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In most Microsoft estates, identity is the real project.

Azure, Microsoft 365 and Power Platform work usually surfaces one issue: an identity and access model that has drifted. MENTARA treats that as the foundation.

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The decision in front of you

Microsoft estates grow by adoption rather than by design. Licences are extended, workloads move to Azure, Teams and SharePoint fill with content, and Power Platform apps appear across the business because the tooling makes that easy — which is a genuine strength and an accumulating liability at the same time.

What ties these together, and what most improvement programmes eventually collide with, is identity. Conditional access, privileged roles, guest access, service principals and permission inheritance determine what is actually possible in every one of those workloads, and in most estates that model has drifted well away from what anyone would design deliberately.

The failure mode

Sprawl that is nobody's fault and nobody's job.

Power Platform is the clearest example. Making app-building accessible to the business is genuinely valuable, and it produces applications holding real business process with no owner, no source control, no environment strategy and no plan for the author changing role. The failure is not that these apps exist — it is that nobody decided which ones matter enough to be supported, so all of them are simultaneously critical and unmanaged.

SharePoint and Teams follow the same shape: permission inheritance and guest access accumulate until nobody can state confidently who can reach a given document. That becomes acute at exactly the wrong moment, when a regulator, a customer security review or a departing employee makes it a question that requires a precise answer.

Azure adds a cost dimension. Consumption pricing means architectural decisions have a monthly bill attached, and environments provisioned for a project that ended keep charging indefinitely. Cost optimisation is usually framed as a FinOps exercise when the underlying issue is ownership — no name attached to a subscription means no one to ask whether it is still needed.

Capability

What MENTARA does.

01Identity and accessEntra ID design, conditional access, privileged identity, guest governance and lifecycle. The foundation everything else in the estate depends on.
02Azure cloudLanding zones, migration, platform engineering and cost ownership — with subscriptions and workloads attached to named owners rather than to projects that have ended.
03Microsoft 365 and digital workplaceTeams, SharePoint and content governance, including the permission and retention model that makes the estate defensible under review.
04Power Platform governanceWhich citizen-built applications matter, which are supported, environment and ALM strategy, and a route for promoting a business-built app to something operable.
05Dynamics 365Implementation and improvement, integrated with the wider estate and its data model rather than run as a separate island.
06Integration and dataConnecting Microsoft workloads to the rest of the estate, with explicit contracts rather than accumulated point-to-point connections.
Approach

How the work runs.

  1. 01 Establish the identity reality

    What access exists, how it was granted and what should be removed. Nearly every subsequent decision depends on this and it is nearly always worse than expected.

  2. 02 Attach ownership

    Every subscription, workspace, environment and significant application gets a named owner. Unowned resources are the mechanism by which both cost and risk accumulate.

  3. 03 Set guardrails, not gates

    Policy-as-code, landing-zone controls and environment strategy that make the safe path the easy one, rather than review boards that slow delivery and get bypassed.

  4. 04 Improve in releasable steps

    Remediation delivered alongside visible business change, so the unglamorous work is funded by the valuable work next to it.

Questions

What buyers ask.

Are you a Microsoft partner?

MENTARA does not currently hold a Microsoft partner designation and receives no commission on Microsoft licensing or Azure consumption. Where procurement requires partner status, that is worth establishing early.

The consequence is that our advice on licensing tiers, workload placement and whether you need a product at all carries no commercial interest of ours.

Can you help reduce our Azure spend?

Yes, and the durable savings are usually structural rather than technical. Rightsizing and reservations help once; ownership, tagging discipline and a decommissioning process are what stop the spend re-accumulating.

We would rather fix the second than sell you the first repeatedly.

Our business has built dozens of Power Apps. What now?

Triage before governance. Establish which applications hold genuinely important process, promote those to a supported footing with proper ALM, and make a deliberate decision about the rest rather than attempting to bring everything under management at once — which fails and alienates the people who built them.

06

Where MENTARA fits best.

Scope

We fit the identity, governance, integration and cost-ownership work, and independent assessment of an estate somebody else will continue to run.

A large-scale Dynamics 365 implementation across multiple countries needs a certified partner with a substantial bench. So does anything requiring Microsoft co-sell or partner-tier procurement.

Where this connects

Bring the estate nobody has a full picture of.

Share the business context, constraints and expected outcome. MENTARA will identify the relevant accountable route.

Submit your requirement

One partner. One plan. Measurable outcomes.