The Licensing Mirage: Why Visibility Doesn't Equal Governance

Your Microsoft 365 admin centre offers powerful reports - Secure Score, licensing dashboards, usage insights.

But these tools show you data. They don’t show you alignment, justification, or risk.

What “Visibility” Misses

Most environments can see that 500 users have E5 licences.

What they can’t see:

• Who actually uses E5 features?

• Which departments need what tiers?

• Whether Power Apps are governed

• Which mailboxes should be shared (and licence-free)

• Whether Teams Phone licences are duplicated

Governance is more than reporting - it’s interpretation and action.

The Illusion of Control

You may think:

“We’ve enabled Defender.”“We use Microsoft Purview.”“We have licensing dashboards.”

But without a governance framework, those are settings - not strategies.

Governance Bridges the Gap Between IT and Finance

Good licence governance answers:

• Are we assigning licences based on usage and need?

• Do we have a persona model?

• Are tools reviewed and retired over time?

• Can we justify renewals and add-ons?

• Is someone accountable?

Without these, visibility leads nowhere.

Governance Is Not a Tool - It’s a Practice

It requires:

• Role-based licence modelling

• Lifecycle controls

• Shared mailbox audits

• Policy-aligned provisioning

• Strategic right-sizing

All of which your dashboards won’t do for you.

From Insight to Intent

You don’t need more reports.You need meaning.

Governance turns “we see it” into “we’ve acted on it.”

Our M365 Optimisation Health Check is built to uncover the gaps dashboards can’t explain.

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.