Managed Microsoft 365 ServicesNJ · NY · PA · FL

A managed Microsoft 365 service is an outside admin team that runs your Microsoft 365 tenant for you: licensing, security configuration, migrations and day-to-day user support. OST handles Entra ID configuration, Conditional Access policies, Intune device enrollment, Defender tuning, DLP rules, Microsoft 365 backup and help desk tickets for Microsoft 365 issues, for a flat monthly fee per user.

Microsoft 365 licenses run from $7 per user per month (Business Basic) to $60 (Microsoft 365 E5) at Microsoft list price since July 1, 2026, and Business Premium holds at $22. OST’s management fee is quoted separately and depends on your user count, plan mix, and compliance requirements. To price a plan mix at current rates, use our Microsoft 365 and Copilot cost calculator. Most businesses with 25 to 200 users find the total cost significantly lower than hiring even one full-time Microsoft 365 administrator.

Often, yes. We review license assignments against how people actually work: inactive accounts still holding licenses, users on E3 or E5 who only need Business Premium, and add-ons now bundled into a plan you already pay for. Microsoft’s 2026 update moved Defender for Office Plan 1 into E3 and narrowed the gap between Business Standard ($14) and Business Premium ($22) to $8 per user, so some businesses get more security for a similar total.

Yes. We take over management of the Microsoft 365 licenses you already have, review what you are paying for, and handle renewals, seat changes and plan upgrades from then on. Existing customers keep their current Microsoft pricing until renewal, so we time any plan change to your renewal date.

We run a 30-day parallel transition: your current provider or in-house admin stays in place while we document the tenant, take over admin access, review licensing and security settings, and onboard your users. You get access to our client ticket portal from day one, and most tickets see an engineer within 5 to 15 minutes during business hours.

Yes. We migrate email, contacts, calendars and Drive files from Google Workspace to Exchange Online, OneDrive, and SharePoint, and we run tenant-to-tenant migrations when businesses merge, split or acquire. Data copies in the background while your team keeps working, and we handle the DNS MX record cutover during a scheduled maintenance window to keep disruption minimal. Most migrations take 1 to 4 weeks, depending on mailbox count and how much data moves to OneDrive and SharePoint.

Business Premium caps at 300 users and includes Entra ID P1, Intune, Defender for Business, and a 100 GB mailbox. It is the baseline: devices joined to Entra ID (cloud Active Directory), managed through Intune, with core endpoint protection. Microsoft 365 E3 removes the 300-user cap and adds Windows Enterprise licensing, Defender for Endpoint Plan 1, and, with Microsoft’s 2026 licensing update, Intune Plan 2. E5 adds Defender for Endpoint Plan 2, Defender for Identity, Entra ID P2, and Purview’s premium audit, eDiscovery and Communication Compliance tools. Smaller businesses can still choose E3 or E5 when they want stronger protection or have compliance obligations to meet. At list price, Business Premium is $22 per user per month, E3 is $39 and E5 is $60.

Not necessarily. Sentinel is an Azure service billed by data ingestion, not by Microsoft 365 license tier. Office 365 audit logs and Azure activity logs are free to ingest on any plan. Microsoft 365 E5 adds a Sentinel data grant of up to 5 MB per user per day covering Entra ID sign-in and audit logs, Purview Information Protection logs, and Microsoft 365 advanced hunting data. On E3 or Business Premium you can still use Sentinel, but that data is billed as Azure ingestion. OST can model both scenarios and recommend the most cost-effective approach.

Not by default. Microsoft keeps the service running, and recycle bins and version history cover routine mistakes for a limited time, but recovering data after ransomware, a malicious deletion or a long outage is the customer’s responsibility. OST provides third-party Microsoft 365 backup, so a copy of your mail, OneDrive and SharePoint data lives outside Microsoft’s cloud, protected from Microsoft outages and attacks on your tenant. Our guide to Microsoft 365 backup for business covers the details.

Microsoft raised the primary mailbox to 100 GB on Business Basic, Standard and Premium in its 2026 update, but some mailboxes stay at 50 GB. Mailboxes where an admin had set a custom quota keep that quota, and standalone Exchange Online Plan 1 and Office 365 E1 remain 50 GB plans. We check quotas during onboarding and raise them where your license allows.

Microsoft offers a Business Associate Agreement (BAA) for Microsoft 365, which is a prerequisite for HIPAA compliance. Signing the BAA alone does not make you compliant. You still need DLP policies scanning for PHI, sensitivity labels on medical records, audit logging, encryption in transit and at rest, and access controls that follow the minimum necessary standard. OST configures these and documents the controls for your compliance audits.

That is exactly what we recommend. Copilot surfaces any file a user has access to, so overshared SharePoint sites and loose OneDrive permissions become a real liability. OST runs a permissions audit, fixes oversharing, configures sensitivity labels, and checks that your tenant meets Microsoft’s Copilot prerequisites before you spend a dollar on Copilot licenses.

Yes. Managed Microsoft 365 is delivered remotely to businesses across the United States, with deepest engineering capacity in Northern NJ, the NYC metro, Pennsylvania, and South Florida. Tenant administration, security configuration, migrations and user support all run remotely, so your location does not change the service. When a project needs hands on site, such as network or cabling work, we dispatch technicians from our Clifton, NJ and Ft. Lauderdale, FL offices.

We monitor the Microsoft 365 Service Health Dashboard and Azure Status page. When an outage hits, we notify affected clients, share workarounds where possible, and track the incident to resolution. Outlook runs in cached Exchange mode on the devices we manage, so recent email and calendars stay available offline, and our backup and continuity services keep a copy of your data outside Microsoft’s cloud.