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Cloud and Infrastructure Services for Pittsburgh-Area Businesses
Most growing companies don't need another sales pitch about "the cloud" — they need a partner who can untangle a mixed environment of aging servers, half-finished Microsoft 365 rollouts, and backups nobody has tested. Our cloud and infrastructure services give Pittsburgh-area operators a single team to plan the move, run the migration, and manage the environment afterward, with clear documentation and predictable monthly costs.
The fastest way to lose money in the cloud is to lift-and-shift workloads that were never sized correctly on-premises.
A realistic scenario: the 60-person professional services firm
Picture a 60-person professional services firm headquartered in the Strip District with a satellite office in Cranberry Township. Their primary file server is seven years old, Exchange is still running on a VM in a closet, and the lease on their server room HVAC is up for renewal. Leadership has been told for two years that they "should move to the cloud," but every quote they've received either looks like a forklift project priced in six figures or a vague monthly retainer with no defined scope.
Meanwhile, the firm's insurance carrier has started asking pointed questions about MFA, immutable backups, and incident response. The IT manager — a team of one — is spending evenings patching domain controllers instead of supporting the partners.
The challenge
Three problems were tangled together, and solving any one of them in isolation would have made the others worse:
- Aging on-premises hardware with a hard refresh deadline driven by warranty and facilities costs.
- An incomplete Microsoft 365 tenant — licenses purchased, but Exchange Online, SharePoint, and Intune were never properly configured, so users still mapped drives to the old file server.
- Backup and disaster recovery gaps that the cyber insurance renewal would no longer tolerate.
A pure lift-and-shift to Azure would have preserved every bad architectural decision and produced a surprise invoice within 60 days. A pure SaaS migration would have stranded two line-of-business applications that genuinely needed a Windows server.
How it was solved
The engagement started with a two-week assessment, not a migration. We inventoried workloads, mapped data flows, interviewed department leads about how files actually move, and produced a written target-state design with three options at different price points.
The chosen path was a hybrid one, and it was delivered in phases:
Microsoft 365 stabilization first
Before touching any servers, we cleaned up the M365 tenant: enforced MFA and conditional access, migrated mailboxes to Exchange Online, moved active project files to SharePoint and OneDrive with a sane permissions model, and enrolled laptops in Intune. This alone eliminated about 40% of the on-premises footprint and gave users a working remote experience.
Targeted Azure migration
The two line-of-business applications that required Windows Server were rehosted to right-sized Azure VMs behind a small hub-and-spoke network. Domain controllers were rebuilt fresh in Azure rather than migrated, which cleared a decade of Group Policy debris. Reserved instances and autoshutdown schedules brought monthly Azure spend in line with the original budget.
Backup, DR, and documentation
A new backup and disaster recovery (BDR) stack with immutable, offsite copies replaced the old appliance. Recovery objectives were written down, tested, and shared with the cyber insurance broker. Every system, credential, and runbook was documented in a client-accessible portal before handoff to managed operations.
TL;DR: Stabilize Microsoft 365 first, migrate only what truly needs to be a server, and document everything before flipping to managed operations.
Outcomes
Without inventing precise figures, the pattern in engagements like this is consistent: the server room gets decommissioned, the IT manager stops doing after-hours patching, the cyber insurance questionnaire gets answered with evidence instead of hedging, and monthly IT spend becomes a predictable operating line rather than a series of capital surprises. End users typically notice two things — files open faster from anywhere, and password resets stop being a help-desk ritual.
Takeaway for the reader
If any part of that scenario sounds familiar — an aging server, a half-used M365 tenant, a backup story you wouldn't want to defend in an audit — the right next step is an assessment, not a migration quote. Our cloud and infrastructure services are built around getting the design right before anyone touches production.
Why PGH Networks
We're a Pittsburgh-based managed services provider, and our engineers live and work across the region: Downtown, the South Hills near our Greentree office, the North Hills, Cranberry, Monroeville, Robinson, Washington, and the Mon Valley. When something needs hands on hardware — a switch swap in Southpointe or a server decommission in the Strip — we drive there.
A few things that tend to matter to buyers evaluating us:
- Compliance depth. We support clients operating under HIPAA, SOC 2, and CMMC requirements, and we write documentation auditors actually accept.
- AI-aware infrastructure. Because we also run a dedicated AI workflows and custom AI applications practice, our cloud designs account for data governance, identity, and access patterns that newer Copilot and LLM-based tools require. Most infrastructure shops are still catching up to this.
- Vendor-honest design. We're a Microsoft-centric shop where that's the right answer, but we'll recommend against Azure when a workload belongs on M365, on a SaaS product, or, occasionally, on a small on-prem appliance.
- Right-sized for small and mid-market. We're large enough to staff a migration properly and small enough that a partner at the firm can call the same engineer twice.
Good infrastructure work is judged years later, by what didn't break and what didn't surprise the CFO.
Get a tailored proposal
Tell us what your environment looks like today and where leadership wants the business to be in 18 months. We'll respond with a written assessment scope, a realistic timeline, and a fixed price — not a generic brochure. Most discovery conversations take about 30 minutes.
Frequently asked questions
Do you handle full server-to-cloud migrations, or only Microsoft 365?
Both. A typical engagement includes Microsoft 365 (Exchange Online, SharePoint, Teams, Intune), Azure infrastructure for workloads that still need a server, identity consolidation in Entra ID, and a modern backup and disaster recovery layer across all of it.
What if some of our applications can't move to the cloud?
That's common, and it's fine. Many clients run a hybrid model where line-of-business applications stay on a small on-premises footprint or a colocated host while email, files, identity, and endpoint management move to the cloud. We design for the workloads you actually have.
Can you support compliance requirements like HIPAA, SOC 2, or CMMC?
Yes. We build environments with the controls, logging, and documentation those frameworks expect, and we work directly with your auditor or assessor. Compliance posture is part of the design phase, not an afterthought.
How is pricing structured?
Project work (assessments, migrations, hardware refreshes) is quoted as fixed-fee against a written scope. Ongoing managed cloud and infrastructure services are billed monthly per user or per workload, depending on what fits the environment. You'll see the math before signing.
How quickly can a project start?
Discovery calls are usually scheduled within a week. Assessments typically run two to four weeks, and migration timelines depend on size and complexity — most small and mid-market projects complete within 60 to 120 days from kickoff.