Headcount: 27 (+145%)
Specialism: Cybersecurity and IT support
HQ: Woking
Marking itself out with its Microsoft Direct CSP status, this Surrey-based MSP saw average monthly headcount swell from 11 to 27 between its fiscal 2021 and 2024.
It counts charity GambleAware and recruitment agency TeacherActive among more than 250 clients.
Recent AWS datacentre outages in the Gulf are sparking “very real conversations about disaster recovery”, CEO Craig Bird tells us (see below).
Headcount has since clambered to 46, Bird said.
View the wider Fast-Growth 50 here.
Q&A with CloudTech24 CEO Craig Bird
How have you been able to increase headcount in a flat market?
With the exception of a small client book acquired via an asset sale, our growth has been achieved organically by net new client wins and upsell/cross-sell into our existing client base. The market has been notably harder in the last 18 months – continued focus on our sales processes and digital marketing is an aspect we can control. We closed 2025 with 42 team members, have already brought on four more in early 2026, and have a further six heads actively recruiting.
What mega trend do you think will most shape the year for your company?
The Iran conflict and strikes across the Gulf have been a very recent and unsettling situation. With confirmed outages hitting regional AWS datacentres, businesses are suddenly having very real conversations about disaster recovery and the challenge of true DR resilience and distributing data across multiple geographic regions versus data sovereignty constraints. We expect to be spending a lot more time in 2026 spent helping clients rearchitecting their approaches to compliance and vendor selection.
What’s a fact or quirk about your company most people won’t know about?
CloudTech24 hold Microsoft Tier 1 Direct CSP status. It’s the highest partner level and only held by very small percentage of Microsoft partners globally. In the last year this has become even more exclusive since Microsoft increased the threshold of all T1 partners from $300k to $1m of annual Microsoft spend. That increase forced many providers to migrate to an indirect reseller model. Essentially this means our clients get direct access to Microsoft & Azure licensing with no intermediary, which is a genuine differentiator and reduces suppliers in the chain.
Does the rise of AI and automation make it less likely you’ll continue to add headcount at the same rate in the coming years?
CloudTech24 already uses AI extensively internally, with dedicated in-house staff working on these projects. Over the last 18 months we’ve validated that the efficiency gains are real and that has in turn created more projects, more roles in this team, although more platforms to manage. On the client side, AI-driven threats are growing and becoming harder to identify, still in 2026 human intelligence and intuition remains a critical factor that sits above automated detection. We are expecting this to drive a greater demand for expert solutions and continued growth of our team and headcount.
Name one thing you have planned for the next 12 months
As the team grows, visibility and control are inevitably diluted. Our biggest internal focus over the next 12 months is maintaining consistency and continuity of strength through growth. It’s been a continuous focus, but doubling down on process standardisation, platform consolidation, training and documentation is key to sustainable growth and increased service value for both existing and new clients.
