Before you renew your Microsoft licences, talk to us.
Two things are worth checking first. Whether you are paying for licences you do not use, and whether the tenant those licences sit in is actually secured. Most businesses are wrong about at least one of them, and renewal is the only day of the year anybody looks.
The whole tenant, not just the apps you noticed.
Every one of these is something we deploy, administer, license or secure for South African businesses. Most of them are already inside the plan you are paying for.
- Microsoft 365
- Outlook
- Word
- Excel
- PowerPoint
- OneNote
- Teams
- SharePoint
- OneDrive
- Access
- Project
- Visio
- Forms
- To Do
- Stream
- Sway
- Viva Engage
- Dynamics 365
- Loop
We supply the licensing directly.
We supply Microsoft licensing directly, so we can quote you against what you are paying now. Same licences, or the right ones, whichever the check turns up.
The check itself is free, takes thirty minutes, carries no obligation, and you keep the findings.
Seven things, in thirty minutes.
Three of them are about what you are paying. Four are about whether it is protected. Putting them in one list is deliberate, because they are the same conversation.
What you are paying for
- Every licence you hold, and whether anybody is actually using it
- Licences still assigned to people who have left
- Whether you are paying separately for something your plan already includes
Whether it is protected
- Whether multi-factor authentication is enforced on every account, including the dormant ones
- Whether legacy sign-in is switched off, or can still bypass multi-factor entirely
- How many people hold global administrator rights, and when that was last reviewed
- Whether anything is backed up independently of Microsoft
You keep the findings whether you buy anything from us or not.
Get this wrong and nothing else matters.
Microsoft 365 is not one product you bought. It is the front door to the business. Email, files, SharePoint, Teams, and the password resets for almost everything else all sit behind a single identity.
An attacker who has that identity does not need to break anything. They sign in.
Identity is now the most common way in. Microsoft’s own threat reporting and the Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report both put stolen credentials and phishing at the top of the initial-access list, and for a business without a security team that identity is almost always Microsoft 365.
It usually arrives one of three ways. A convincing sign-in page that is not Microsoft. A password reused from a service that was breached somewhere else. Or a multi-factor prompt approved by somebody tired and busy.
Seven things wrong in most tenants we open.
Multi-factor authentication is not on everything
It is on the people who asked for it, and not on the dormant accounts, the shared mailboxes or the service accounts. Those are the ones an attacker goes looking for, precisely because nobody is watching them.
Legacy sign-in is still enabled
Legacy sign-in bypasses multi-factor authentication completely. Automated password-guessing tools go looking for it first, because it turns a protected tenant back into an unprotected one.
There are too many global administrators
Usually created for a project years ago and never removed. Every one of them is a full set of keys, and most businesses cannot say how many they have without checking.
Nobody reads the sign-in logs
The information is already there. Microsoft records every sign in, where it came from and whether it succeeded. What is missing is a process that looks at it and a person who acts on what it says.
There is no conditional access
Nothing asks whether a sign in from an unexpected country at three in the morning is reasonable. Conditional access is the control that turns a password into a decision rather than a door.
Mailbox rules are unmonitored
Creating a rule that quietly forwards invoices somewhere else is the standard first move after a mailbox is taken. An unexplained new rule is one of the clearest signals of compromise, and almost nobody is alerted to it.
Nothing is backed up independently of Microsoft
Microsoft protects its own infrastructure and guarantees its service. It does not protect you from a staff member deleting a mailbox, from ransomware encrypting SharePoint, or from a departing employee, beyond limited retention windows that expire.
None of these seven are expensive to fix. Six of them are configuration. The reason they are wrong is not cost, it is that nobody has looked.
An IT audit,
and a free dark web scan.
Our specialists audit your network, computer systems, Microsoft 365 environment, cybersecurity controls and backups on site, then hand you a written report with a prioritised action plan. Every audit includes a free dark web exposure scan, run against your domain before anybody visits.
Worried about what it takes to move?
Changing IT provider is the single biggest reason businesses stay somewhere they have outgrown. We plan the move around your working week, and we help carry the cost of getting across. Ask us how that works when we speak.