Licensing, migrations, security hardening and managed Microsoft 365 support from a UK-based Microsoft Solutions Partner. We help SMEs get the right licences, move without disruption, lock down the tenant, and keep it running properly after go-live.
You bought the licences. Your team logs in. Email works. On paper, Microsoft 365 is done. In the weeks we spend inside SME tenants, the same six patterns show up again and again.
Paying too much across the board, or paying too little and losing features you need.
MFA off for half the team, Conditional Access unset, audit logging disabled.
200 sites, no naming, no retention, sharing turned on for everyone.
Orphaned mailboxes, legacy DNS, old distribution lists never tidied up.
Rolled out with no thought about channels, external access or governance.
No idea what would happen on a bad Tuesday. No plan for when a mailbox is deleted.
Nine service areas, delivered by the same senior team from audit through to managed service. Every engagement pulls the ones you need and skips the ones you don’t.
Right SKU per team member across Business Basic, Standard, Premium, F3, E3 and E5. Typical clients save 8 to 15% on annual spend by cutting the licences they never used.
Google Workspace, on-prem Exchange, IMAP/POP3, Wix, IONOS, GoDaddy. Zero email loss, mailbox cutover usually overnight, calendars and contacts transferred cleanly.
MFA, Conditional Access, Defender for Office 365, Purview information protection, audit logging, DKIM/SPF/DMARC, and everything else Cyber Essentials asks for.
Site architecture, document libraries, retention policies, sharing controls, external guest rules. Designed for how your team actually works.
Channels, external access, meeting policies, phone system integration, sensitivity labels for Teams sites. Rolled out so people use it properly.
Laptops and mobiles enrolled and managed centrally. Lost device wipe in one click. New starter provisioned in ten minutes, not two hours.
Replace legacy PBX with Microsoft Teams Phone. Port existing numbers, keep DDIs, build call flows and IVR. Most cutovers live within a fortnight.
Microsoft 365 mailboxes, Teams chats, SharePoint sites and OneDrive backed up with immutable, ransomware-resistant snapshots. Recovery tested quarterly.
SharePoint permissions audit, sensitivity labels, sharing rules. Everything Copilot needs so it doesn’t surface confidential content to the wrong people. Then a rollout plan.
The same process for every engagement. You know what happens next, when it happens, and what the outcome looks like.
Two hours in your tenant with a senior engineer. Licensing, security posture, SharePoint and Teams state, Intune coverage. Written report with priorities.
Scoped proposal with fixed pricing per workstream. Migration timeline, security remediation order, training plan. Andy signs it off with you before anything moves.
Mailboxes, files, licences. Weekends and evenings for cutovers so weekdays stay clear. Every step tested against a rollback plan.
MFA enforced, Conditional Access rules applied, Defender configured, audit logging on, sharing controls tightened, sensitivity labels published.
Short, practical sessions for staff. Not a two-hour webinar nobody watches. Ten-minute topic videos plus a live Q&A per team.
Ongoing tenant management, user lifecycle, licence reviews, Secure Score reviews, Defender alerts, backup verification, quarterly roadmap with your leadership.
Microsoft 365 Business plans run from 1 to 300 employees, and Microsoft charges what it charges. What varies is whether you’re on the right plan and whether you’re paying for licences no one has used since the last leaver.
Our starting point on every engagement is the licence audit: what you have, what you actually need, what you can drop or downgrade. On tenants of 40 or more users we typically find 8 to 15% of annual licence spend that can come out on the first pass alone.
We’re happy to explain Business Basic vs Standard vs Premium in owner-to-owner language, when F3 makes sense for shopfloor or hospitality staff, and when to jump to E3 for regulated firms. We resell Microsoft licences at partner price with no markup. The money we make is on the managed service, not on reselling Microsoft to you.
Do the audit first: try the licence audit tool below. Four questions, get a recommended mix and a UK monthly cost.
Multi-factor authentication actually enforced. Conditional Access blocking legacy protocols. Defender scanning attachments in real time. Audit logging on. Sharing restricted by default. Sensitivity labels for anything that would be uncomfortable in the wrong inbox.
