Cloud tracking and optimisation often slip to the bottom of the IT to do list, especially in the midst of daily firefighting and urgent fixes. But when you are managing a complex Azure environment, operating without visibility is like driving at night without headlights.

You must consider whether it’s worth exposing your business to unnecessary risk. Without clear data, decisions about your digital strategy become guesswork. That guesswork often leads to wasted spend, compliance concerns, and missed opportunities. 

Cloud visibility matters for cost and compliance (and your sanity) 

Visibility impacts vital outcomes for organisations, including: 

• Financial Control:  Continuous cost management keeps you financially competitive and allows you to make thoughtful decisions. It is crucial to identify underutilised resources and right-size virtual machines to stop unnecessary spending. While this is true, tracking every penny spent is difficult, especially with numerous systems and reports to analyse. Although, the dream of real time visibility to proactively monitor spend across all licenses and resources might be closer than you think. 

• Governance and Compliance: A strong security posture is essential in today’s cyber landscape with AI advancing at an unprecedented rate. Ensuring your environment is fully secure on all fronts is crucial, but not straightforward. Gaining visibility can be pivotal here for maintaining robust governance and compliance across your Azure estate. Visibility enables you to continuously monitor for policy violations, misconfigurations, and unauthorised changes, reducing the risk of data breaches and regulatory penalties. 

• Drive Efficiency: Sifting through multiple reports and dashboards to find the information you need is draining your time and resources. But it’s not just you – many businesses are rife with fragmented data, making manual investigation a necessary chore. The cure is a centralised platform where you can gain actionable insights instantly and free up your team to focus on more strategic initiatives. When you can quickly pinpoint underperforming services or areas for improvement, overall business productivity is boosted. It’s about empowering your team with the right information at the right moment so you can deliver greater results. 

Gain control of Azure and end the admin nightmare 

Now wondering where you can find this one-stop-shop for your Azure environment? That is exactly what the Provide™ Portal delivers. It is a centralised platform that provides all the Azure visibility you need in one place. But it also goes far beyond basic Azure reporting to provide you with actionable recommendations and optimisations, including: 

• Cost and License Management:  Set budgets and receive alerts before you hit unplanned expenditure, track spend across all M365 subscriptions and Azure resources instantly, and better plan for the future with forecasted spend outlook. This proactive approach is aligned to Microsoft’s Well Architected Framework (WAF) and helps you avoid surprises and keep your cloud costs predictable. 

• Monitor Security Posture:  Track cloud compliance levels, identify misconfigurations, and review risk exposure across your environment – as well as access to your Microsoft Secure Score to understand your current secure posture and how to improve it. With real time alerts, you can address vulnerabilities before they become serious threats. 

• Performance Metrics: Observe the health and efficiency of your running services to maintain optimal speeds and availability. This ensures your applications deliver the experience your users expect. 

• Sustainability Goals: Visibility even extends to tracking CO₂ emissions within your Azure usage. If your organisation has committed to strong sustainability goals, this sometimes overlooked metric helps align your cloud strategy with environmental targets. 

Real time data means no more manual reports. Instead of tracking down and dissecting last month’s costs, your monthly review becomes a proactive planning session focused on optimisation and growth. 

Beyond the Portal to expert optimisation reports 

Cloud Direct CSP+ enhances the Provide™ Portal with expert oversight. Regular optimisation reports will deliver personalised improvement suggestions on cost, security, and performance. Higher tiers also include direct access to cloud architects to support your future strategy and ambitions. This is the difference between simply having data and having expert insight applied to act strategically with that data. 

The combination of cutting-edge technology and certified expert review ensures your cloud environment is continually optimised and you extract maximum value from your investment. Plus, you can save money on your Azure spending. 

Ready to take control of your Azure environment? 

Stop guessing and start making informed decisions with real time visibility. Try our CSP+ calculator to find the right plan for your business.

If you’re an IT manager, you know how managing support tickets can feel like a second job. You spend hours juggling internal requests and chasing updates while waiting for service providers to resolve complex issues. It is frustrating and it wastes time – but there is a better way.

The real cost of slow Azure support  

• Productivity loss: According to a recent study, employees spend an average of 6 hours per month waiting for IT issue resolution. Employees who report long IT support delays also state the negative effects on morale and job satisfaction.  

