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Cloud Consulting Services that name what to change, and what to leave alone.

Cloud consulting is advisory work: we read the AWS or Azure environment you already run and hand back a ranked plan for its architecture, security and spend, before anything is committed.

  • 120+Projects delivered across 12 countries since 2012
  • 100+Senior in-house engineers, six countries
  • 5.0Unified rating across 61 client reviews on Clutch
  • AWS CertifiedSolutions Architects on the team
  • ISO 27001Certified security practice, audited by Quay Audit UK

01Overview

When to buy cloud consulting services

Buy cloud consulting when the environment already exists and nobody can give you a straight answer about it. The bill grew and no one can say what it bought. Nobody in-house owns the running estate, and it is somebody's third job. A decision that is expensive to reverse has arrived with no written comparison behind it. Or an AI initiative is landing on infrastructure nobody has sized for it.

  • The roadmap names who executes each stepNot only what good looks like. If that is us, it is the same engineers; if it is your team, the plan is written to be usable without us.
  • Read-only, and scoped before it startsRead access to billing and architecture under NDA, the accounts in scope agreed with your technical contact, and no write access to production while the review runs.
  • A sequence, not a findings listThe read comes back ordered, so the first three things to do are obvious.
  • The rest of the cloud clusterMigration when the decision is made, infrastructure when the plan needs building, and DevOps when the releases are the problem.

02Proof

What the advice was worth

Cloud advice is easy to sell and hard to evidence, because a roadmap produces no number until somebody executes it. So each of these is an engagement we also ran.

  • The AWS bill came down by 30% or morePatrick W., Founder and President of a New York B2B SaaS company, credits unicrew on Clutch with helping "reduce our AWS costs by 30% or more" on a platform live for more than a decade. The same review puts the saving down to knowledge of AWS and Heroku, and adds that unicrew "helped us scope future projects involving AI".
    30%+lower AWS costs on that B2B SaaS platform, where rollouts also got faster than the previous vendor's
  • An assessment first, then the estate movedCrik-IT, a B2B CRM used by manufacturers and wholesale distributors, started with an assessment of the on-premise setup to map dependencies, critical services and bottlenecks. It now runs on Azure. Stephanie Allemann, President of Crik-IT LLC, on Clutch: "Rather than simply following instructions, they put in the time to understand the underlying objective or goal of the project."
    Eliminatedthe downtime that CRM had on-premise, with latency down alongside it
  • A cloud company brings us into the planningOne of our clients sells cloud services itself, and still brings us in while the plan is being made. Tal, CEO of a cloud solutions company, says their internal team "sometimes requires additional assistance in various areas, including project planning and overcoming technical obstacles" (verified Clutch review).
    AWS CertifiedSolutions Architects on the team, so a second opinion on an AWS estate comes from people who have run one

03Compare

Do you need cloud consultants at all?

Often you do not, and the honest threshold is not company size. One account, a predictable bill and someone in-house with real time to own it, and AWS or Azure native tooling gets you most of the way. Consulting earns its fee when the spend spans several accounts and nobody can explain it, or when a decision is expensive to reverse.

Cloud consultingunicrew Your own team on native toolingDIY The cloud provider's own servicesVendor
Best forAn estate that already exists, where the spend is unexplained or a decision is expensive to reverse, and you want the read before you commit to anything. Best forOne or two workloads in a single account, with an engineer who has real time to own cost and architecture. Best forA deep, single-cloud implementation where you want that platform's own people accountable for their platform.
Trade-offWe are a software engineering firm, not a management consultancy. A governance office, or a procurement negotiation with your provider, is the wrong call for us. Trade-offFree in licence terms, but it competes with feature work, and the savings creep back when nobody owns the roadmap. Trade-offThe scope is that vendor's own platform, so "should we still be on this cloud" sits outside what you are buying.
You end up owningThe roadmap, the written architecture decisions, and the option to execute them without us. You end up owningThe changes you got to, and the reasoning in one busy person's head. You end up owningAn implementation of that platform's recommended architecture.

Quick self-check

Tick what is true of the environment you are paying for now. The read-out updates as you go.

0 of 4 true

Cloud consulting is the wrong buy

Nothing here says you need it. One account, a predictable bill and one engineer with real time, and your provider's own cost tooling gets you most of the way. If releases are the slow, manual part, that is DevOps consulting; if you are moving off a data center, that is cloud migration.

