GCP & Workspace migration
Client engagement · September – November 2025 · Anonymized
A move onto Google Cloud and Google Workspace — identity, productivity, and the cloud foundation underneath. We led the engagement from the PM, leadership, and SRE seat: planning the cutover, keeping stakeholders aligned across time zones, and making sure the systems that landed were operable, not just migrated.
Outcomes
The number we are proudest of is the one that shrank. The client arrived with roughly 500 accounts and 500 projects accumulated over years, and the instinct in a migration like this is to move all of it. Instead we went through the inventory with them and worked out what was actually load-bearing — which is how ten GCP projects ended up carrying what five hundred nominally held.
The story
The client needed to leave a fragmented stack behind and land on GCP plus Workspace as a coherent platform. The technical work was real — org structure, networking, IAM, Workspace rollout, and the operational habits that make a migration stick — but so was the coordination. Delivery ran alongside an overseas partner; someone had to own the plan, the status, the risk calls, and the documentation the whole team could actually use.
We took that role. Week to week that meant driving the project plan, running leadership and partner syncs, translating technical progress into clear updates, and building the runbooks and architecture notes that survive the cutover. From the SRE side we cared about the boring load-bearing pieces: identity and access that wouldn’t surprise people on Monday, environments that matched between partners, observability and ownership so incidents had a home, and a migration sequence that preferred reversible steps over big-bang hope.
By November the org was on GCP and Workspace with a documented operating picture — who owned what, how changes landed, and how the partner and internal teams stayed in sync. We left them with a migration they could explain and a platform they could run, not a handoff of unexplained tickets.
What we delivered
- Migration leadership — project plan, risk tracking, stakeholder updates, and decision cadence across client leadership and an overseas delivery partner
- GCP foundation — org and project structure, IAM posture, networking baselines, and environment conventions the partner and internal teams could share
- Workspace rollout — identity and productivity cutover support, admin and user-facing guidance, and sequenced go-live coordination
- Operability & SRE — runbooks, architecture and request-flow docs, ownership maps, and post-cutover habits so the platform stayed supportable
- Partner coordination — clear interfaces between remote delivery and local leadership so status, blockers, and handoffs didn’t get lost across time zones
- Dependency mapping before cutover — we traced which services depended on what, so every window had a known blast radius and a stated expected downtime rather than a hope
Stack at a glance
| Layer | Choice |
|---|---|
| Cloud | Google Cloud Platform |
| Productivity / identity | Google Workspace |
| Delivery | Partner-led implementation · Cool Consulting PM / leadership / SRE |
| Operability | Runbooks · architecture docs · stakeholder updates |
Details of the client organization are withheld under NDA. Want a similar migration led for your team? Get in touch.