• Financial impact: Gartner estimates that IT downtime costs businesses an average of £4,400 per minute for critical systems. Even smaller outages can accumulate tens of thousands in lost revenue. 

• Reputation damage: Slow IT queues can harm customer experience and lead to public complaints. Studies have shown that organisations with support ticket backlogs report lower customer satisfaction scores.  
• Security exposure: Delays in patching or fixing access issues leave doors open for attackers. A single missed update can lead to compliance breaches or data loss. 

Think about what happens when delays drag on: 

• Employee productivity stalls: When staff can’t access critical resources, deadlines slip and payroll pounds go to waste. 

• Customer confidence erodes: If the issue impacts customer-facing services, trust evaporates fast. 

• Innovation freezes: Instead of driving projects forward, your IT team is stuck firefighting. 

You have a capable IT team, but when a complex Azure problem pops up, they need expert help fast.

CSP+ advances your cloud support

Many businesses assume premium Azure support is too expensive or that switching providers is a hassle. That is why we created Cloud Direct CSP+ – to make expert Azure support simple and accessible. 

We integrate support directly into your Azure consumption model, and allow you to choose the tier that fits your needs. 

• Essentials: Monday to Friday standard business hour support for response and resolution of platform issues. In addition, access to an Azure Expert MSP partner for escalations. 

• Enhanced: 24×7 enhanced support with reduced SLA’s and expert human support. Direct escalations to Microsoft through our specialist team. 

• Enterprise: 24×7 enhanced support and direct escalations to Microsoft. Plus, direct access to Tier 4 Cloud Engineers who know your environment and can fix issues fast. 

This means no more ticket queues. No generic helpdesk. Just immediate access to the right expert when you need them.  

Why Enterprise tier changes everything 

Have you ever had a critical app go down on Friday afternoon? How long did it take to get help? Imagine this… instead of waiting days for a ticket to be picked up, you are on a call with a Tier 4 Azure engineer who knows your architecture and can resolve the issue in hours, not days. That is the difference CSP+ makes. It gives your IT team the freedom to stop firefighting and start innovating.  

Unlock your team’s potential 

CSP+ means embedding an expert support team into your business. That means fewer delays and more time for strategic work that drives growth. 

Here’s what your IT team could focus on if they weren’t stuck in support queues: 

• Cloud optimisation: Fine-tuning workloads for cost efficiency and performance. 

• Security hardening: Implementing advanced threat protection and compliance frameworks. 

• Automation projects: Building workflows to eliminate manual processes. 

• Innovation initiatives: Deploying new apps, migrating legacy systems, and enabling AI-driven solutions. 

Instead of firefighting, your team can finally deliver the projects that transform your business. 

Ready to eliminate downtime?

Key takeaways from the Microsoft Digital Defence Report, written by Leon Godwin

We drew inspiration from the Churchill War Rooms to host our latest Security Briefing – a venue where strategic defence decisions once shaped our history, and now where security professionals learned from Cloud Direct and Microsoft about the new cyber landscape being shaped by AI-driven threats. 

To paraphrase Winston Churchill: “Never before in the field of digital defence has the security of so many relied so heavily on the vigilance of so few.” The battleground consists of intelligence, speed, and resilience, and adversaries are using AI-powered attacks to rapidly infiltrate and compromise organisations, faster than human-based defences can respond. 

From a day in the life of a modern CISO through attack simulations, to insights from Microsoft’s Aileen Finlay and concrete steps that you can take to adjust to the new threats, I’ll reflect on the event and share my take on the newly released Microsoft Digital Defence Report 2025. 

The reality on the ground

On 13 October, the UK government took the unprecedented step of sending a letter out to all UK businesses to highlight the significance of new cyber threats. The letter’s goal was to fundamentally reclassify cyber security from a technical operational task to a critical board-level imperative. By issuing a direct mandate, the government signaled that the intense and sophisticated nature of modern threats now constitutes a primary risk to national economic stability.  

The Microsoft Digital Defence Report 

The recent release of the Microsoft Digital Defence Report makes it clear why the UK government is so concerned, and why you should be too. 

