Harbor Logistics coordinates freight across the Northeast with a dispatch team of about 60 people. The whole operation ran on a single on-premise server that had failed twice in one quarter. Each outage stopped dispatch cold, and the second one cost them a full afternoon of billable loads.
The situation
The server hosted everything: the dispatch database, file shares, email, and a legacy line-of-business app the previous IT vendor had installed and never documented. Backups ran to a USB drive in the same rack. There was no test restore on record, and the hardware was six years past its warranty.
The team knew they needed to move, but every migration quote they had received started with "expect a weekend of downtime, possibly more." For a business that runs Saturdays, that was the same as saying "expect to lose money."
What we did
We started with the free assessment: mapped every workload on the box, identified what actually depended on what, and found that the undocumented legacy app only mattered to two workflows, both of which had modern replacements the team already licensed but never adopted.
The migration itself ran in parallel, not as a cutover cliff. We stood up the cloud environment alongside the old server, synced data continuously for two weeks, and moved the team over one department at a time, starting with the group that could tolerate a hiccup and ending with dispatch. The old server stayed live as a fallback until every department had run a full week in the new environment.
Email moved the same way, mailbox by mailbox, with the old system forwarding until the last account switched.
The results
Cutover happened on a Tuesday, on purpose. Nobody stopped working; most of the dispatch team could not tell you which day it was. Since the migration, uptime has held at 99.9%, backups run automatically to a separate region and get restore-tested on schedule, and the six-year-old server is a shelf.
Harbor stayed on as a Managed IT client. Their operations director summed it up better than we could: "We moved our entire team to the cloud without a single day of downtime. Voltek planned every step and stayed on the line until it was done."
Running on hardware you don't trust? Talk to us before it decides for you.