Optimize your Microsoft Contract
Our Free Cost Optimization Assessment offers valuable insights into your M365 and Azure licenses and usage. It identifies opportunities to optimize your costs and evaluate how your current contract performs against market standards.
Statistics on Overspend
Many organizations are overspending on M365 licenses and have significant cloud waste.
Some surveys have found that 56% of enterprise licenses are inactive, underutilized, or improperly assigned. IT managers purchase their licenses in bulk, without matching them to personnel usage. On average:
- 37% of E1 licenses are inactive, and 39% are unassigned.
- 12% of E3 licenses are inactive and 42% are unassigned.
- 23% of E5 licenses are inactive and 27% are unassigned.
When it comes to Azure spend, Flexera’s State of the Cloud report found that companies are exceeding cloud budgets by 17% on average in 2025.
We help our clients reduce waste and only pay for what they actually use. This is achieved by analyzing licenses, contracts and usage. Based on our previous projects we have achieved savings between 10 – 56% on M365 license and Azure costs.
The Cost Optimization Assessment
The Approach: Our license and cloud optimization methodology provides strategic management of cloud usage and software licenses to maximize usage efficiency and minimize unnecessary costs. The objective is to identify the right number and type of licenses for your current and future deployment, while reducing Shelfware and remaining compliant with relevant Product Terms.
During this process, we do an inventory of all software, services and Azure consumption, identifying how many licenses were bought, which ones are in use and how frequently they are utilized.
Historical Pricing Analysis
We start the inventory phase by analyzing your current Microsoft Contracts. This involves assessing the current pricing structure, identifying any amendments in place, and reviewing the Customer Price Sheet to determine what is included. This analysis provides insight into the current commercial structure of your software environment and serves as the foundation for optimizing your software estate.
License Entitlement Analysis
Based on our assessment of your current contract, we generate a current Bill of Material, which includes the list of products, licenses, and amendments that could potentially provide license entitlements.
Server & Cloud Subscriptions Analysis
We then delve deeper into the actual installations and usage of the software. This is where the data comes into play. We analyze three different areas:
1) On-premises installations.
2) Microsoft Cloud Subscriptions, and
3) Azure Consumption.
The on-premise data comes from your existing tools such as vCenter, Active Directory, SNOW, Flexera, SAM Pro, Lansweeper, or other tooling. To analyze Microsoft Cloud Subscriptions and Azure, we use data exports from M365 and Azure or use our own tooling to provide us with the necessary data to analyze the current usage of the Cloud platforms.
Deliverables
We will present the Cost Optimization report back to you. This will give actual insight on the usage and cost optimization opportunities in your software environment. The Cost Optimization report will include information on:
- Unassigned licenses
- Unused licenses
- M365 App Usage
- Mailbox and OneDrive storage usage (gb)
- License and users eligible to downgrade license
- Benchmarking
- Commercial and Contract Optimization Strategies
- Azure optimization strategies like:
- Orphaned resources
- VM Optimization
- Bring Your Own License Strategies
- Reserved Instances
- Savings Plans
- Region Optimization
Don’t let the complexity overwhelm you. Whether it is a lack of expertise or a time constraint on doing a full inventory of your usage, 2Data is here to help. We are committed to helping you navigate and unlock substantial savings with our free Cost Optimization Assessment.
Remember, optimization is a continuous process. The sooner you start it, the more you can save.