Tell us anyway

One symptom, not yet an estate problem

A single signal is usually one workload rather than the environment, and an audit scoped across everything to answer it comes back thorough and expensive.

Talk it through

Worth scoping as an audit

Two signals usually means the gap is ownership rather than one busy quarter, and no native tooling closes an ownership gap. A fixed-scope audit tells you what to change and what each change is worth.

Book a discovery call

Consulting is the right buy

Three signals usually means the spend and the architecture have drifted out from under whoever is nominally responsible for them. What is left to settle is scope: which accounts are in view, and whether the AI-readiness half runs alongside the cost teardown.

Book a discovery call

Read it first, then decide with the numbers in front of you

All four together describe a decision arriving before the evidence does, which is the case this page exists for. The roadmap is separable: execute it with your own team, with us, or with somebody else entirely.

Start with the audit

The estate almost never needs the change people arrive asking for. What actually moves the bill is usually something nobody has looked at in two years, and the honest first deliverable is a list of things to leave alone.

Yaroslav HavrylivSenior Engineering Manager, unicrew

04Capabilities

What a cloud consulting engagement covers

Eight things the engagement produces. Each one is a decision or a plan you can act on, not billed hours.

  • Cloud infrastructure audit

    An audit of the estate you actually have

    Ranked by saving against effort

    We read your AWS or Azure environment itself rather than a questionnaire: architecture, dependencies, security posture, and where the money actually goes.

  • Cloud cost optimization

    FinOps and cost control

    Against your real bill

    Idle and oversized machines, storage and data-transfer charges nobody has looked at, and commitments you are paying for and not using, all quantified against your real invoice. In our delivery experience, right-sizing and removing waste takes 20% to 40% off infrastructure spend. The definitional side, what cloud financial management is, is a separate read.

  • Cloud strategy and roadmap

    Which workloads should move, in what order, what breaks when they do, and whether hybrid is the honest answer for the ones that cannot. This is the input to the decision, not the move: once a date exists it becomes a cloud migration engagement.

  • Cloud architecture consulting

    One cloud or hybrid, containers or managed services, what to automate with Infrastructure as Code. We write down the reasoning, so the decision survives the person who made it.

  • Cloud security and compliance review

    Security posture, as one input

    Policy an auditor can read

    Access control, encryption in transit and at rest, and the guardrails that stop configuration drift, written as policy an auditor can read. We review the posture and stop there; turning it into an engagement is cybersecurity consulting.

  • CI/CD and reliability review

    Whether your pipelines, monitoring and on-call can carry the environment you are about to build, and what has to change before it lands. When the releases themselves are the problem, that is DevOps consulting.

  • Cloud AI readiness assessment

    Whether AI can land on this estate

    Architecture, data, access model

    Whether your architecture, data pipelines and access model can carry AI workloads without runaway cost or a security gap, and what has to change first. It runs alongside the cost teardown or on its own.

  • Cloud training and handover

    Team enablement and handover

    Training and a written handover

    Training and a written handover so your engineers can run what we recommend. Advice that only works while we are in the room is a dependency, not a plan.

05Trust

What the engagement hands over

An audit is worth what you can still use six months later, so all three of these are things you keep whether or not a build follows.

  • RankedA roadmap ordered by saving against effortEach change carries what it is worth, so the budget argument starts from evidence
  • SeparableA plan that works without usExecute it in-house or hand it to another firm; nothing in it is written to make that hard
  • Read-onlyProduced without touching productionBilling and architecture access under NDA, the accounts named in writing before it starts

06Stack

Clouds and tooling we advise on

The short list is deliberate: we advise on the clouds we operate rather than every platform with a logo. Terraform and Docker are here because a recommendation nobody can express as code quietly stops being true.

07Engagement

Three ways to run a cloud consulting engagement

Three shapes. What changes is who executes what the read recommends, and how much you commit before you have seen it.

  • One agreed set of accounts and environments, reviewed against your actual bill and architecture, ending in a written report and a working session on it. You can stop when the report lands: there is no minimum engagement period.

    Best when
    You need a second opinion, or a number, before you commit budget
    You pay
    Outcome based, quoted per project
    Typical start
    Two to four weeks
  • Our architects sit in your planning and review cycles: architecture calls, cost reviews, and the decisions that are expensive to reverse, without taking delivery off your engineers.

