Microsoft 365 gets bought for two reasons, email and the Office applications, and for most businesses that's where the story ends. The licenses renew each year, and the rest of what they include sits unopened.
I review these setups regularly. Here is what I usually find.
Licenses for people who left
I'd start with the simplest money. When someone leaves, their mailbox often needs to stay reachable for a while, and the easy way to do that is to leave the license in place. The easy way becomes the permanent way, and eighteen months later a business of forty people is paying for fifty-two seats.
There are proper ways to keep a departed employee's mail and files without paying monthly for them. If nobody has checked your license count against your headcount lately, that comparison takes ten minutes, and it's the fastest savings in IT.
Security you already pay for
In my experience, this is the part that surprises people most. Depending on the plan, a Microsoft 365 subscription commonly includes multi-factor authentication, device management, conditional access rules that block sign-ins from places your staff will never be, encryption for sensitive email, and policies that keep confidential files from wandering out of the company.
Businesses buy separate products to do these same jobs, sometimes while already paying for a Microsoft 365 plan that includes them. The features are off by default because Microsoft can't know your business. Turning them on thoughtfully is real work. Paying twice for them isn't required.
Collaboration sprawl
The opposite problem shows up too, the parts that turned themselves on. Teams and shared sites multiply on their own. Three years in, a business has hundreds of shared locations and nobody is sure what's in them. Guests invited for one project in 2023 still have access.
That isn't cause for alarm, but I'd treat it as a reason for an occasional tidy-up. Who can see what is a question you want answered on a calm afternoon, well before a client dispute or a compromised account forces it.
What a proper review looks like
A useful Microsoft 365 management review should usually end with you paying Microsoft less. Ours covers four things:
- Licenses against people, so you stop paying for ghosts
- Plan levels against actual use, since some staff need less than they have and a few need more
- Included security features against what is actually switched on
- Sharing and guest access, so who can see this has an answer
The result is a shorter bill and a safer setup, from the same subscription you already have.
Where to start
If nobody owns this in your business, that's normal. It sits between accounting, who see the bill, and whoever set up email, who has moved on to other fires. Our cloud and Microsoft 365 services include this exact review, and for businesses with their own IT staff we're glad to do it alongside an internal team.
Contact us with roughly how many people you employ and what you pay Microsoft each month. That's enough for me to tell you whether a review is likely to be worth your time. Often the answer is clear from those two numbers alone.