Microsoft 365, run properly.
Migration, security hardening, a SharePoint people can actually find things in, and the servers you still have — with the licence count kept honest.
What we look after
Almost every company we take on is already using Microsoft 365. Very few are using it in a state anyone would describe as configured, and the gap between those two things is where most of the cost and most of the risk lives.
Tenant setup and hardening
Legacy authentication closed, multi-factor enforced, sharing rules set deliberately, and administrative roles reduced to the people who genuinely need them.
Migration
Google Workspace, an old Exchange server, or a tenant somebody set up in an afternoon in 2019. Mail, files and calendars, with a cutover planned around your week rather than ours.
SharePoint and Teams structure
A structure decided on purpose, with permissions that match how the business is actually organised. The alternative is what we usually inherit: four hundred Teams, no naming convention, and everything shared with everyone.
Identity and access
Single sign-on where your other applications support it, conditional access rules that fit real working patterns, and a joiner-mover-leaver process that runs the same way every time.
Licence right-sizing
Reconciled against your actual headcount and actual usage. Paying Business Premium for people who need nothing beyond email is the most common overspend we find, and it is often enough to change the shape of the conversation about our own price.
The servers you still have
File servers, line-of-business applications, the machine nobody wants to touch. Monitored, patched and backed up, with an honest opinion about when moving it would cost less than continuing to run it.
Backup for Microsoft 365
Their responsibility is the platform. Your data is yours, and the retention period you are relying on is shorter than you think. Exchange, SharePoint, OneDrive and Teams are backed up separately.
Offboarding and retention
What happens to a departing person's mailbox and files, how long it is kept, and who can reach it. Decided in advance rather than during a dispute.
Two things worth knowing before you talk to anyone
The first is licensing. Microsoft's pricing is negotiable in ways that are not obvious, the differences between plans are genuinely confusing, and most companies we take on are paying for at least one tier more than they use, on at least a handful of accounts that belong to nobody. We reconcile it in the first month and the saving is yours, not a discount we quietly keep.
The second is backup, and it catches people out with impressive regularity. Microsoft protects the service, not your content. If somebody deletes a SharePoint library and nobody notices for two months, the retention window has closed and it is gone. This is written plainly in Microsoft's own shared responsibility model and almost nobody reads it until the week they need it.
Whether this is the right service for you
This is usually the right shape when
- Microsoft 365 that was set up quickly and never revisited
- A migration you have been postponing because the cutover looks frightening
- A licence bill that has grown faster than headcount
- Files spread across SharePoint, a server and several personal drives
We would point you elsewhere if
- Wanting a lift-and-shift with nobody responsible afterwards
- Heavy specialist workloads in AWS or Google Cloud, where you want a dedicated cloud engineering team
- A preference for keeping everything on-premise, which is a legitimate choice and not one we would fight
Questions about cloud & microsoft 365
How disruptive is a migration?
Will we lose anything in the move?
Is Microsoft 365 backup really necessary?
Can you take over a tenant somebody else set up?
Start with a free IT assessment
Thirty minutes on a call, then a written picture of what you are running, where you are exposed, and what supporting it properly should cost per month. No obligation, and the document is yours to keep either way.