Licensing Doesn’t Equal Value: The Hidden Waste in Microsoft 365

Many organisations assume that buying Microsoft 365 licences ensures productivity, protection, and compliance.

But the truth? Most businesses pay for features they don’t use - or worse, misuse licences entirely.

The Reality We Find in Health Checks

In nearly every M365 audit we run, we discover:

• E5 licences issued to users who only use email

• Power Automate assigned but unused

• Teams Phone or Audio Conferencing licences active with zero activity

• Project and Visio licences assigned broadly, but only used by a handful

• Shared mailboxes with paid user licences

• Orphaned licences still consuming cost

These aren’t edge cases - they’re the norm.

“Set and Forget” Licensing Costs You

M365 environments evolve rapidly, but licensing rarely keeps up:

• Users leave, and licences stay active

• New features get added - but never adopted

• Business units deploy tools outside of IT oversight

Without visibility, licence sprawl becomes silent waste.

Value ≠ Activation

You might have Defender, Purview, or Copilot enabled. But are they:

• Configured?

• Monitored?

• Used effectively?

Most environments activate services - but don’t govern or measure outcomes.

It’s Not Just About Savings

Optimising licensing isn’t just a financial exercise - it’s strategic:

• Enables better budget forecasting

• Reduces compliance risk

• Improves support and lifecycle governance

• Strengthens ROI conversations at the board level

  
  

What Our M365 Optimisation Health Check Delivers

We uncover:

• Licence underutilisation

• Misaligned entitlements

• Redundant third-party tools

• Persona-based licensing opportunities

• Cost attribution and governance gaps

If you’ve never audited your M365 usage - start now.

Our Optimisation Health Check finds the inefficiencies your admin centre won’t.

We benchmark your overall Microsoft 365 configuration against Microsoft Secure Score and Zero Trust principles. It surfaces configuration drift, license misalignment, and operational risks across identity, device, data, and compliance services.