Moving to a Larger Office? How to Scale Your IT

Moving to a larger office is one of the most exciting milestones for a growing business. It signals success, ambition, and the confidence to invest in your future. But alongside the excitement of choosing new furniture and planning the layout, there is a critical operational challenge that too many businesses underestimate: scaling your IT infrastructure to match your new space and your growing team.

For UK SMEs, an office move is often the trigger for a complete IT overhaul. The technology that served you well in a small office with fifteen people may be woefully inadequate for a larger premises housing forty or fifty staff. Network infrastructure, internet connectivity, telephony, server capacity, security systems, and user support all need to be reconsidered and, in most cases, significantly upgraded.

This guide provides a comprehensive, practical framework for scaling your IT when moving to a larger office. Whether you are relocating within the same city or moving from a serviced office in Manchester to a dedicated premises in Leeds, the principles remain the same. Get the IT right, and your move becomes a catalyst for productivity and growth. Get it wrong, and you face weeks of disruption, frustrated staff, and costs that spiral far beyond your budget.

The challenge is compounded by the fact that IT requirements do not scale linearly. Doubling your staff count does not simply mean buying twice as many laptops. It means upgrading your internet bandwidth, redesigning your network architecture, increasing your cybersecurity posture, rethinking your backup strategy, and often migrating from systems designed for small teams to platforms built for larger organisations. The office move is your one opportunity to get all of this right in a single, coordinated effort rather than addressing each issue piecemeal over the following months and incurring far greater cost and disruption in the process.

Start with an IT Audit of Your Current Setup

Before you can plan your IT for the new office, you need a thorough understanding of what you currently have and how it is performing. An IT audit should be the very first step in your move planning process, ideally conducted at least three months before the move date.

Your audit should catalogue every piece of IT equipment: servers, switches, routers, firewalls, wireless access points, desktop PCs, laptops, monitors, printers, scanners, phone handsets, and any specialist hardware. For each item, record its age, condition, warranty status, and whether it will be moved, replaced, or decommissioned. Equipment that is approaching end-of-life should be flagged for replacement rather than moved to the new site.

The audit should also document your software and services. What operating systems are in use? What line-of-business applications do you rely on? Which cloud services are you subscribed to? What are your current internet speeds, and how much bandwidth are you actually consuming? What backup systems are in place, and when were they last tested? Understanding all of this is essential for planning the IT infrastructure in your new office.

Assessing Growth Capacity

When auditing your current setup with a move to larger premises in mind, do not simply document what you have today — project forward. If you are moving from a 15-person office to one that can accommodate 50 staff, your IT infrastructure needs to be designed for 50 users from day one, even if only 30 desks will be occupied immediately. Retrofitting network infrastructure after the move is expensive and disruptive, whereas installing additional capacity during the initial fit-out is comparatively inexpensive.

Consider how your technology needs will evolve over the term of your new lease. If you are signing a five-year lease, think about where your business will be in five years. Will you need more bandwidth as cloud adoption increases? Will new meeting rooms require video conferencing equipment? Will a growing remote workforce demand a more capable VPN infrastructure? Designing for your future state, not just your current one, is what separates a strategic IT investment from a reactive expense.

Network Infrastructure: The Foundation of Everything

The network infrastructure in your new office is the foundation upon which everything else depends. If the network is not properly designed and installed, nothing else will work reliably. This is the area where professional planning makes the most difference, and where cutting corners causes the most problems.

Structured Cabling

For any office with more than a handful of staff, structured cabling is essential. This means running Cat6a (or Cat6 at minimum) Ethernet cables from a central comms room to every desk position, meeting room, and common area. Each desk position should have at least two data points — one for a computer and one for a VoIP phone or other device.

When planning cabling for a larger office, always over-provision. Install more data points than you currently need. Adding cables after the initial installation is expensive and disruptive, especially if walls have been plastered and floors carpeted. A good rule of thumb is to install at least 30% more data points than your current headcount requires. If you are moving in with 30 staff and plan to grow to 50, cable for at least 65 positions.

Wireless Network Design

Wi-Fi is no longer a nice-to-have — it is essential for laptops, mobile devices, meeting room systems, and guest access. But wireless networks in larger offices need careful planning. The consumer-grade access points that worked in your small office will not provide adequate coverage, capacity, or security in a larger space.

