5 min read
A national care group operating across multiple subsidiary companies providing residential, supported living, and specialist care services. The organisation had accumulated a complex estate of security and productivity tools over several years, each solving a specific problem but never reviewed as a whole. Annual software licensing had grown to over £870,000 without anyone realising how much overlap existed.
Service: Managed IT Care sub-sector: Residential, supported living, specialist care
The organisation was spending £873,694 a year on seven separate licensing agreements across two Microsoft 365 tiers and five third-party security products:
Each of these tools had been introduced to address a genuine need. Darktrace provided AI-driven network monitoring, Varonis watched for data exfiltration, Mimecast handled email filtering and archiving, Sophos protected endpoints, and Nexthink monitored device health. The problem was that nobody had stepped back to look at the full picture.
The licensing estate had been built tool by tool over years, often by different people, and nobody had assessed whether these capabilities now overlapped. Microsoft had significantly expanded the security and compliance features in its E5 tier - but the organisation was still on E3, paying separately for tools that E5 included natively.
For a care provider, every pound spent on duplicate software licences is a pound not spent on care delivery. The board knew costs needed to come down, but without a clear picture of what each tool actually did and what would replace it, there was no confidence to make changes.
We carried out a full licensing audit, mapping every active subscription, its renewal date, and its capabilities against what Microsoft 365 E5 provides natively.
The analysis showed that five of the seven third-party products could be fully replaced by capabilities included in the E5 licence:
We then designed a phased migration plan aligned to each vendor's contract renewal date, so the organisation would never pay for overlapping capabilities longer than necessary:
2024 (transition year): E5 licences activated in November alongside existing contracts. Varonis and the bulk of the E3 CSP licences retired mid-year. Annual cost: £794,872.
2025: Full E5 running. Mimecast archiving wound down by August, Sophos retired in April. Annual cost: £720,414.
2026: Darktrace and Nexthink contracts ended in Q1. Annual cost: £467,323.
2027 onwards: Fully consolidated. Only E5 and F5 (frontline worker) licences remain. Annual cost: £391,838.
The F5 licences (£18,374/year) provide appropriate security coverage for frontline care workers who need mobile access to scheduling and care records but do not require the full E5 feature set. This right-sizing ensured the organisation was not over-licensing staff who use a limited set of applications.
The annual licensing cost dropped from £873,694 to £391,838 - a saving of £481,855 per year, a 55% reduction.
The organisation went from managing seven separate vendor relationships, seven renewal cycles, and seven support channels to a single Microsoft licensing agreement. The IT team no longer needs to coordinate between Darktrace support in one tab and Defender in another - everything feeds into the same security centre with a unified view of threats across the environment.
Security coverage actually improved. The previous setup had gaps between tools that different vendors each assumed the other was covering. With everything running through the Microsoft security stack, alerts, investigations, and automated responses are connected end to end. An email phishing attempt detected by Defender for Office 365 can automatically trigger an investigation in Defender for Endpoint and flag compromised credentials in Defender for Identity - all without switching platforms.
The phased approach meant zero disruption to care delivery. At no point was the organisation running without security coverage in any category. Each third-party tool was only decommissioned after its Microsoft replacement was fully operational and tested.
£481,855 annual saving (55%) · Seven vendors consolidated into one platform · Phased migration over three years with zero disruption · Full Microsoft E5 security suite replacing five third-party tools
Related service: Managed IT
Almost half a million pounds a year that was being spent on overlapping security software is now available for what matters most: delivering better care. The technology that protects the organisation's data and its people's privacy still works, it just works from one platform instead of seven, at a cost that reflects the actual need.