    Best when
    You have the bench and need judgment, not hands
    You pay
    Billed hourly, quoted per project
    Typical start
    Two to four weeks
  • The roadmap is handed to the same people who wrote it and runs on as a migration, infrastructure, or DevOps engagement.

    Best when
    The plan is agreed and you do not have the bench to execute it
    You pay
    Billed monthly, per team member
    Typical start
    Two to four weeks
You already have an audit, or a stalled roadmap

We will start from what exists, and taking it over is a separate decision

If somebody has already reviewed the estate, we read their findings rather than bill you to repeat them. A roadmap that stalled usually stalled for one reason: no step had a named owner and a cost attached, so it lost every argument against feature work. And if what you want is somebody to own cloud operations permanently, that is an internal hire or a managed team, not a consulting engagement.

08Industries

Industries we advise in

Six sectors we have delivered in. On the first three we have run or moved the cloud estate itself; on the other three the engagement was the product rather than the platform. If your sector is not here we will say so on the call.

Deepest expertise

Logistics and transportation

Order, freight and fleet systems where the busiest week of the year is the worst possible week to be tuning infrastructure: a freight management platform with AWS behind its storage, and a moving company's operations platform on Azure.

Deepest expertise

Hospitality and leisure

Demand is seasonal, so an estate sized for the peak is being paid for all year. We moved a hotel and hotel-network booking platform onto a containerized Azure stack with Docker and Terraform, whose Opera Cloud, IBS Software and Shift4 integrations had to keep working through it.

Healthcare

We took over a US home-health monitoring platform running on AWS. The outages stopped and the operating bill came down inside the same engagement.

E-commerce and marketplaces

Storefronts and marketplaces where traffic is spiky and the bill follows it, including a European manufacturer selling across seven countries and a consumer marketplace we built on AWS.

Fintech and accounting

Regulated estates are where the access model has to be written down before anything is read. We built bookkeeping automation for a financial advisory firm, with encryption and secure authentication around the financial data it reconciles.

EdTech and research

Research and teaching tools that run on somebody's departmental budget, including a time-tracking tool for a research university and search and AI engineering for an edtech platform.

Get a straight read on the estate before you commit the budget

Tell us whether you are on AWS or Azure, how many accounts are in play, and what is driving the review: cost, an architecture decision, an AI initiative, or all three. We confirm the scope and the timeframe before any work starts.

Let's talk

What happens after you contact us

  1. We reply within one business dayA real answer to what you sent, including what we would need to see before scoping anything.
  2. A scoping call about the estateWhich clouds, how many accounts, and what is actually worrying you.
  3. An agreed scope and timeframe, in writingThe accounts and environments in view, what the review covers, and when it ends, all fixed before it starts.
  4. You decide, with no pressureIncluding the answer that your environment does not need an audit yet. Where an engagement does follow, most start within two to four weeks.

09Delivery

How does cloud consulting work, step by step?

Five stages: scope and access, assess, rank, decide the controls and the owner, then the readout. The one that decides the outcome is the ranking, because an unranked findings list is what makes an audit feel expensive and change nothing.

  1. Scope and accessWe agree which accounts and environments are in scope, then take read access to your cloud billing and architecture, agreed with your technical contact before anything starts.You getAn agreed scope and timeframe, in writing, before the review begins.
  2. AssessWe map spend against usage to find the waste, and review the architecture, dependencies, security posture and AI readiness. What you provide is the access from step one plus time with the people who run the environment: between four and ten hours of your team's time in total, depending on the offer.You getAn honest read on what is working, what is not, and what it is costing you.
  3. RankEvery finding is ordered by what it saves against what it costs to do. A flat list of theoretical optimizations is the thing we are trying not to hand you.You getA prioritized roadmap: what to change, in what order, and what each change is worth.
  4. Decide the controls and the ownerWe define the security and compliance policies, the cost guardrails, and the architecture decisions, and name who executes each step, your team or ours. A roadmap with no named owner is the one that quietly does not happen.You getWritten policies, guardrails, and architecture decisions, each with a named owner.
  5. Readout, then reviewYou get the written audit and a working session on it. If a build follows, it runs as a separate infrastructure, migration, or DevOps engagement.You getA working session on the findings, and a standing invitation to bring the environment back for review.

