You are paying for more Microsoft than you use

Almost every organization over-licenses: premium licenses assigned to people who need basic, inactive accounts still licensed, Azure resources running with no owner. This review finds it — a full analysis of M365 license assignments against actual usage, plus Azure spend by resource, owner, and utilization.

You leave with a savings plan your finance team can act on, and a licensing model that stops the waste from returning.

Why the bill keeps growing

License waste is not fraud or carelessness. It is the natural result of how licensing decisions get made: someone joins, they get the standard — usually premium — license. Someone changes roles, the license stays. Someone leaves, the account lingers. A project needs Azure, resources get provisioned, the project ends, the resources keep running. Nobody is responsible for the ongoing truth of any of it, because licensing is nobody's job: IT provisions access, finance pays the bill, procurement renews the agreement, and the person who could connect usage to cost does not exist in most organizations.

The waste hides in plain sight. Premium licenses assigned to people whose work needs basic. Inactive accounts still licensed — and still a security exposure. Azure resources provisioned for projects that ended, oversized workloads, storage nobody accesses, dev environments running around the clock. Third-party tools paid for that Microsoft 365 already includes, because nobody mapped what the licenses already cover. The bill is approved as a lump sum, so the gap between assigned and used stays invisible — until someone looks.

How the review works

The review connects assignments to usage. M365 license assignments are analyzed against actual usage by user group and license type — who has what, who uses what, and where the gap is. Azure spend is analyzed by resource, owner, and utilization — what is running, who owns it, whether it is used, and whether it is sized right. The analysis distinguishes the three kinds of waste that need different fixes: over-licensing, inactive accounts, and orphaned or oversized resources.

Findings become a savings plan: prioritized actions with estimated savings and effort, so finance can act on them in order rather than facing a list of undifferentiated recommendations. And because waste returns without governance, the review also delivers the governance that prevents recurrence: provisioning rules that assign the right license for the role, periodic review cadences, tagging and ownership for Azure resources, and deprovisioning on a schedule.

What you walk away with

A savings plan your finance team can act on — specific actions, ordered by return, with the reasoning behind each one. A licensing model matched to real usage. And the governance routines that keep the waste from returning within two renewal cycles, so the review pays off once and keeps paying off.

• License usage analysis — assignments vs. actual usage, by user group and license type. This is the core finding: who has which license, who actually uses what it provides, and where the gaps are — stated by user group, so the conversation with finance is about roles and needs, not about individual users.
• Azure spend analysis — cost by resource, owner, and utilization; idle and oversized resources flagged. Every cost is tied to a resource, an owner, and a utilization level — so the review can say not just what Azure costs, but what is idle, what is oversized, and what has no owner at all.
• Right-sizing recommendations — license downgrades, reassignments, and Azure optimizations. Recommendations are specific: which licenses downgrade, which get reassigned, which resources resize or switch off — with the reasoning and the trade-offs for each, so decisions are made on evidence rather than on a vendor's default.
• Savings plan — prioritized actions with estimated savings and effort. Actions are ordered by return per unit of effort, so finance can start with the highest-value items and work down the list — with estimates that are honest about what is certain and what depends on follow-through.
• Governance recommendations — provisioning and review processes that prevent recurrence. Provisioning rules, periodic review cadences, tagging and ownership for Azure, and deprovisioning on a schedule — the routines that keep the savings from evaporating by the next renewal.