A financial-services client had a 4-month migration window: decommission a 2.4 MW legacy hall, re-rack the workloads into a leased colocation across the road, and never touch trading traffic. Their permanent team was the right size for BAU — hiring six more full-time engineers for 16 weeks would have taken longer than the migration itself. Here is how the surge model actually worked in practice.
Six engineers, three roles, one shared calendar
We embedded a mixed crew: two lead engineers (chain-of-custody + secure-erase), three cabling+re-rack specialists, and one dedicated documentation engineer whose only job was maintaining the as-built diagrams. On a migration, documentation drift is the source of every downtime incident 6 months later.
The team dissolved on Week 17 — no notice period, no severance, no permanent-hire drag. That's the whole point of the model.
- 2 leads: chain-of-custody + secure-erase certified
- 3 field engineers: high-density cabling + rack integrations
- 1 documentation engineer: as-built diagrams + spreadsheets
- 0 involvement in client's BAU work — cleanly ring-fenced
Never touch anything during exchange hours
Every migration activity was scheduled outside of trading hours — evenings, nights, weekends. The client's own operations team gave us hard windows and we hit every one. Where a rack could not be moved in a single window, we set up a mirror configuration so the live side kept serving until the exact cutover minute.
€310k saved vs. equivalent permanent headcount
For a 16-week engagement, six permanent hires at fully-loaded EMEA rates would have cost the client roughly €640k — with a 3-month recruitment cycle and a de facto 12-month minimum term. Our surge team delivered the same work for €330k with zero long-tail HR obligation. The savings paid for the colo lease for its first year.
“We got the migration our board wanted without carrying six engineers we didn't need in month five.”
The temp-vs-permanent choice isn't ideological, it's arithmetic. For a defined-window workload, the surge model is always cheaper AND faster. The only requirement is that the engineers who land on your floor are the real thing — vetted, certified, and ring-fenced from your BAU team so they don't get pulled onto other work.