As businesses strive for continuous growth and innovation, ensuring your IT strategy is adaptable to future challenges is crucial. Microsoft 365 (M365) plays a pivotal role in this, offering robust tools that can significantly enhance security, productivity and collaboration. However, in the rapidly evolving digital landscape, maintaining an optimised M365 environment requires constant adjustments, particularly when it comes to licensing, security, compliance, and productivity. In this blog, we explore how you can future proof your M365 strategy by staying ahead of emerging trends and effectively navigating the challenges businesses face.
Optimising Microsoft 365 Licensing: Staying Agile in a Changing Landscape
Microsoft 365 licensing often presents one of the biggest challenges for businesses. With the suite’s wide range of plans, organisations can struggle to determine the most cost-effective way to allocate licenses. Gartner’s research highlights that many businesses tend to over-purchase or underutilise licenses, leading to inefficient spending.
bluesource uses licensing optimisation recommendations to support usage and adjusting licenses as business needs change. By aligning your licenses with specific team requirements, organisations can ensure they’re not overspending while also staying prepared for scaling needs in the future. This ensures businesses are always paying for the tools they use most, while avoiding the costs of unused capabilities.
Building a Strong Security Posture: Proactive Measures for Long-Term Protection
In an era of increasing cyber threats, security is one of the most pressing considerations for businesses. Gartner’s insights indicate that organisations face ongoing challenges in keeping up with rapidly evolving security threats, often due to siloed IT teams and outdated practices.
bluesource's regular posture assessment approach can help organisations proactively monitor and manage their security settings. This future-focused approach ensures businesses not only meet current security standards and best practices but are also prepared for evolving risks.
Maximising Productivity: Identifying Gaps in Usage and Performance
A common challenge businesses face is the underutilisation of Microsoft 365 tools. Many organisations fail to leverage the full range of capabilities offered by M365, such as Teams, SharePoint, and OneDrive, which can significantly boost collaboration and productivity. According to Gartner, many companies are unaware of the gaps in usage or performance that exist within their M365 environment.
Using the Adoption Score, businesses can identify areas where teams are not fully exploiting the platform’s features. By focusing on training and awareness initiatives, organisations can ensure that employees are using the tools that can drive productivity and innovation. Additionally, identifying unused features can help streamline processes and reduce inefficiencies, preparing businesses for future growth. bluesource builds on this by leveraging detailed usage telemetry along with our proprietary analytical approach to identify opportunities to increase adoption of technologies.
Staying Agile in a Cloud-First World
As businesses continue to shift towards cloud-native environments, the volume of data and telemetry generated by tools like Microsoft 365 grows exponentially. Gartner’s findings show that this increase in data can overwhelm organisations, making it difficult to separate valuable insights from redundant data. Additionally, the challenge of maintaining performance and security in cloud environments can be complex.
 To navigate this complexity, businesses should focus on data governance and cloud-native observability. By consolidating observability tools and establishing a centralised team to manage data and security, organisations can ensure that they’re not only securing their data but also extracting actionable insights from it. This will be critical as businesses expand and evolve in a cloud-first world.
Conclusion
Future-proofing your Microsoft 365 strategy isn’t just about keeping up with current best practices—it’s about staying ahead of emerging challenges and positioning your business for long-term success. By using leveraging out-tasking solutions through experts like bluesource, organisations can ensure that their Microsoft 365 environment remains a powerful tool for growth and innovation.
Adopting a proactive approach now will not only help businesses navigate today’s complexities but will also position them for success as they move into 2025 and beyond.
Are you ready to future-proof your M365 strategy? Learn more about how Advanced Support can help your organisation thrive in 2025 and beyond.