The threat landscape isn’t just evolving – it’s accelerating. Attacks are more aggressive, more organised, and frankly, more relentless than ever. The UK is now ranked number two in the global index of countries most impacted by cyber threats. 

Defence Report takeaways for the Modern CISO 

One theme that kept coming up during the event was the “prevention versus response” paradigm, or what the military calls “Left of Bang” and “Right of Bang.” The Microsoft Digital Defence Report 2025 makes it clear; you can’t choose one over the other. You need both. 

Here’s a breakdown of the key findings of the report, and actions to take off the back of it.  

1. Identity is the Battleground 

Problem: Attackers aren’t only breaking in, they’re logging in. Identity compromise is still the number one entry point for ransomware and data theft, and it’s getting smarter. When you login to a computer you gate a token that is your permission to use that session for a period of time before you need to reauthenticate. Token theft and Adversary-in-the-Middle (AiTM) attacks are on the rise, bypassing traditional protections. Your traditional Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) that secured you for many years is now simply not enough. 

Solution: Phishing-resistant MFA is the gold standard. 

Action: 

• Audit your Entra ID environment today. 

• Enforce phishing-resistant MFA for everyone, especially admins. 

• Update legacy authentication protocols.

Impact: Phishing-resistant MFA blocks over 99% of unauthorised access attempts, according to the Microsoft report. If you do one thing this quarter, make it updating your systems from traditional MFA to phishing-resistant MFA. 

2. The Double-Edged Sword of AI 

Problem: AI isn’t just our friend, it’s the attacker’s too. They’re using it to craft convincing phishing lures, scale attacks, and even create deepfakes for fraud. 

Solution: We fight fire with fire. AI-driven defence can now contain breaches in seconds, suspending compromised accounts before a human is aware of an issue. This is helped further now that Microsoft Copilot has been bundled into the M365 E5 licenses, rather than an expensive bolt-on. 

Action: 

• Put an AI governance framework in place. ISO 42001 is a great starting point.  

• Deploy AI-powered tools like Copilot for Security, Microsoft Sentinel, and Defender XDR to automate detection and response. 

• You already have access to the phishing simulations within your M365 subscriptions, you should increase the schedule to be at least weekly. 

Impact: Moving from reactive to proactive defence shrinks dwell time, improves awareness, and limits the blast radius of an attack. 

3. Cyber Risk is Business Risk 

Problem: Too often, security is treated as an IT issue. But as we see in the examination of real-world breaches, it doesn’t just impact systems. It’s effecting revenue, supply chains and reputation. In one case this resulted in liquidation of the business and termination of it’s 700 employees.  

Solution: Security needs a seat at the boardroom table. 

Action: 

• Build reports with metrics that matter including, MFA coverage, patch latency, incident response times.  

• Run tabletop roleplaying exercises so your executive team knows what to do when, not if, the breach happens. 

Impact: A resilient culture means the business keeps moving, even when attackers try to stop it. 

What you can do next 

The MDDR 2025 isn’t just a collection of scary stats, it’s a wake-up call. 

If you’re planning your 2026 roadmap and wondering how to prioritise (or fund) these improvements, let’s talk. We can help secure funding for assessments to pinpoint your weakest links and help provide guidance on your security journey.  

Don’t wait for the breach to happen. Build resilience now.

Sign up to one of our Security Innovation consultancy sessions. These sessions are designed to help you with your specific business challenges  

You’ll have heard it said before that ‘there are two types of businesses: those that get ahead and those that get left behind.’ It’s a prediction that’s starting to look increasingly accurate, particularly when it comes to Financial Services. Here we consider how and where AI is being used in the industry, its broader cultural implications, and what you should do to prepare.

“I think there are three main drivers in our industry right now: one is scale, one is complexity, and one is the risk of becoming irrelevant,” explains Kim Sgarlata, CEO of fiduciary services provider Oak Group.

AI has the potential to assist financial services firms with all three of those challenges.

When we talk about AI in financial services, we’re referring to two overlapping revolutions:

• The increasingly established use of data-driven AI, such as data analytics, machine learning, and task automation, along with
• The emerging use of ‘agentic AI’, to autonomously and intelligently execute workflows.