You need enterprise-grade wireless access points positioned according to a professional wireless survey. This survey maps the physical space, identifies sources of interference (thick walls, metal structures, neighbouring networks), and determines the optimal placement and number of access points. For a typical multi-room office, you should expect one access point per 100 to 150 square metres, though this varies significantly depending on the building construction and the number of wireless clients.

Network Switching and Core Infrastructure

The network switches that sit at the heart of your infrastructure deserve careful attention during a move to larger premises. Consumer or small-business switches that served you adequately with 15 users will not cope with 40 or 50 devices. You need managed, enterprise-grade switches with sufficient port density, Power over Ethernet capability for wireless access points and VoIP phones, and support for VLANs to segment your network traffic. Layer 3 switches with routing capability become important in larger environments where network segmentation is more complex and inter-VLAN routing needs to be efficient.

Consider deploying a dedicated management VLAN for your network infrastructure, a separate VLAN for voice traffic, a corporate VLAN for staff devices, and a guest VLAN for visitors. This segmentation improves both performance and security by isolating traffic types and limiting the blast radius of any security incident. A well-segmented network also makes troubleshooting far easier, because problems can be isolated to a specific VLAN rather than affecting the entire network.

Internet Connectivity: Order Early

One of the most common mistakes businesses make when moving to a new office is failing to order internet connectivity early enough. Business-grade leased lines can take 60 to 90 working days to install in the UK, and even FTTP broadband can take several weeks. If you leave this to the last minute, you risk moving into your new office with no internet connection — a situation that is as close to a complete business shutdown as you can get.

For a growing business moving to a larger office, you should consider upgrading your internet connectivity as part of the move. If you are currently running on standard broadband, a leased line will provide dedicated, symmetrical bandwidth with guaranteed speeds and an SLA for uptime and repair. Typical leased line speeds for UK SMEs range from 100 Mbps to 1 Gbps, with costs ranging from £200 to £800 per month depending on speed and location.

Always order a secondary internet connection as a failover. This could be a standard FTTP broadband line or a 4G/5G backup solution. If your primary connection fails, your business can continue operating on the backup whilst the issue is resolved. The cost of a backup connection is trivial compared to the cost of having your entire business offline.

Bandwidth Planning for a Growing Team

When sizing your internet connection for a larger office, calculate your bandwidth requirements carefully. As a general guide, allow 5 to 10 Mbps per user for typical office workloads involving email, web browsing, and cloud applications. If your staff use video conferencing heavily, increase this to 15 to 20 Mbps per user. A 40-person office with moderate video conferencing usage should be looking at a minimum of 300 Mbps dedicated bandwidth, with a 500 Mbps or 1 Gbps connection being preferable for future growth headroom.

Symmetrical upload and download speeds become increasingly important as organisations move to cloud-hosted applications and storage. Standard broadband connections typically offer much lower upload speeds than download speeds, which creates bottlenecks when staff are uploading large files, backing up data to the cloud, or participating in video calls. A leased line provides symmetrical bandwidth by default, which is one of the key reasons it is the preferred choice for business-critical connectivity in larger offices.

Security Considerations for a Larger Space

A larger office typically means a larger attack surface, both physical and digital. Your security planning needs to address both dimensions comprehensively.

Telephony and Unified Communications

An office move is the ideal time to modernise your telephony. If you are still using a traditional PBX phone system with physical handsets on every desk, moving to a cloud-based VoIP platform can save money, improve flexibility, and integrate with your other communication tools.

Platforms like Microsoft Teams Phone, 8x8, RingCentral, and 3CX provide enterprise calling features — auto-attendant, call queuing, call recording, voicemail to email — without the need for expensive on-premise hardware. Calls can be made and received from desk phones, laptops, or mobile devices, which is essential for hybrid working. And because the system is cloud-based, adding new users as you grow is simply a matter of purchasing additional licences.

If you do opt for VoIP, ensure that your network infrastructure supports it. Voice traffic is sensitive to latency and jitter, so Quality of Service (QoS) configuration on your switches and firewall is important. Dedicated VLANs for voice traffic are recommended to prevent data traffic from degrading call quality.

Number Porting and Meeting Room Technology

When planning your telephony migration, do not overlook the importance of number porting. If your business has been using the same telephone numbers for years, your clients know those numbers and may have them saved in their phones and CRM systems. Porting your existing numbers to a new VoIP platform is straightforward but requires advance planning — typically two to four weeks notice is needed, and the process must be coordinated carefully to avoid any gap in service during which incoming calls are lost.

