Microsoft 365 adoption doesn’t always deliver value
Microsoft 365 is embedded in a significant number of South African organisations, but adoption doesn’t mean value and the difference between the two is showing up as cost and risk, says Doug Morrison, VP of Modern Workplace at Braintree.
There’s a reason companies invest in technology. It’s meant to deliver measurable gains across key areas such as productivity, cost and time savings, and operational optimisation. Companies invest in technology so they can write key words like ‘significant gains’ or ‘integrated security’ or ‘positive financial impact’ into board reports and return on investment analyses. However, reality often diverges from the promises made because implementation quality, adoption, integration and data readiness are the actual determinants of value.
The gap between what a platform can deliver versus what it actually delivers comes down to how it was deployed, and what happened afterwards. Often, migration is treated as a project with a defined end date with licenses assigned at go-live and rarely revisited and security settings sitting at the out-of-the-box defaults. While the platform runs reliably in the background, it’s not being managed and the organisation around it is changing continuously.
People join and leave the business, roles change, teams restructure, new security threats emerge, and the platform keeps running on the configuration and license structure it started with. This accumulates cost and risk while drifting from what your business needs, and the result is a platform that looks like it’s operating optimally until something goes wrong. And, unfortunately, it will.
The most immediate and recoverable problem is licensing. When licensing isn’t optimised for usage or business, you can end up overspending on your platform significantly. It’s a massive waste of budget that can be avoided. For example, often companies are sitting on a higher license tier than their users need because it hasn’t been reviewed since deployment. Addressing this is as simple as going into your environment and assessing your usage and ensuring that each user’s profile has the right license and then downgrading those that are not relevant or necessary. It is entirely possible for you to save as much as $5 to $12 per user on Microsoft 365 if you understand your license structure and per-user requirements.
Of course, security is another issue. Microsoft 365 includes a built-in benchmark called Secure Score, which is a continuously updated measure of how well your environment is configured against Microsoft’s recommended security practices. According to Braintree, the average Secure Score across surveyed Microsoft 365 users typically sits between 30-45 points. Understanding this score gives you a clear picture of your security posture and what needs to be done to close the gaps, and it is possible to lift your profile from as low as 34 points to 85 points very quickly, and at little to no cost.
Another challenge is grey AI. These AI tools aren’t sanctioned by the business and are often free versions of popular solutions such as ChatGPT, Gemini or Claude. However, these free versions are not secure and don’t sit behind a firewall or within a walled garden and open the business up to serious risk. Employees are simply using the most accessible tools at their disposal, but the data going into these tools sits outside every governance, compliance and security control you have in place.
Finally, there’s the problem of backups and data. When it comes to Microsoft 365, for example, there’s a widespread belief that Microsoft is responsible for the data. However, Microsoft is explicit in clarifying that the business owns its data and identities and is responsible for protecting them. Microsoft provides infrastructure, but what happens to the data after an attack comes down to you. Unfortunately, many companies only realise this when it’s too late because backup is underestimated and often the wrong tools are in place.
Unpacking and unpicking these problems is worth the hassle. It is worth taking on a partner that understands the most common mistakes and why they happen because, when the gap closes, you start to see the proven value. The documented return on a well-managed Microsoft 365 environment, says a 2025 Forrester Total Economic Impact study, is time savings of 1.5 hours on collaboration, a 90% reduction in IT help desk ticket time, and three-year benefits exceeding $519,000 through business user automation.
And for companies with AI ambitions, this foundation has also delivered measurable value. The Forrester study on Microsoft 365 Copilot showed an ROI of 116% over three years within a well-governed environment with clean data, correct access controls and a sound security posture.
Achieving this value doesn’t expect new technology or additional licences, it requires an actively governed Microsoft 365 environment that’s tuned to your business, consistently managed, and properly documented. By partnering with a managed services provider, you can close the gap, stabilise and predict your costs, and extract far more value from Microsoft 365 than you do today.