However, don’t think of AI as just a tool for productivity. It is increasingly central to competitiveness, compliance, and customer trust, within a highly regulated and reputation-sensitive environment. To understand why, and how, let’s take a deeper dive into these two areas.

Data-driven AI

Good data is fundamental to the success of data-driven AI initiatives, and for many its existence is far from a given.

“While storing data has become easier, ensuring it’s clean, governed, and consistent across the organisation is the real challenge today,” explained Jonathan Ball in his role as a Data Architect at 7IM.

But, underpinned by reliable data, AI can deliver improvements in:

• Operational resilience and efficiency
  Using AI to pre-emptively identify and fix IT vulnerabilities, before service outages. For real-time anomaly detection and predictive analytics for financial crime prevention, and for automating manual processes.
• Customer insight and experience
  Using a customer’s profile, goals, and risk appetite to provide personalised financial advice, or sentiment and behavioural analytics to understand customer needs and risk behaviours from transaction and communication data.
• Decision intelligence and risk modelling
  Identification of emerging trends, liquidity risks, or portfolio optimisation opportunities. For improved credit risk modelling and underwriting, and automation of regulatory compliance, such as ESG reporting, or early detection of conduct breaches.
• Innovation and product development
  Personalising insurance and investment products to an individual customer’s needs or drawing new insights from customer data to create new services or partnerships.

The role of Agentic AI

Rather than merely generating an output, Agentic AI can plan, reason, and act autonomously to achieve a goal – theoretically without human oversight. However, Financial Services’ governance requirements mean many are cautious about adoption. So, it’s likely that we’ll see a form of ‘bounded’ autonomy in which systems act within well-defined compliance and ethical frameworks.

Industry watchers are already talking of:

• Compliance monitoring, with AI that identifies potential issues and initiates remediation
• Autonomous trading agents, that operate within tightly governed limits
• Customer service agents that manage whole case journeys (eg from claim to resolution), albeit with human oversight
• Portfolio management copilots that propose and rebalance strategies, in line with ethical and regulatory constraints.

Over time, it’s likely that many more use cases will emerge.

Cultural considerations

Perhaps more than anywhere else, cultural and ethical considerations are as important as the technology in financial services. Trust, regulation and human judgement are integral to how the sector operates.

Here are five key areas for consideration.

• Trust and transparency
  Your organisation’s credibility will be eroded if either customers or regulators mistrust your use of AI. The technology must be understood, and teams must be able to explain why a model makes a decision, such as a loan approval or a risk flag.
• Human accountability
  AI shouldn’t be seen as an ultimate decision maker, but rather as something that can make decisions that humans remain accountable for – just like a well-trained, more junior member of staff. This means having a human oversight mindset, clear ownership, and encouraging people to challenge AI output.
• Data ethics and fairness
  You’ll want your use of AI to reflect your organisation’s stance on bias, discrimination, and data misuse. Certainly, those involved in developing your AI uses must be acutely aware that the end product will reflect any biases in its training data – but you should go further than this. Embed data ethics reviews into model design and discuss what’s fair, rather than merely meeting legal requirements.
• Involve subject matter experts
  AI success is heavily dependent on combining technology expertise with the knowledge of business and regulatory specialists. Bring data scientists, compliance officers, product managers, and customer advocates together in cross-functional teams. Encourage mutual learning and a shared language so these don’t degenerate into us and them, ‘tech versus business’, silos.
• The human touch
  Consideration of AI use can easily become very process oriented, but it can also trigger fear and uncertainty for staff. This needs to be sympathetically addressed. It’s also important to recognise that AI isn’t static and that culture needs to evolve with it. This may include ongoing training on responsible AI, bias awareness, and data handling,  as well as changing your organisation’s measures of staff performance to promote explainability and critical thinking around new AI capabilities.    

“The cost of AI is an investment, but one that pays off in saved time, better decision-making, and automation of repetitive tasks,” notes Matthew Ebo, Assistant Strategic Insights Manager, at Lloyds Banking Group.

Moving forwards

If you don’t yet feel fully ready to take advantage of AI, you’re not alone. EY’s ‘State of Financial Services AI transformation 2025’ survey revealed that only 9 per cent feel they are ahead of their peers in AI adoption. Yet, in the same survey, 61 per cent of UK and European executives said they expect AI to have ‘significant impact’.