Consider the meeting room experience as part of your telephony and communications planning. Larger offices typically have more meeting rooms, and equipping these with quality video conferencing capability is no longer optional for most businesses. At minimum, each meeting room should have a large display, a quality camera, and a speakerphone or ceiling microphone array. Integration with your chosen platform — whether Microsoft Teams, Zoom, or Google Meet — should be seamless, allowing staff to walk into any room and start a call within seconds rather than spending the first five minutes wrestling with technology.

The Office Move IT Timeline

A well-executed IT move follows a structured timeline. Rushing any phase creates risks that will cost you far more in disruption and remediation than the time saved.

Cloud Migration: The Move Within the Move

If you are still running on-premise servers, an office move is the perfect opportunity to migrate to the cloud. Rather than physically transporting a server to a new location — with all the risks of damage and downtime that entails — you can migrate your workloads to Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, or a UK-based hosted platform.

Cloud migration during an office move offers several advantages. You eliminate the cost and risk of transporting servers. You eliminate the need for a dedicated server room in the new office (or at least reduce its size and power requirements). You gain the scalability to add capacity as your business grows. And you improve your disaster recovery posture because your data is stored in geographically redundant data centres rather than in a single office location.

The key to a successful mid-move cloud migration is timing. Start the migration well before the move date so that systems are running in the cloud and tested before you leave the old office. This way, the physical move becomes simply a matter of connecting workstations and devices at the new site — the servers are already running in the cloud.

Hybrid Cloud and Backup Considerations

If a full cloud migration is not feasible or appropriate for your business, consider a hybrid approach. Keep latency-sensitive applications on local servers at the new office whilst migrating email, file storage, and collaboration tools to the cloud. Microsoft 365 is the most common choice for UK businesses, providing Exchange Online for email, SharePoint and OneDrive for file storage, and Teams for communication and collaboration. This hybrid model reduces the physical infrastructure required at the new office whilst maintaining the performance benefits of local hosting for applications that need it.

Whatever approach you take, ensure that your data backup strategy is updated to cover both on-premise and cloud environments. Many businesses assume that data stored in the cloud is automatically backed up, but this is not always the case. Microsoft's shared responsibility model, for example, means that whilst Microsoft ensures the availability of the platform, the responsibility for protecting your data within that platform sits with you. Third-party backup solutions for Microsoft 365 are strongly recommended to guard against accidental deletion, malicious activity, and retention policy gaps.

Budgeting for IT in Your Office Move

IT costs are one of the most commonly underestimated elements of an office move. Many businesses budget for rent, fit-out, furniture, and removals but allocate little or nothing for IT — and then face unexpected bills that strain cash flow at an already expensive time.

As a rough guide, IT infrastructure costs for a UK SME moving to a larger office typically range from £15,000 to £50,000 depending on the size of the team, the complexity of the setup, and how much existing equipment is replaced rather than moved. This figure includes structured cabling, networking equipment, internet connectivity setup, server or cloud migration, security systems, telephony, and meeting room technology.

These costs can be managed by phasing the investment. Essential infrastructure — connectivity, cabling, networking, security — must be in place for day one. Nice-to-have elements like advanced meeting room AV or digital signage can be added in subsequent weeks or months. Many IT providers offer payment plans or leasing arrangements that spread the capital expenditure over 12 to 36 months, converting a large upfront cost into a manageable monthly payment.

The most important thing is to include IT in your move budget from the very beginning. Engage your IT provider at the earliest stage of move planning — ideally before you sign the lease on the new premises. They can advise on the suitability of the building for your technology needs, identify potential issues (such as a lack of fibre connectivity or inadequate power supply for a server room), and provide accurate cost estimates that you can build into your overall move budget.

Do not forget the ongoing costs that come with a larger IT infrastructure. Managed IT support costs will increase as the number of users and devices grows. Software licensing costs scale with headcount. Internet connectivity for a larger office will cost more. Cybersecurity tools and monitoring services will need to cover a larger estate. Build these recurring costs into your operational budget alongside the capital expenditure of the move itself, so that there are no surprises in the months that follow.

It is also worth considering the cost of doing nothing — or doing too little. An office move that results in an unreliable network, inadequate internet bandwidth, or poor wireless coverage will cost your business far more in lost productivity than the investment required to get it right. If 40 staff members each lose 30 minutes per day to IT problems, that equates to 20 person-hours per day, or roughly £3,000 per week in lost productivity for a business with average UK salaries. The payback period on a properly designed IT infrastructure is measured in weeks, not years.