Information technology (IT) is the part of an office move that decides whether Monday works. Desks in the wrong place are an irritation. A network that is not live is a business that cannot trade. The physical relocation of servers, comms and workstations is rarely the hard part. The hard part is connectivity lead times, which run to weeks and cannot be compressed once the date is fixed.
Order circuits the week the lease is signed. That single instruction prevents more downtime than everything else in this article combined, because a leased line ordered late will not arrive on time however well the rest of the move is planned.
Summary: Order connectivity first and build everything else around it. Survey the new comms room before committing to a date. Run the old and new networks in parallel where you can. Move over a weekend, decommission in a labelled and photographed order, and test with real users before the crew leaves. Phones are less fragile than people fear: Ofcom General Condition C7 requires providers to port your number on reasonable terms, without charging you directly, and caps any loss of service at one working day.
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Lead times decide the date
| Item | Where it sits in the queue | Order when | Consequence of ordering late |
|---|---|---|---|
| Leased line or dedicated fibre | The longest lead time in the whole project | The week the lease is signed | The single biggest cause of post-move downtime |
| Business broadband as backup | Shorter than a leased line, still measured in weeks | Same time as the primary circuit | No fallback if the main line slips |
| Structured cabling and patching | Scheduled works rather than a delivery date | As soon as the layout is agreed | Desks with no live ports |
| Comms room power and cooling | Depends entirely on the building | After the survey, before fit-out | Equipment that cannot be switched on |
| Phone number porting | Fixed to an agreed switch date | Once the circuit date is confirmed | Calls routing to an empty building |
| Hardware refresh | Entirely within your control, which is the point | Only if genuinely needed | Avoidable ambiguity during a move |
Number porting deserves particular attention because it is invisible until it fails. The constraint is not how long a port takes, it is that the switch happens on a date agreed in advance. If the move slips and the port does not, calls route to a site nobody is sitting in.
The regulatory position is more forgiving than most businesses assume, and worth knowing before anyone panics. Ofcom requires the switch to happen on the date you asked for where that is technically possible, caps any loss of service at one working day, and obliges the losing provider to keep the service running on the same terms until the switch completes. If a port fails outright, the number and the services attached to it have to be reactivated until the process works. You also keep the right to port for at least a month after switching, so missing the window on moving weekend is not the disaster it feels like at the time.
Where a business runs on cloud telephony rather than physical lines, all of this simplifies considerably, which is one good reason a relocation is a sensible moment to leave an on-premise phone system behind.
Surveying the new comms room
Go and look before you sign anything. What matters is where the incoming circuits terminate, whether there is adequate power on a suitable circuit, whether the room can be cooled, whether it can be locked, and whether a rack will physically fit through the door. A populated rack is a serious load rather than an awkward one, and HSE guidance INDG143 on manual handling at work is clear that its published weight figures are risk filters rather than safe limits, so plan the route and the equipment rather than the muscle.
Comms rooms in older buildings are frequently repurposed cupboards, and the problems are consistent: no ventilation, a single socket on a shared circuit, and a doorway narrower than a standard rack. Each is solvable, and each takes time and money that nobody budgeted.
- Power. Dedicated circuits, sufficient capacity, and an uninterruptible power supply (UPS) sized for a controlled shutdown rather than for running through an outage.
- Cooling. A sealed cupboard with active equipment gets hot quickly. Ventilation or cooling is not optional above a small load.
- Access and security. A lockable room, with a documented list of who holds keys or codes.
- Cable routes. Where the incoming service enters and how it reaches the rack. Containment costs more than people expect.
- Physical access. Door widths, lift capacity and turning space for a fully populated rack.
- Water risk. Never site a rack beneath a bathroom or a pipe run. This happens more often than it should.
Have your IT provider attend the viewing rather than describing the room to them afterwards. Fifteen minutes on site prevents a category of problem that is expensive to fix once the fit-out has started, and it feeds directly into the wider office relocation budget.
Decommissioning without losing anything
Photograph the back of every rack and every workstation before unplugging a single cable, then label both ends of everything. Reassembly is fast when the photographs exist and extremely slow when they do not. Work to an asset inventory while you are at it, because the NCSC 10 Steps guidance on data security starts from knowing what data you hold and where it is stored, and a move is the moment that knowledge is easiest to lose.
Take a full backup and verify it before the move, not during. A verified restore point taken the day before is the only thing standing between a dropped server and a very bad week. Test that the backup actually restores rather than assuming the job completed.
Every device that leaves the old site should be recorded, and every device should be accounted for at the new one. Office moves are one of the more common points at which laptops and monitors quietly disappear, and an inventory is what makes that visible rather than merely suspected.
