Strategic Business Reviews: What We Cover and What You Get

Wins since the last review

• Finished the Windows 10 to Windows 11 upgrade on all remaining workstations.
• Removed standing global administrator rights from user accounts.
• Removed personal accounts from the company Microsoft 365 tenant.
• Added a one-click “Report phishing” button to Outlook.
• Cleaned up and reorganized the server room and IT storage.
• Kept vulnerability scanning running, with findings remediated as they came up.

Security posture

• Found that multifactor authentication (MFA) wasn’t turned on for contractor accounts. Turned it on, with advance notice sent to the affected users.
• Reviewed protections against session hijacking and token theft, two ways attackers get around MFA.
• Reset security awareness training metrics so reporting reflects current progress.
• Planned the move to a company-wide password manager.

Licensing & subscriptions

• Reviewed why staff were on different Microsoft 365 license levels and how to simplify.
• Looked at a one- to three-year commitment to lower the monthly Azure bill.
• Flagged a 2016 PDF editor that can no longer be updated. Quoting modern replacements.
• Listed the software installed across company devices to find overlapping tools.

Hardware lifecycle & warranties

• Listed the remaining Windows 10 computers to replace, with each one’s last sign-in date.
• Confirmed the main server’s warranty status and the option to extend it another year.
• Flagged switch, access point, and remote firewall licenses expiring in the coming months.
• Flagged a UPS battery that needs replacing before its replacement date.
• Started a risk document covering out-of-warranty switches, servers, and storage.

Backups & disaster recovery

• Walked through what’s backed up today: Microsoft 365, servers, and the line-of-business database.
• Discussed a test restore of the line-of-business database.
• Talked through what happens if the main server fails.
• Discussed a tabletop exercise and a disaster recovery plan test.

Billing review

• Went through the year’s invoices together.
• The client raised that departed users and retired systems weren’t being cleaned up, adding to monthly billing. Agreed on a cleanup.

Issues the client raised

• Weak Wi-Fi in parts of the building. Next step: a heat-map survey to find the dead spots.
• Some computers couldn’t sign in after weekend maintenance until they were restarted.
• Accounting software slowed down during the day. A scheduled sync was moved outside business hours.
• New-hire setup was still manual. A formal onboarding checklist was built into our ticketing system.

Action items