14 Jul The Cost of an Unmanaged Microsoft Cloud
How much time and money are lost in the cloud?
In our previous blog, we focused on the hidden security issues that may be piling up inside your clients’ computing networks if they are using Microsoft 365 and Azure. We pointed out that, whether accidental or malicious, your clients’ employees may be performing high-risk actions within the Microsoft applications on a regular basis. Their account credentials can also be acquired via phishing scams and used by third parties to gain access to corporate data stored in the Microsoft Cloud.
A regular IT and security assessment using Network Detective Pro’s Microsoft cloud assessments can shed light on many of these security issues, allowing MSPs to create a valuable Microsoft Cloud managed security offering for their clients.
But helping your clients better monitor their Microsoft cloud environments for security issues is just one reason to perform regular assessments. Here are three other problems you can help resolve with regular Microsoft Cloud Assessments:
Wasted Money: Whenever we audit a Microsoft 365 (formerly Office 365) environment, we almost always come across situations where clients are paying for extra licenses that aren’t being used, and sometimes we discover resources in Azure that are not needed, but are being charged for monthly by Microsoft.
Among the mountain of data that Network Detective can pull is a summary of all the client’s Microsoft 365 subscriptions, how many seats they are paying for and the number actively used. It’s pretty easy to identify circumstances where a client can reduce the number of licenses and save money.
You can also use the tool to generate a SharePoint Assessment, which shows the total number of sites started under management, the number of active sites and the storage requirements. You can also view daily trends in the active sites and storage usage. It then takes the site collections and breaks down all the individual sites so you can understand what is being published in each, how they are organized and even what groups they contain. Among other things, the report helps understand growth trends and helps better predict backup needs. With SharePoint, storage equals money, so trimming unneeded files means trimming costs.
Wasted Time: Employees spend so much time in the Microsoft Cloud – sending emails, uploading documents, texting coworkers, creating teams and groups, and more – it’s very common for the environment to get quickly bloated with data and more data. This can slow things down, make it harder for your clients to locate what they need, and create duplicate copies of important records, some of which become unknowingly outdated but are still being used.
Your clients are probably not actually measuring their own productivity, but when you show them what the structure of their Microsoft Cloud actually looks like, it will be obvious to them that they need to “clean up their act,” and your assessment will be worth its weight in gold to them.
Loss of Control: You can’t manage what you can’t see or control. Without regular reporting an analysis of your clients’ Microsoft 365 and Azure environments, there’s no way for you to assume your role as a trusted technology advisor. That means you can’t help your clients manage their risks, contain costs or improve productivity.
That’s why it’s so important to run regular Microsoft Cloud assessments for every client that uses Microsoft 365 and/or Azure. And thanks to RapidFire Tools, there’s a quick, easy and affordable way to pull all this essential data out of the cloud in about 10 seconds per user, and then automatically generate a wide array of well-organized and pre-analyzed reports.
Even if you charge your clients an incremental $1 or $2 per user for this service, you’ll still be making a handsome profit and delivering to your clients a significantly improved security profile — one that is measurable and you can prove with your reports.
To learn more about this unique offering, ask for a demo.
In our next installment in this series, we’ll talk about creating your own Microsoft Cloud managed service offering.