Shut equipment down gracefully rather than pulling power. Servers and storage arrays in particular need an orderly shutdown, and a hard power-off is how a disk that was fine yesterday fails to come back.
Transport racks upright, strapped, on a tail lift, and never stacked with other items on top. Hard drives and rack rails do not tolerate being dropped, and a rack tipping in transit destroys considerably more than its own value.
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Data protection during the move
Personal data in transit is still your responsibility under the UK General Data Protection Regulation (UK GDPR). Servers, backup media and paper records all move outside your normal security perimeter during a relocation, which is exactly the window in which losses happen. If one does, the clock is short: the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) guidance on responding in the first 72 hours requires a reportable breach to reach the regulator within 72 hours of you becoming aware of it, counted from discovery rather than from the loss.
Encrypt anything that can be encrypted before it moves. Full disk encryption on laptops and portable drives is the single most effective control available here, and it changes the regulatory picture as well as the practical one, because a device whose data cannot be read by whoever finds it is a materially different incident from one whose data can.
Keep backup media separate from the servers they back up. Moving both in the same vehicle removes the point of having a backup, and it is a mistake that only reveals itself in the worst circumstances.
Equipment being retired rather than moved needs proper sanitisation, not a trip to the tip. Ask for a certificate of destruction covering each asset by serial number, keep it, and strip any labels that identify the business before the kit leaves the building. Deleting files is not destruction, and a business that disposes of a server carelessly has created a breach it will not know about.
The commonly missed part is that servers and laptops are not the only things holding data. Printers and multifunction devices, routers, switches, monitors, memory cards and the rest all contain storage of some kind, and there are documented cases of sensitive documents being recovered from decommissioned photocopiers. Treat every device with a memory chip in it as in scope, and sweep the store cupboard as well as the comms room.
Paper records need the same discipline. Our guide to business archiving before an office move covers retention periods and secure shredding, which is the paper equivalent of this conversation.
Telling people the address has changed
A business address appears in more systems than anyone remembers, and one of them is legally load-bearing. Per GOV.UK guidance on changing a limited company’s address, your registered office does not officially change until Companies House has registered it, the new address must sit in the same part of the UK the company was incorporated in, and you must also tell them where your records are kept.
That jurisdiction rule catches people out. A company registered in England and Wales cannot simply move its registered office to Scotland, and a business relocating across that boundary has to re-incorporate rather than file a change of address. Worth knowing before the lease is signed rather than after.
Companies House does pass the registered office change to HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC), so that much is handled. What it does not cover is the rest of your tax footprint: Pay As You Earn (PAYE) and Value Added Tax (VAT) records are held separately and need updating in their own right. If your organisation pays the data protection fee, the ICO holds your address too, and the ICO change of details service is where that gets corrected. All three carry obligations rather than merely being useful.
Then the operational layer: bank and card providers, insurers, payroll, pension provider, and any supplier who invoices you. An invoice sent to an old address is an invoice that gets paid late, which is a cash flow problem created by an administrative one.
Finally the visible layer, which is the one customers notice: the website, Google Business Profile, directory listings, email signatures, invoice templates, letterheads and signage. A Google Business Profile still showing the old address sends customers to a building you have left, and that is the version of this mistake that costs revenue.
Sequencing the cutover
A standard weekend cutover runs roughly as follows. The order of operations matters more than the speed of any individual step, and each stage has a precondition that is worth checking rather than assuming.
| Stage | When | What must be true before starting |
|---|---|---|
| New site network live and tested | Days or weeks before | Circuit installed, cabling terminated and tested |
| Verified backup taken | The day before | Restore tested, media held separately |
| Graceful shutdown and decommission | Friday evening | Photographs and labels complete |
| Transport and rack installation | Saturday | Comms room powered, cooled and accessible |
| Core services up, then workstations | Saturday into Sunday | Network confirmed working first |
| User acceptance testing | Sunday | Real staff logging in, not just IT |
| Support presence on site | Monday morning | Someone physically there, not on a phone |
Two things in that sequence carry most of the risk. The first is the order of the first two rows: the new site should be live and tested before anything is switched off at the old one. Running both in parallel for a period costs a little in duplicated connectivity and removes almost all of the risk, because you retain somewhere to fall back to.
The second is user acceptance testing by actual staff, which is what catches the problems IT will not. A network engineer confirms the network works. An accounts assistant discovers that the label printer is not mapped, the scanner does not reach the shared folder, and the practice management system times out. Those are Monday problems unless somebody finds them on Sunday.
Have IT physically present on the first morning. Remote support on day one at a new site is a false economy, because half the issues are people not knowing where things are.