11Case studies

Our case studies

unicrew was formerly Artelogic, so the older reviews use that name. The two cloud engagements this page leans on are both written up in full. The Crik-IT move onto Azure is linked from the proof section above; the hotel booking platform, whose integrations had to keep working through it, is linked from the hospitality card above and the integration answer below.

See all case studies

12Questions

Cloud consulting: frequently asked questions

The first two answers have no number in them, deliberately: a single-account cost review and a multi-account estate reviewed alongside an AI-readiness assessment are not the same purchase. The last one is for every firm on your shortlist, us included.

We scope before we quote, because a headline price would be wrong for almost everyone who reads it. Cost tracks how many accounts are in scope, how much of the estate needs reviewing, and whether you want the AI-readiness half alongside the cost teardown. The audit is fixed-scope: we agree the accounts, the timeframe, and the deliverable before anything starts, so the review cannot run away from you, and it is quoted outcome based, per project. If execution follows and you want a team of ours to run it, that is team extension, billed monthly per team member. We do not publish project-level price bands, because on this kind of work they mislead more often than they help.

It depends on how much estate there is, and we tell you the timeframe before you commit rather than after. A single-account cost review is short; a multi-account estate reviewed alongside an AI-readiness assessment takes longer, and we say which of the two you are before we begin. Because the audit is fixed-scope, the duration is agreed with the scope, so you know the deliverable and the end date together. Any build that follows is estimated separately, once there is a roadmap to estimate against.

Integration is usually where the schedule risk actually lives, so we map it first. On a hotel booking platform we migrated, the hard part was not the cloud, it was the Opera Cloud, IBS Software, and Shift4 integrations that had to keep working, so we built a booking engine that sits as middleware between the platform and those systems. On a B2B CRM moving off on-premise infrastructure we mapped dependencies, critical services and bottlenecks before touching anything. Your ERP, CRM, payment providers, and data warehouse get named in the assessment rather than discovered in week six.

We start by reading the stack you already run and the growth you are planning for, then weigh public, private, and hybrid against it rather than applying one shape to everyone. What comes back names which workloads should move, in what order, and what breaks when they do. If the estate you have is the right one and the budget would do more somewhere else, the readout says that instead.

Yes. We run a deep-dive audit to find unused resources, optimize licensing, and put automated cost controls in place. In our delivery experience, right-sizing and removing waste produces immediate savings in the 20% to 40% range, and a New York B2B SaaS client credits us on Clutch with cutting their AWS costs by 30% or more. Your figure depends on your starting point, which is exactly what the audit measures.

Ask them first, honestly. They know the system, they are cheaper to brief, and on a healthy estate that is the end of it. What nobody can do is review their own architecture from a neutral position, which is the thing you are buying here rather than a criticism of them. If a review already exists we read it instead of billing you to repeat it, and where it says the architecture is sound, that is what our readout says too. We are equally happy to hand the roadmap back to them to execute: it is written to be usable by whoever ends up doing the work.

Technology is only half the battle, so the consulting includes who owns what afterwards: the roles and responsibilities the new setup needs, and the training that goes with them. The handover is part of the deliverable, in writing, so the environment does not depend on us to stay healthy.

unicrew holds ISO 27001:2022 and ISO 9001:2015, renewed through a multi-stage audit with Quay Audit UK, and ISTQB certified QA sits inside delivery rather than bolted on at the end. We do not hold SOC 2, and if your procurement process requires it you should know that before you shortlist us. For the audit itself we work from read access to billing and architecture under NDA, with the accounts in view agreed before we start, so nothing outside that scope is touched.

Every firm on your list will claim independent judgment about your cloud, this page included, so compare on the things that can be checked before you sign. Three of them, and all three are fair to put to us. What access does the review need, and what does it not touch: ours is read access to billing and architecture under NDA, the accounts named in writing, no write access to production. Who can execute the result: a roadmap that only works while the firm that wrote it holds the pen is a dependency, not a plan, so ask whether your own team or a third firm could pick it up. And what does the firm not hold: we hold ISO 27001:2022 and ISO 9001:2015, audited by Quay Audit UK, and we do not hold SOC 2. Every client quoted on this page opens their own Clutch review. Read the interview rather than the rating. Worth naming a non-vendor option too: a cloud cost management tool buys continuous visibility across an estate several teams deploy into, which is a real thing to want. It also adds a licence to the bill it measures, and it will not re-architect anything or make the move-or-stay call.

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