Ninety percent of the Microsoft 365 security value sits in a dozen settings most tenants never enable properly. We apply them as standard, then map the whole tenant against Cyber Essentials controls so when you go for certification (or renew), the evidence is already in place.
“Andy from Initial IT has been prompt after our first enquiry, visited promptly and revised our Microsoft Outlook problems and suggested and supplied new hardware to update improve our IT arrangements.”
“Good guys, knowledgeable and responsive. I changed over to Microsoft, largely because it’s safer. Lots of support whilst I learn to navigate the system. With AI and fraudsters galore, it’s foolhardy not to take IT security seriously to secure your business and your life as a whole.”
70 five-star Google reviews. Read the full case studies →
The reason to work with us over a one-off consultancy is that we’re still there in month twelve, month twenty-four, month sixty. Every managed client gets:
Starters, leavers, role changes, mailbox delegations. Same-day turnaround.
Because business size and mix keeps changing. No surprises at renewal.
Microsoft’s own tenant security rating, reviewed and improved every quarter.
A real engineer looks at every alert, not a bot.
Snapshot integrity checked monthly, restore drills run quarterly.
45 minutes with your leadership. What’s coming from Microsoft, what to plan for, what to budget.
Billed separately. Resold at partner price with no markup. Direct to Microsoft is fine too if you’d rather.
Fixed price per workstream, quoted after the audit. No hourly billing for scoped work.
Fixed monthly per person, billed simply. Ongoing tenant management, security reviews, user lifecycle, quarterly roadmap.
One-off cost. Report is yours to keep whether you continue with us or not.
Three things. First, audit the tenant you already have: what licences, what security posture, what state SharePoint and Teams are in, what’s missing. Second, deliver the projects that fix the gaps: migrations, hardening, structure work. Third, manage the tenant afterwards so it stays right as your business changes. Everyone talks about the first two. The third is where 90% of the value shows up over three years.
Yes. We’ve done dozens of Workspace to M365 migrations for UK SMEs. Email, calendars, contacts, Drive content and shared drives all move. We plan once, cut over once (usually overnight), and staff walk in the next morning with the same content in the new tools. Zero email loss is the target and the standard.
In most cases, yes. On tenants of 40 or more users we typically find 8 to 15% of licence spend that’s either unused, oversized, or the wrong SKU (Business Standard where Basic would do, E3 for people who barely use Word). The audit is the first thing we do and the report is yours to act on, with us or without.
For office staff at any professional-services firm (legal, accountancy, financial services, HR, insurance) yes. Business Premium includes the security stack (Defender, Intune, Conditional Access, sensitivity labels) that Cyber Essentials expects and that cyber insurers increasingly demand. Business Standard costs less but leaves you buying the security tooling separately at a higher combined cost.
Yes. Consultancy, migration and managed service work is delivered remotely as standard for UK-wide clients, with on-site visits when the project needs them (day-one hardware refresh, cutover weekends, senior-team workshops). Our on-site coverage from Lichfield is comfortable across the Midlands, but the Microsoft 365 work itself doesn’t care where you are.
Yes, and honestly, this is where the value compounds. Ongoing management covers user lifecycle, licence reviews, security posture, backup verification, incident response and quarterly roadmap. Fixed monthly per person. Most clients start with a project and move onto the managed service once they see how much the tenant needs continuous attention.
Yes. Every Microsoft 365 hardening engagement is designed against Cyber Essentials controls so the evidence is in place for certification. We can also handle the certification submission directly through our accredited assessor partner.
Yes. Microsoft’s own service agreement is clear that they’re responsible for the service, not for your data restoration. Mailboxes, Teams chats, SharePoint sites and OneDrive are all within scope for third-party backup, and any of them can be lost to accidental deletion, ransomware or malicious action without a backup in place. Immutable, ransomware-resistant snapshots are cheap insurance.
30 focused minutes with Andy or one of our senior engineers. We’ll review your current tenant, the gaps that would worry an insurer or auditor, and the highest-impact moves for your business in the next 90 days. 30 minutes, no obligation, no sales pitch.
Prefer to talk now? Call 01543 524594 or email hello@initialit.co.uk.
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