sign in and restore the standard business setup.
Evidence when someone asks
You can show an insurer or regulator which devices meet the agreed security settings.
Local, hands-on, and straight with you.
Local team
Based in Warriewood, with regular onsite visits across the Northern Beaches and Lower North Shore.
5 to 30 staff is our sweet spot
We know the constraints, the budgets and the realities of a business your size.
Plain English, not ticket-shuffling
First call, a real person, no offshore helpdesk reading a script.
Scope agreed first
Fixed-fee where we can, with clear scope and pricing before work begins.
Onsite across the Northern Beaches & Lower North Shore.
Based in Warriewood. Onsite across the Northern Beaches and Lower North Shore, with remote support when onsite isn’t needed. We focus on doing this corner of Sydney really well.
Cloud and infrastructure, answered.
Do small businesses on the Northern Beaches really need cloud services?
If you’re 5–30 staff with files on a server in the corner office, an aging line-of-business app, or backups that no one’s tested recently, yes. The practical reasons are simple: cyber insurers expect cloud-grade controls, hybrid work needs files accessible from anywhere, and on-premises servers fail at the worst possible time. Cloud isn’t an upgrade for its own sake. It’s the boring infrastructure that lets a small business stop worrying about IT failing on a Monday morning.
How much does it cost to move our small business to the cloud?
Honest answer: it depends on what you’re moving and what you keep. A 10-person office moving from a file server + on-premises Exchange to Microsoft 365 + SharePoint typically lands in a low-five-figure project plus the ongoing per-user licensing. The bigger-than-expected number is usually the data tidy-up, most file shares have 15 years of clutter that someone needs to sort through before migration. We scope projects with a flat fee, not hourly, so you know what it’ll cost before we start.
Microsoft Azure or AWS for a small business?
For most Northern Beaches SMBs, Azure. The reason is integration: if you’re already on Microsoft 365 (most are), Azure plugs into your identity, security, and productivity stack with no extra plumbing. AWS is a fine platform, it’s just usually more infrastructure than a 5–30-staff business needs, and the learning curve eats into the savings. If you’re a software business or have specific AWS-native dependencies, AWS makes sense. Otherwise, Azure.
Can we keep some things on-premises and put others in the cloud?
Yes, that’s a hybrid setup, and it’s how most Northern Beaches SMBs run. The server in the back room might host the line-of-business app that’s not cloud-ready yet; meanwhile, files are in SharePoint, email is in Microsoft 365, and identity is in Entra ID. The trick is making the two halves feel like one network to the people using them. We design hybrid setups so your team doesn’t have to think about which system they’re in.
What happens to our data if Vaelis IT stops being our IT provider?
Your data stays yours. Microsoft 365, Azure, SharePoint, OneDrive, every account is registered to your business, with your credit card, in your name. We’re administrators on your tenant, not owners of it. If you ever switch providers, the new provider gets handed admin access and we step out. There’s no data lock-in, no proprietary platform, no “export fee”. This matters more than it sounds, some IT providers structure things so leaving them is painful. We don’t.
How long does a cloud migration take for a 10–20 person business?
Most projects we run for businesses this size run six to ten weeks from start to finish, but the visible disruption is minimal. The bulk of the time is preparation: cleaning up old data, mapping permissions, planning the cutover, testing. The actual go-live for users is usually one weekend, with a quiet first week of catching anything that didn’t migrate cleanly. We sequence the work so you keep working through the project, no big-bang outages.
Plain language. Straight answers.
Let’s scope it properly.
We’ll talk through what makes sense to move, what to keep, and what a clean cloud or hybrid setup would cost, fixed-fee, no surprises.