Infrastructure
Not everything belongs in the cloud and plenty of it is not going anywhere soon. We look after the estate you already have: servers, storage, virtual desktops and the Windows environment underneath them.
Free ConsultationThe A2Z IT Promise
Knowing the old estate is what makes moving it credible. We can run what you have for as long as it earns its place and tell you honestly when it stops.
Servers and Storage
Physical and virtual, from a single host to a clustered estate with shared storage.
Virtual Desktops
Citrix, Azure Virtual Desktop and Windows 365, including the route from one to another.
The Windows Estate
Active Directory, Group Policy, DNS and DHCP, reviewed and tidied rather than left to drift.
End of Life
Rebuilds and upgrades planned before the support date rather than after it.
What we look after
The parts of IT that do not fit neatly into a subscription.
Servers and Hardware
We work across Dell, HP and the other mainstream brands, including converged chassis and hyperconverged setups where the compute and storage live together. Specification is done against what the workload actually does, with room for the growth you can see coming rather than the growth a datasheet suggests.
Sized for the Work
Hardware chosen for the workload in front of it, supplied through authorised distribution at distributor pricing.
Watched and Patched
Firmware, operating system and hypervisor patching on a schedule, so nothing quietly falls years behind.
Storage
From a NAS in a comms cabinet through NVMe to enterprise arrays, across QNAP, Dell storage and NetApp among others. Most storage problems are not capacity problems. They are performance or resilience problems wearing a capacity costume, which gets fixed differently.
Storage is also where backup quietly goes wrong, so we look at the two together rather than as separate purchases.
Virtualisation and Virtual Desktops
Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops, NetScaler, VMware and Hyper-V, including rebuilding standalone hosts as proper clusters so a single failure stops being an outage. Image management, patching and the major version upgrades that everyone puts off.
On the cloud side we deploy and manage Azure Virtual Desktop alongside Windows 365 Cloud PCs. We run all three, so any advice about moving between them is about your workload rather than about what we would rather sell you.
Citrix, Run Properly
Published apps and desktops, gateway plus load balancing, with images maintained rather than cloned once then forgotten.
Cloud Desktops, Managed in Intune
Windows 365 Cloud PCs enrol in Intune like any other device, so they inherit the policy, updates and security baselines your laptops already follow. One set of rules, not two.
The Windows Estate Underneath It
Active Directory health reviews covering structure, DNS clean-up, Group Policy consolidation, Sites and Services, plus DHCP. Directories accumulate twenty years of good intentions. Most of the odd behaviour people live with traces back to something in there.
- Group Policy reviewed and consolidated, not just added to
- End-of-life Windows Server and SQL rebuilt before the date, not after
- Hybrid identity that behaves the same on-premises and in Microsoft 365
When It Is Time to Move
Plenty of estates should move to Azure. Plenty of others have three good years left in kit that is already paid for. We will tell you which one you have. When the answer is to move, knowing how the old estate was built is what stops the migration turning into a series of surprises.
Backup and recovery runs alongside all of it. See Backup & Recovery for how we handle that.
Across the estate
The kit and platforms we look after day to day