Microsoft 365
Microsoft 365, managed properly
Email, files, accounts and licensing, along with the security settings that Microsoft leaves switched off until somebody turns them on.
For most businesses we look after, Microsoft 365 is where the company actually lives. Email, documents, calendars, and increasingly the identity that everything else logs in with. It arrives working, which is the problem: because it works out of the box, most businesses never go back and configure the parts that matter.
What we find during assessments is fairly consistent. Accounts still active for people who left. Licences being paid for monthly by nobody in particular. Multi-factor authentication switched on for some staff and not others. And the domain settings that stop somebody sending email as you either missing or half done.
The settings that are off until someone turns them on
There's a set of controls in Microsoft 365 that make a genuine difference and are not enabled by default. Multi-factor authentication across every account rather than the ones that volunteered. Rules that stop a mailbox quietly forwarding itself to an outside address, which is one of the commonest signs of a compromised account. And SPF, DKIM and DMARC, three domain records that between them tell the rest of the world which servers are allowed to send email as your business.
None of that costs anything beyond the licence you already pay for. It's a configuration job, done once, and it closes the route most commonly used to impersonate a business to its own customers. It's part of tenant management on Advanced and Premium, and it's one of the first things the free assessment looks at whatever plan you're on.
What's covered
- User accounts opened and closed, on every plan
- Licence assignment, and finding the ones you're paying for and not using
- Multi-factor authentication rolled out across the business
- Email authentication records, so nobody can send as your domain
- Mailbox forwarding rules monitored for the signs of a compromised account
- Shared mailboxes, distribution lists and permissions
User account management is on every plan. Full Microsoft 365 tenant management comes in on Advanced.
Compare the three plans, or read what the monthly fee covers.
Questions we get asked
- Can you take over our existing Microsoft 365 setup?
- Yes, and it's how most of these start. The first job is establishing who actually owns the tenant, because it's occasionally registered to a previous IT provider rather than to your business, and that's worth discovering early.
- Somebody received an email pretending to be from our owner. Preventable?
- Largely, yes. The domain records that authorise which servers can send as you are frequently missing or incomplete, and setting them up correctly stops most impersonation attempts before they arrive.
- Are we paying for licences we don't use?
- Very possibly. Unused licences accumulate quietly as people leave, and reviewing them is part of taking a tenant over. It's one of the few parts of this job that sometimes reduces a bill.
- Do you handle email migration from another system?
- Yes. A migration is project work rather than part of the monthly fee, so it's scoped and quoted before it starts and you approve the number first.
Related
Start with the assessment
An hour on site, at no cost. You'll get a written summary of what you're running, what's out of date, and what we would deal with first.