It is good practice to have an overall understanding of your Microsoft license compliance at any point in time, but during an audit, this is imperative.

Our Microsoft Internal Compliance Review service provides step by step guidance on how to collect and analyse the required information from the estate to then produce the effective license position ahead of the auditors. This allows you to understand exactly what your compliance position is and where the potential risks are (if any).

There is a tendency for auditors to request an excess amount of information as part of their data requests, mostly as a result of a rigid audit process or as a way to reduce the investment into developing more sophisticated scripts/data collection methodologies. As such, you will often send far too much information (notably too much personally identifiable information) if you just follow the auditors’ approach.

Our service will review and explain the data requests while also helping you manage the data provisions to the auditors so only the appropriate amount information is issued.

Like any other software vendor, there are often grey areas within the licensing terms and conditions leading to multiple interpretations (each with different cost requirements).

Often, auditors will make a ‘worst case’ assumption when it comes to these grey areas or data ambiguities, leading to a higher potential risk than should reasonably be identified. We will review the findings and support you in challenging any and all assumptions, ensuring that there are no inflated costs as part of the final result.

Throughout the whole process, we will provide guidance on how to take control of the audit, all the way from a high level communication strategy and timeline management to specific responses via individual emails.