Microsoft 365 & Cloud Services

The licence is identical and so is the underlying Microsoft agreement — what changes is who looks after it. As a Microsoft direct billing partner, we supply the licences, manage renewals and seat changes, and act as your primary administrator, so when something goes wrong you call our helpdesk rather than queueing with Microsoft support. Licensing also stops being a job someone in your business has to remember: we tell you about renewals around 30 days out, add or remove seats as your headcount changes, and flag when a cheaper plan mix would cover what your team actually uses. Everything arrives on one invoice alongside any other services you take from us. Buying direct works fine if you have someone technical who enjoys licence administration; most of the businesses we work with would rather nobody had that job.

It depends on how stable your headcount is, and the honest answer is usually a mix. Microsoft charges roughly a 20% premium for monthly-term subscriptions compared with annual ones, but monthly licences can be dropped as people leave. Annual and multi-year subscriptions are cheaper and the price is locked for the whole term — Microsoft price rises don't touch you mid-term — but you're committed to the seats for the year. So the pattern we usually recommend is annual subscriptions for your stable core team and monthly for the flexible edge: contractors, seasonal staff, and roles you're not sure will exist in six months. We'll model both options against your actual staff list before you commit, and because we manage the renewals, the mix gets reviewed rather than rolling over unexamined year after year.

A staged move of your email, files, and day-to-day tools into Microsoft 365, planned so your team keeps working throughout. We start by mapping what you have — mailboxes, file shares, old servers, and the applications that depend on them — then migrate in stages, usually email first, files next, with both systems running in parallel until everything is verified. Staff typically notice a weekend cutover and not much else. Good Seed Trust is a fair example of the destination: a non-profit running early childhood centres and holiday programmes across Auckland that moved 100% to the cloud with us, lifted productivity, and lowered their costs at the same time. The migration also forces some useful tidying — file structures get rationalised, and old accounts get closed — so you arrive in Microsoft 365 cleaner than you left the old system.

Not in the way most people assume, and this catches businesses out. Microsoft keeps your services running and offers retention windows — a deleted email or file can usually be recovered for a limited period — but retention is not backup. If ransomware encrypts your SharePoint files, if a leaver's OneDrive is purged after their account closes, or if a deletion is only noticed months later, retention alone often can't get you back. That's why we run a separate, automated backup of Microsoft 365 — email, OneDrive, SharePoint, and Teams — held independently of your tenancy and tested so we know restores actually work. It's the same principle we apply to servers and Google Workspace. Microsoft's own service agreement recommends keeping regular backups of your content; we just make sure that's actually in place before you need it.

Usually at a decision point: a server is ageing out, an office move is coming, or your team needs to work properly from anywhere. Instead of buying new hardware that will sit in a cupboard depreciating, we move the workload into Azure, where it's maintained, backed up, and scales with you. Azure Virtual Desktop is often the practical centrepiece for businesses whose software still expects to run on a server: Waterware, a 35-person plumbing and heating importer, moved to Azure Virtual Desktop with us when their old infrastructure stopped keeping up, and got streamlined internal processes and a team that can work the same way from anywhere. Azure isn't automatically the right answer — for some businesses Microsoft 365 alone covers everything — which is why we assess your actual workloads first and tell you plainly if the cheaper path is the better one.

The licence is the easy part; whether Copilot is useful depends on the state of your data. Copilot answers using whatever the person asking can access in your tenancy, so if your SharePoint is chaotic, permissions are loose, and sensitive files sit in open folders, Copilot will surface the mess — sometimes to people who were never meant to see it. Readiness means tidying that first: sensible file structure, permissions that reflect reality, and labels on the genuinely sensitive material. Then comes enablement, which is where most rollouts actually fail — staff try two prompts, get a mediocre answer, and quietly stop. We prepare the data foundations, roll Copilot out to the roles that gain the most, and train people on the prompts that matter for their actual work. Our two-hour AI workshop is a common starting point for leadership teams weighing it up.