The IT Director’s Dilemma – Facing the challenges of Microsoft 365 management 

Christopher explores why traditional tools fall short in delivering the control and agility modern enterprises need, and how the constant pressure of MACDs and technical complexity puts unnecessary strain on IT teams.

Finally, he introduces how VOSS helps break the cycle – with automation, intelligent workflows, and proactive monitoring to simplify Microsoft 365 management and drive operational efficiency.

Hi. I’m Christopher Martini, Vice President with VOSS Solutions.

In a recent blog post, my colleague, Tim Jalland, queued up a conversation about powering enterprise scale Microsoft environments by leveraging the VOSS toolset.

Over the coming weeks, I’ll be sharing a series of vlogs where I address some of the challenges that we see with our enterprise scale Microsoft customers, the solutions that we’ve delivered to those customers, and then some of the outcomes that we’ve seen when the customers have leveraged the VOSS toolset. But starting this week, I just wanted to frame the conversation around some of the common challenges that we see with large enterprise class Microsoft deployments.

The first problem comes around the area of tenant segmentation.

If you’re on a large single tenant or what we would classify as a super tenant, the challenge is by having everything in the same bucket, kind of ripple across the support environment.

It starts with trying to build out a hierarchy that makes sense and aligns with what you have internally.

You’ve got departments. You have an entire segmentation piece that you’ve thought out. Getting the out of the box tools from Microsoft to see that consistently across portals, across products is time consuming, challenging, and it doesn’t always stay in a steady state, right? Changes that you might make to the way that you want to filter information need to be redone every time you log into that tenant.

That leads to inefficient data management. You tend to create silos or operational efficiencies that are mostly driven by “we don’t want to give access to the entire tenant, to every single person in the environment. We want to give people access to do the thing that they need to do to get their job done efficiently”.

At the same time, you could run into a lack of cohesive monitoring, right? If internally you have PowerShell people or Power App people that can understand all of that complexity that’s going on in the background, great if you have those people. A lot of organizations either have to outsource that work or they look for ways that they can overcome those challenges and not have to piece together a solution. This becomes more complex if we start to look at things outside of the Microsoft environment. So maybe you’re looking at a complex telephony solution and the TAC is a fantastic resource for you for administering that environment.

But there are six other pieces of that telephony infrastructure that are not Microsoft centric. So now you’d find yourself logging in and out of systems, trying to connect portals in the background super challenging. That technical complexity alone drives a lot of the discussion from VOSS’s standpoint.

You also have the evolution of a regular stream of service requests that are coming from your internal customers. The key MACDs and the processes that you have in place today might not be the key things that you’re looking to support tomorrow or into the future.

If you’re building all of those things on the fly, you’ve put yourself on kind of a perpetual development cycle.

And then the other piece is, that leads to siloed information. So as an example, your effort to limit the number of people that are seeing alerts for things like Defender might be helpful in lowering the signal to noise ratio for those employees, but it’s not really the holistic view that you want to have, for your security posture as an enterprise.

At VOSS, we’ve looked at all of these challenges and we’ve matured our products over time to address these challenges specifically. So tenant segmentation as an example, we have an entire solution that leverages role based access control. And we can take each of those individual items and turn them on and off for each user. So you don’t need to share credentials across an entire tenant with people that don’t really need them.

They need purpose driven credentials that limit the scope of what they’re able to do and as a result, limits the scope of what they’re able to break and that you might eventually have to clean up. The same holds true for our analytics, assurance, and reporting tools. Again, Microsoft oftentimes is a very large part of an incredibly complex enterprise IT and service delivery movement. In order to get the most out of that movement, you need to be managing Microsoft not in a silo and not on its own, but looking at the data that you’re getting from Microsoft alongside things like network and infrastructure data.

Maybe you’re trying to look at, building management system data. You need a flexible and robust platform that delivers that role based access control, but does it in a way that makes sense for your environment, even if Microsoft is an overwhelming majority of the environment, but not the entire environment.

Next week, I’m going to talk through our toolset and specifically how we can help you address some of those challenges, that I just outlined. I’m Christopher Martini. I appreciate you taking the time and I look forward to seeing you again next week.