Our manifesto

The server in your closet is a habit, not a necessity.

Why we bet the entire company on cloud-only — and why we think every 15–250 person organization should leave servers behind.

There was a time when servers made sense.

Twenty years ago, if you wanted email, shared files, and centralized user accounts, you bought a server. There was no alternative. The MSP industry grew up around that reality — selling hardware, installing it, patching it, and billing for the hours it consumed.

That world is gone. Exchange Online replaced the mail server. SharePoint and OneDrive replaced the file server. Entra ID replaced the domain controller. Intune replaced Group Policy. For the overwhelming majority of small and midsize organizations, every job the server did now has a cloud-native equivalent that's more secure, more reliable, and more capable.

But most MSPs never changed their business model. Here's where most MSPs get this wrong: they added cloud services on top of the server business instead of replacing it — because the server business is where the margin lives.

The case for cloud-only, honestly stated.

Security

Microsoft spends over $1B a year on cloud security. Your server gets patched when someone remembers, sits behind a firewall from 2019, and is one stolen credential from ransomware. The comparison isn't close.

Cost

No hardware refresh every 4–6 years. No server OS and CAL licensing. No backup appliance, no UPS, no warranty renewals, no maintenance hours. Predictable per-user pricing instead of capital surprises.

Disaster recovery

A flooded office or a failed RAID array used to be an existential event. Cloud-only, it's an inconvenience: your data, identity, and apps live in geo-redundant datacenters. Grab a laptop, sign in, keep working.

Remote and hybrid work

No VPN bottlenecks, no "it only works in the office." Conditional Access secures the connection based on identity and device health — from anywhere, without the legacy plumbing.

Deeper Microsoft integration

Teams, SharePoint, OneDrive, and Copilot are built to work together in the cloud. A file server is a dead end for search, co-authoring, versioning, DLP, and everything Microsoft ships next.

Simplicity

Every server is an ongoing project: patching, monitoring, backing up, replacing. Remove the server and the whole category of work — and risk — disappears with it.

The uncomfortable part

Why is your MSP still recommending servers?

Maybe your workload genuinely requires one — a few still do, and we'll tell you if yours is one of them.

But understand the economics: hardware margin, installation projects, warranty renewals, and maintenance hours are the traditional MSP's best revenue. Every server they retire shrinks their business.

We built Level2 with the opposite incentive. We sell no hardware. We bill no maintenance hours. Our only path to revenue is managing your Microsoft 365 environment well enough that you stay. That alignment is the whole point.

See how we retire servers

What replaced what

Exchange ServerExchange Online
File serverSharePoint + OneDrive
Domain controllerEntra ID
Group PolicyIntune
VPNConditional Access
Backup applianceGeo-redundant cloud storage
Fair questions

The objections, answered honestly.

Cloud-only isn't a religion — it's an engineering position. These are the pushbacks we hear most, with the real answers.

Schedule a Microsoft 365 Strategy Session
For organizations of 15–250 users: almost always, yes. Microsoft invests over a billion dollars annually in cloud security and employs thousands of security engineers. Your server closet gets patched when someone remembers. The honest comparison isn't 'cloud vs. a perfectly maintained server' — it's cloud vs. the server you actually have.
When your internet is down, an on-premises server serves files to an office that can't email, take calls over VoIP, or reach any web application. Modern work is already internet-dependent. Meanwhile, OneDrive and SharePoint sync files locally, so your team keeps working on cached copies during an outage.
Owning hardware looks cheaper only when you exclude what it actually costs: replacement cycles every 4–6 years, server OS and CAL licensing, backup infrastructure, UPS and cooling, warranty renewals, and — the big one — the MSP hours spent patching and maintaining it. Modeled honestly over five years, cloud-only usually wins, and it always wins on risk.
Some line-of-business applications still require Windows Server. Our assessment identifies them, and there are usually three paths: a cloud-native version from the vendor, hosting in Azure, or — occasionally — the honest answer that you should keep that one workload where it is until the vendor catches up. Cloud-only is the destination; we don't pretend every road is finished.
Because servers are good business — for the MSP. Hardware margins, installation projects, warranty renewals, and the ongoing maintenance hours that servers generate are significant revenue streams. We're not saying every MSP recommending a server is acting in bad faith. We're saying the incentive exists, and you should know it does.
Nearly everything, for most of our clients: email in Exchange Online, files in SharePoint and OneDrive, identity in Entra ID, devices in Intune. Specialized workloads may live in Azure or a vendor's cloud. What cloud-only means precisely: nothing business-critical runs on hardware in your office.

Related

Ready to retire the closet?

Bring us your server inventory. We'll map every workload to its cloud-native replacement — and flag anything that genuinely can't move yet.

Schedule a Microsoft 365 Strategy Session