Out of the server room,
into something maintainable.

Everything you need, none of the upsell.

Real deliverables, with the boundaries written down. So you know what you're paying for and what counts as extra.

The order we work in.

A clear sequence so you can budget time, money, and risk against the work.

Getting out of the server room without losing what's running in it.

A cloud migration is the process of moving workloads that currently run on physical hardware in your office (or a colocation facility) to cloud infrastructure maintained by Microsoft, Amazon, or Google. The objective is not to move to the cloud because cloud is a trend. The objective is to reduce the operational burden of maintaining on-premises hardware, improve availability and disaster recovery capability, and enable staff to work effectively from anywhere. For most BC and Alberta SMBs, that means moving file shares to SharePoint or Azure Files, moving email to Exchange Online if it is not there already, and retiring one or more ageing Windows Server systems that are consuming IT budget and generating risk.

A Prince George engineering firm running its project files on a physical file server in a back room is also running the risk that the server fails, the drives fail, or the building floods. Moving those files to SharePoint or Azure Files eliminates the hardware risk, adds built-in versioning, and lets staff access files from the field on an iPad without VPN complexity. The migration involves mapping what is on the server, choosing the right cloud destination for each workload, migrating the data with minimal downtime, and decommissioning the hardware once the migration is verified. North Star plans and executes all of that, including the Canadian data residency considerations under BC PIPA and PIPEDA that determine where your data must actually live.

Cloud migration deliverables.

Businesses with ageing on-premises infrastructure or a hardware refresh coming up.

The right time to evaluate a cloud migration is when on-premises hardware is approaching end of life and a hardware refresh is on the horizon. Instead of spending $20,000-$40,000 on a new server with a five-year depreciation schedule, the question is whether the workloads that server runs are better placed in Azure, in Microsoft 365, or in a hybrid configuration where latency-sensitive applications stay local and everything else moves to the cloud. North Star evaluates both options honestly: sometimes the right answer is a hardware refresh, sometimes it is migration, and sometimes it is a hybrid. We do not push cloud migration when on-premises makes more sense for the workload.

BC and Alberta businesses with compliance obligations under BC PIPA or PIPEDA need to understand where their data will be stored before migrating to the cloud. Cloud providers that store data exclusively in the United States subject Canadian personal information to US law, including the CLOUD Act. Microsoft Azure's Canadian regions store data in Canada and are the appropriate choice for BC and AB businesses handling client personal information. North Star configures all migrations to use Canadian Azure regions by default.

Businesses with multiple BC or AB locations that currently rely on site-to-site VPN to reach a central server are often better candidates for cloud migration than single-site businesses, because moving the workload to the cloud eliminates the VPN dependency and typically improves performance for remote and secondary-site staff.

Fixed-price project scoped after discovery.

Cloud migrations are scoped and priced as a fixed-price project after a discovery engagement that assesses what is on-premises and what the cloud destination will be. The discovery is typically a short paid engagement (a few hours of technical review), and the migration project is then quoted with a fixed price and a defined timeline. Ongoing cloud infrastructure costs (Azure subscription, Microsoft 365 licensing) are separate from North Star's project fee and are billed directly by Microsoft. Contact us to schedule a discovery call and receive a migration scoping proposal.

What clients ask before migrating.

Cloud migrations with Canadian data residency built in from the start.

North Star is headquartered in Prince George and serves BC, Alberta, and the Yukon. We migrate businesses to Azure and Microsoft 365 with Canadian data residency as a default, not an afterthought. We understand that BC PIPA and PIPEDA impose real obligations on how personal information is handled in the cloud, and we configure migrations to satisfy those requirements rather than explaining them after the fact. We use AI-assisted tooling to accelerate the discovery and inventory phases, giving you a faster and more complete picture of what you are migrating before the project starts. After migration, the cloud workloads are managed as part of your ongoing managed IT services agreement.

Cloud migration across BC, Alberta, and Yukon.

Pick your city for local pricing, response windows, and recent project notes.