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Two small things repeatedly cause disproportionate trouble on the first morning. Printers and multifunction devices need their network settings reconfigured and their drivers repointed, and almost nobody plans for it, so a whole floor discovers simultaneously that nothing prints. And door entry, alarm and access control systems are frequently forgotten entirely until the first person to arrive gets there before the person with the code.
Add both to the checklist explicitly, along with the wifi credentials for guests, the meeting room booking system and whatever handles visitor sign-in. None of them are technically difficult and all of them are visible failures on day one.
When not to move the hardware at all
If your servers are approaching end of life, a relocation is the wrong time to move them and the right time to retire them. Migrating to cloud services beforehand means there is no comms room to survey, no rack to transport, and no single point of failure travelling in a van. Retiring is not the same as skipping, though: NCSC guidance on secure sanitisation of storage media expects anything holding data sensitive to your business to be sanitised before it leaves your control.
IT providers with a hardware business have an obvious interest in moving hardware. The honest position is that for a lot of small and mid-sized businesses, the equipment in the comms room no longer needs to exist.
A file server and an on-premise mail server are the two most commonly retired during a relocation, and both have mature cloud equivalents. Doing that migration ahead of the move rather than during it removes the highest-risk element of the whole project, and it changes what you need from the new premises.
The caveat is not doing both at once. A cloud migration and a physical relocation in the same week is two major changes stacked, and when something breaks nobody knows which change caused it. Migrate first, settle, then move.
Equally, do not refresh hardware during a move for the sake of it. New laptops issued the same week as a new building means every problem is ambiguous, and the support load doubles at exactly the wrong moment.
Staff and the human side of the cutover
Tell people what will change and what will not, in writing, before the weekend. Most first-day support tickets are questions rather than faults, and a single clear email answers the majority of them before they are raised. Include the security instructions too, because a laptop taken home over a moving weekend and left on a train is precisely the scenario the ICO guide to personal data breaches is describing when it talks about loss of confidentiality.
Cover the basics: whether logins change, whether the wifi name and password are different, where to find printers, who to contact if something does not work, and what to do on Monday morning if a machine will not start. Ask people to shut down properly on the Friday rather than locking the screen, since a machine that never powered off will not pick up new network settings.
Ask staff to clear their own desks and take laptops, chargers and anything personal home with them. Loose cables and personal items are what get lost in an office move, and nobody can chase a charger that was never on an inventory.
Nominate a contact per department for the Sunday testing. They know what their team actually uses, and they will find the specialist application or the scanner workflow that IT would never think to check. That single hour is worth more than any amount of documentation.
Finally, set expectations honestly. Something will not work on Monday morning. Saying so in advance, with a clear route for reporting it, converts a frustrating day into a manageable one.
How EcoGreen Movers handles IT equipment
We work alongside your IT provider rather than around them, moving racks, workstations and screens to a sequence they set. EcoGreen Movers uses reusable crates and screen-specific protection rather than cardboard, and works out of hours so the cutover happens when the business is closed. If you are still choosing a firm, our list of questions to ask before hiring an office relocation company covers what to establish before anyone quotes.
We handle office removals and commercial relocation nationwide, including London and Manchester. Plan the wider sequence with our office relocation checklist, then get in touch for a quote.
Frequently asked questions
What should be ordered first?
Connectivity, the week the lease is signed. Leased lines and dedicated fibre have the longest lead times of anything in an office move, and a late order is the most common cause of downtime on the other side.
Should the old and new networks run in parallel?
Where the budget allows, yes. A period of overlap costs a little in duplicated connectivity and gives you somewhere to fall back to if the new site is not ready. It converts a hard cutover into a staged one, which is a materially lower risk.
What drives the cost of an IT relocation?
Three things: the volume of equipment, whether the new comms room needs power, cooling or cabling work before anything can be switched on, and how much of the cutover has to happen outside normal hours. Downtime is the cost that never appears on an invoice and is usually the largest single item, which is why the sequencing above matters more than the day rate.
What about data protection?
Personal data in transit remains your responsibility under UK GDPR. Encrypt devices before they move, keep backup media separate from servers, sanitise anything being retired rather than relocated, and remember that a reportable breach has to reach the ICO within 72 hours of you becoming aware of it.
Can phone numbers move to the new office?
Yes. Ofcom General Condition C7 requires providers to port numbers on reasonable terms, without charging you directly, and to keep any loss of service to no more than one working day. The switch happens on a date agreed in advance, which is the part that needs managing if the move slips, and you keep the right to port for at least a month after switching.
In summary: circuits first, everything else after
Order connectivity the week the lease is signed, survey the comms room before committing to a date, and take a verified backup the day before. Photograph and label everything, transport racks upright, and bring core services up before workstations.
Then let real staff test it on the Sunday and have someone physically on site on the Monday. Downtime is the cost that never appears on an invoice and always exceeds the one that does.
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