Microsoft 365 has become the backbone of how most businesses work — email, files, Teams calls, calendars, and increasingly the security around all of it. Getting it set up properly, keeping it tidy, and getting the value you are already paying for are three separate questions, and most businesses have only really answered the first.
We pick up Microsoft 365 in every state: fresh setups, migrations from an old Exchange server or another provider, and tenants somebody else configured years ago that nobody has looked at since.
What we actually do
- Migrations — from on-premise Exchange, from another provider, or from one tenant into another after an acquisition. One mailbox or a hundred.
- New setups — accounts, mail, file storage, Teams, and the security settings that should be on from day one rather than added after something happens.
- Tidying up — shared mailboxes nobody owns, permissions that accumulated over years, distribution lists for departments that no longer exist, accounts still active for people who left.
- SharePoint and OneDrive — file storage arranged so people can actually find things, and syncing that does not fight with itself.
- Security — multi-factor authentication, conditional access, and the settings that stop a compromised password becoming a compromised business. That overlaps with our cyber security work and with Cyber Essentials, where MFA is now a hard requirement.
- Day-to-day help — the things that stop somebody working this morning.
We will happily save you money
We’re not Microsoft resellers, so we’ve no interest in upselling you to a bigger licence than you need.
That cuts both ways, and the useful direction is the one nobody mentions: a smaller licence costs us nothing either.
Most businesses we look at are paying for something they should not be. Licences still billing for people who left. Everyone on the same plan because that is what was set up on day one, when half the team needs less and two people need more. A plan chosen three years ago for a reason that no longer applies.
Microsoft changed its business plans in July 2026 — some prices moved, mailbox sizes doubled, and features shifted between tiers. If nobody has reviewed your licensing since before then, there is a reasonable chance the right answer has changed and nobody has told you.
We will go through what you are paying for and what you actually use. Sometimes the answer is that you are on the right plan and should leave it alone, and we will tell you that too.
Microsoft does not back up your data — and this is the honest version
This gets shouted about by IT companies selling backup products, which is a shame, because underneath the noise it is a real thing worth understanding.
Microsoft’s position is straightforward and it is in their Services Agreement: they are responsible for the platform, you are responsible for your data. They keep the service running, replicated across data centres, extremely reliably. What they do not promise is to get your data back when the problem is something you did.
There are native protections, and they cover the everyday cases perfectly well:
- Deleted files and SharePoint or OneDrive items sit in a recycle bin for roughly three months
- Deleted email is recoverable for a matter of weeks
- Files keep version history, so you can roll back a bad edit
For “somebody deleted the wrong folder on Tuesday”, that is genuinely enough, and anyone telling you otherwise is selling something.
Where it runs out:
- Anything discovered after the retention window has closed — and problems in a shared file nobody opens often are frequently found months later
- Data belonging to someone who left, once their account was deleted
- Ransomware that encrypts files on a laptop which then dutifully syncs the encrypted versions up
We do not sell a backup product, so take this as information rather than a pitch. If you decide you want proper backup, there are two routes: Microsoft’s own backup service, charged by how much data you protect, or one of the established third-party products. We are happy to tell you which we would choose for your situation and to help set it up — we simply do not make anything on the licence either way.
What we would say is this: know which of those two positions you are in. Deciding you are content with the native retention is a perfectly reasonable answer. Assuming you have a backup when you do not is the one that hurts.
Inheriting somebody else’s setup
A good proportion of our Microsoft 365 work starts with a tenant configured by someone who has since moved on, with no documentation and no one who knows why anything is the way it is.
That is normal and it is fixable. We work out what is there, write down what matters, sort out the parts that are causing problems, and leave you with something you or anyone after us can understand. Nobody gets a lecture about how it should have been done.
Getting started
Tell us roughly how many people you have on Microsoft 365 and what is prompting the call — a migration, a mess, a bill that looks too big, or something that simply will not work. We will tell you what we would do and what it would cost.