A 32-person accounting firm retires its server room

// the problem

An aging server and a hard deadline

The firm — 32 staff, two partners, one office — ran email, files and their tax application from a seven-year-old on-premises server. It had already failed once, in March, costing a day and a half of productivity during filing season. Their incumbent provider quoted roughly $18,000 to replace it with new hardware, plus ongoing maintenance.

The partners didn't object to the spend. They objected to not knowing whether it was the right spend. They booked our free assessment for a second opinion.

What the assessment found

The server was doing three jobs: hosting email, serving files, and running a tax suite the vendor already offered as a hosted product. Email could move to Microsoft 365. Files could move to cloud storage with proper permissions. The tax application's own vendor hosting was cheaper per year than the amortized server cost. Nothing that remained justified new hardware.

// the approach

Migrate in the quiet months, change nothing in season

We ran the cloud migration between May and July, deliberately far from any filing deadline. Mailboxes moved first, over a weekend, with staff arriving Monday to the same Outlook. Files moved next, department by department, with the old file shares kept read-only for a month as a safety net. The tax suite moved last, on the vendor's hosted platform, with a parallel-run week before cutover.

Security came with the move rather than after it: MFA on every account, encrypted laptops, and cloud-to-cloud backup — because Microsoft 365 is not a backup of itself. The firm's WISP was updated to describe the new environment.

// the outcome

What actually changed

• The $18,000 capital spend never happened; the server was decommissioned and recycled.
• Monthly IT spend dropped roughly 20% once server maintenance and hosting overlaps ended.
• The following tax season ran January to April with zero unplanned outages.
• Partners now open the same files at home, at clients and in the office — which quietly ended the after-hours VPN tickets.

The honest caveat: cloud isn't automatically cheaper. It was cheaper here because the workloads fit. When they don't, we say so — several of our clients still run servers we look after, because for them that's the right answer.