Microsoft Cloud Assessment

Our Microsoft Cloud Assessment will help you become the business you want to be by supporting a successful cloud migration.

Discovery & planning is an essential part of a cloud migration. A Microsoft Cloud Assessment explores your cloud readiness, aligns digital transformation with business outcomes, and provides you with a roadmap for transitioning to Microsoft 365.

What is a Microsoft Cloud Assessment?

We offer Cloud Assessment services exploring Office 365 and Microsoft Azure. Assessments are tailored to your specific requirements, with an emphasis on those areas most appropriate to your particular environment. They address the breadth of Microsoft Office 365 and Microsoft Azure and provide an in-depth review of systems, security, governance and utilisation, and how best to prepare for a cloud migration.

Organisations that participate in our Cloud Assessment workshops gain a holistic view of their IT estate and cloud technology that results in a seamless cloud migration, maximises their investment and enables users to quickly get the productivity, collaboration and mobility benefits of their new technology.

We may challenge some of your assumptions and ask you to view technology from a different perspective; with the aim of giving you a clearer understanding of what the cloud can do for your business and how IT can help you achieve your goals.

The service includes:

  • Briefing call: a 60 minute Microsoft Teams call with introductions, background to the organisation and understanding priorities and knowledge across the service.
  • Day 1 – Onsite or Virtual Workshop: a deep dive into Office 365, your technology environment and what you want to achieve.
  • Day 2 – Decision Support: we document notes and research from Day 1. You will receive a detailed report providing a roadmap for a successful migration, and access to our Microsoft experts to support key decision making.

Want to know more? Speak to our team

Request a call back to find out more about Microsoft Cloud Assessments. Please complete the form below.

Day 1 - Onsite or virtual workshop

Following an initial briefing call, which enables us to tailor the workshop day to your needs, our Cloud Assessment service typically covers the following key areas:

A Day in the Life of Office 365

Introduction to the features of Office 365 and how it would work for your business, with a ‘Day in the life of Office 365’ demonstration and a high-level overview of how your business would migrate to the platform.

Infrastructure Overview

We review your existing on-premise infrastructure to assess how to move to Office 365
Current Challenges: Understanding the challenges affecting the business and the impact on IT; how well does IT align with business objectives; remote working; mobility; support; costs.

Demonstration of the capabilities of Azure

Includes an introduction to Microsoft Azure and how it would work in your business, its capabilities and workloads that can be moved to Azure.

Azure benefits to your business

Discuss costs of current infrastructure; flexibility and benefits of moving resources to Azure.

Infrastructure review

Review of existing on-premise infrastructure to assess how a move to Azure would take place.
Current Challenges: Challenges affecting the Business and IT and how Azure might help; cost savings; speed to react; scalability; security; current load on infrastructure.

Licensing

We’ll show how to review licenses and assess functionality and appropriateness to your organisation, including:

  • Review current license consumption
  • Assess utilisation and optimisation
  • Discuss how to implement features that are not in use

For Azure, we’ll also show how to analyse monthly spend for Cost Management.

  • Are resources being used efficiently?
  • Could virtual machines be powered off when not in use?
  • Using Cost Management to review current subscription and usage
  • Review spending for last 6 months.

Secure Score Analysis

This assesses your tenant against a security baseline. We’ll take you through each Secure Score focus area and:

  • Show how to assess your Secure Score
  • Review each item, discuss the implications and actions
  • Provide recommendations to help improve your overall

Office 365 security

This review will also highlight how to assess and improve Azure security postures.

  • Security discussion around issues affecting Azure and how to mitigate threats.
  • Evaluate 3rd party security products that maybe appropriate.

Email Security

Our review will show how to ensure that Office 365 is configured correctly:

  • Review Email security.
  • Identify security incidents and ensure current configuration meets requirements – would a 3rd party solution be beneficial
  • If using a 3rd party security solution, is it configured optimally.

Client access and application

Is your business taking advantage of all mobile productivity benefits and the latest Office 365 applications. Here we’ll:

  • Discuss how Office 365 is consumed – via mobile device, on the web or via desktop clients
  • How you secure access

For Azure, the assessment includes a review and evaluation of overall governance and makes recommendations for improvement.

  • How to review Azure instance against Microsoft and industry best practice.
  • Review your company IT governance and security policies for compliance in Azure.
  • Role Based Access – we’ll also ensure that Role Based Access is configured to enable appropriate administrator and user access and make recommendations as to how this can be improved.
  • Azure Resource Graph – here we’ll explore all your cloud resources and determine how your cloud inventory can be managed more effectively. This will be reviewed with you and analysed.
  • Networking – an overview of Azure virtual networks and site to site or Expressroute connections.

Assessment output

A detailed overview is produced from the discovery workshop and a report illustrating the proposed cloud migration plan. Resources in these documents includes:

Microsoft Office 365:

On completion, a detailed overview of the session will be sent to you:
  • Analysis of existing infrastructure: AD; Exchange; applications and files
  • Recommendations and steps for moving your business to Office 365: -Identity and security-email migration-file migration; user training-admin training to support usage and adoption-managed support
  • Current challenges affecting your business and how these may be offset by a move to Office 365
  • Next steps for each section and how they would proceed
We’ll prepare a report illustrating how your Office 365 tenant will be produced for you:
  • Office 365 environment and state:
    • Secure Score-Licensing – what is consumed and used and the licensing model
    • Email Security – current state; Client Access and Applications – how they consume Office 365
  • Recommendations to how to improve the security of Office 365 and the utilisation and functionality of the Office 365 Suite:
    • Secure Score recommendations and implications
    • Detailed costs for implementation
    • Licensing -recommendations based on current usage
    • EA vs CSP-Turning on additional features to get the most out of license
    • End user and admin training

Microsoft Azure:

On completion, a detailed overview of the session will be sent to you:
  • Analysis of existing infrastructure
  • Recommendations and key steps for moving your business to Azure
  • Current challenges affecting your business and how these could be offset by a move to Azure.
We’ll provide you with a full illustration of your Azure instance, containing:
  • How to analyse Azure environment and state:
    • Secure Score –current Secure Score posture against industry best practice.
    • Licensing –current spend; subscriptions.
    • Governance –current Azure setup and configuration.
    • Role Based Access –who has access to what.
    • Azure Resource Graph –output of all resources deployed in Azure.
  • Recommendations, including:
    • Governance -Improvements to current configuration against industry best practices
    • Security -Improving your Secure Score; cost for implementing features to improve security; 3rd party products that would improve security posture; recommendations; PEN testing.
    • Cost management -licensing; cost management recommendations based on analysis; future cost predictions based on moving more resources to Azure.
    • Resource usage -current usage; future usage requirements; ensure Azure is architected optimally.
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