So, what should you do if you want to improve your organisation’s AI preparedness?

Register to attend a free 1:1 consultancy with one of our Data and AI experts. In this session we can discuss the individual challenges your organisation is facing and help you discover the ‘Art of the possible’ with the right AI tools in place.

In 2025, the UK’s cyber resilience has been tested like never before. Major brands have made headlines after suffering disruptive cyberattacks, forcing them to halt operations and exposing sensitive customer data.

These incidents are not isolated. The UK government’s latest Cyber Security Breaches Survey reveals that 43 per cent of UK businesses experienced a cyber breach or attack in the past year, rising to 74 per cent among large organisations. Phishing remains the most prevalent and disruptive threat, and the financial and reputational costs are mounting. 

For IT decision makers, the message is clear: robust device management is no longer optional, it’s a strategic imperative. 

The evolving threat landscape

• Identity is the new perimeter: With traditional network boundaries dissolving, user identities have become the frontline of defence. Almost all (97 per cent) identity hacks are password spray or brute force attacks. Despite headlines proclaiming more sophisticated attacks, the majority of identity-based attacks still target weak or reused passwords.

• Ransomware on the rise: Human-operated ransomware attacks have surged, with 90 per cent of successful breaches originating from unmanaged devices outside the visibility and control of IT. 

• The AI impact: AI-driven phishing is now three times more effective than traditional methods. The increasing use of AI by attackers poses new challenges for detection and response, although AI can equally be used to defend against attacks such as by detecting anomalous sign-in patterns.

Why Traditional Approaches Fall Short 

Legacy Mobile Device Management (MDM) is no longer sufficient. The modern enterprise requires Unified Endpoint Management (UEM) and Unified Endpoint Security (UES) – these integrate antivirus, encryption, detection, and response into a single platform, ensuring consistent security across all devices and operating systems. 

How enhanced device management protects your organisation 

1. Limit identity breaches by adopting… 

• Mandatory Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA): Enforce phishing resistant MFA across all devices to drastically reduce the risk of unauthorised access, even if passwords are compromised. 

• Adaptive Access Policies: Integrate with Identity and Access Management (IAM) systems to trigger additional authentication or restrict access based on risk factors like device health, location, or user behaviour. 

• Continuous Monitoring & Zero Trust: Leverage AI and machine learning to monitor for anomalies, enforce “never trust, always verify” principles, and detect compromised credentials before they’re exploited. 

2. Prevent data breaches with… 

• Robust Encryption: Ensure data is encrypted both in transit and at rest, including full-disk encryption and protection for removable media. 

• Data Loss Prevention (DLP): Flag, track, and control sensitive data to prevent unauthorised sharing or exposure. 

• Remote Device Control: Instantly lock or wipe lost or stolen devices to prevent data leaks. 

Turning theory into practice 

Addressing Unmanaged Devices 

• Device Discovery: Use tools like Microsoft Defender for Endpoint to identify all devices (managed and unmanaged) on your network. 

• Onboarding: Bring unmanaged endpoints under management to close visibility gaps and reduce vulnerabilities. 

Leveraging Microsoft’s Ecosystem 

• Microsoft 365 & Defender Suite: Deploy built-in MDM, DLP, and Conditional Access Policies for consistent, integrated security. 

• Intune Security Baselines: Rapidly deploy recommended security configurations to all managed devices, addressing the root cause of most breaches – poor configuration. 

Navigating the Age of AI 

• BYOAI Risks: With four in five AI users bringing their own tools to work, device management is essential for controlling application use and preventing data leakage using tools like Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps.  

• AI-Driven Security: Modern device management platforms use AI to predict threats, automate policy updates, and shift security from reactive to proactive. 

What next?

1. Assess your current device management posture: Identify unmanaged devices, poor configurations, and BYOAI risks. 
2. Adopt a unified, AI-powered device management strategy: Leverage Microsoft’s ecosystem and you’re existing M365 investment for comprehensive protection. 
3. Don’t wait for a breach: Proactive action today is the best defence for tomorrow’s threats. 

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