Microsoft 365 is trusted by more than two million organizations worldwide. It offers critical modern workplace capabilities that make it essential to operating modern businesses. But while Microsoft is essential to operating modern workplaces, it can also create issues that most organisations are unaware off.
Licences are assigned but never used, security alerts are triggered but unnoticed, and powerful tools go underused or forgotten. You wouldn’t notice it at a glance, everything seems to work. But beneath the surface, opportunity is being missed, and money is being lost. In fact, research shows that 44% of Microsoft 365 licences are underutilised or oversized.
As the Solution Lead for Modern Workplace at Babble, I’ve helped hundreds of organisations optimise and secure their Microsoft 365 environments. And I can say with confidence almost every environment we assess reveals unnecessary costs or hidden risks that could have been avoided.
In this article, I’ll walk you through the five most common issues we uncover in Microsoft 365 environments once we run a SmartCheck scan, what they look like, why they matter, and how to fix them. If it’s been a while since you last reviewed your setup, this may be the moment to pause, reassess, and take back control.
It all starts with a simple question: 'Do you know what's happening inside your Microsoft environment?' The answer is usually something along the lines of, “We think we’re okay, but can you just take a look?”. The reality is, most businesses don’t go looking for problems in Microsoft 365 because they're often unaware that they exist in the first place.
That was exactly the case for a 100-person professional services firm we recently worked with. Their team used SharePoint, Teams, Outlook, OneDrive - the whole Microsoft 365 stack. While there were no outages, incidents, or urgent complaints, our question sparked some curiosity. So, we ran a quick, non-intrusive SmartCheck scan of their Microsoft 365 environment. From that simple scan, they got a visual report showing what was really happening inside their tenant.
I must say, what we found raised some eyebrows:
No alarms had gone off. Yet quietly, the business was overspending on key tools that so many people weren't using. If this wasn't bad enough, they were sitting on unresolved security alerts that flagged compliance risk and left the business largely under-protected.
This recent example is just one of many cases I see over and over again. So, if you don't know when you last audited your Microsoft 365 environment, have a look at the video below to see the kind of data you need to have on your radar:
Licences are often assigned and then forgotten. Staff leave, roles shift, projects end, but those licences stay active, silently adding to your monthly bill. The waste hides in plain sight because Microsoft 365 doesn’t flag underused or inactive accounts.
A scan of your Microsoft tenant can break this cycle. It shows who’s using what, how often, and where you’re overspending. Once you know, it’s straightforward to reassign or cancel underused licences, downgrade where it makes sense, and right-size your entire setup.
We always advise businesses to put these practices in place - even small course corrections can unlock large savings:
When was the last time you audited your licence usage? If it’s been more than 3–6 months, there’s a strong chance you’re already overspending.
Microsoft 365 is constantly monitoring your environment for suspicious activity, such as admin logins from unknown locations, newly created inbox forwarding rules or users behaving outside their usual patterns. These signals are vital. But in many organisations, no one is looking at them. Alerts get buried. Default settings go unreviewed. High-risk activities sit unresolved sometimes for weeks. Not because teams don’t care, but because the visibility just isn’t there.
Scanning your Microsoft environment will surface every alert, including the ones hiding in the background, and highlights those that matter most. From unreviewed login attempts to shadow forwarding rules, it pulls the critical issues into focus. With alerts surfaced, your IT team can take immediate action, whether that’s disabling compromised accounts, adjusting permissions, or enabling policies to prevent recurrence.
Are you confident your team is reviewing Microsoft 365 security alerts regularly? If not, now's the time to start.
If you’ve never heard of Secure Score, you’re not alone, but that doesn’t make it any less important. Secure Score is Microsoft’s internal measure of how well your environment aligns with security best practices.
The Secure Score acts as a benchmark for how well an organisation is protecting its environment - read more about it here.
It looks at things like MFA, conditional access, outdated protocols, and privileged accounts. It’s scored out of 100, and Microsoft recommends businesses aim for 75 or higher. But most firms sit somewhere in the 30s to 50s, without knowing what’s dragging them down. A low score doesn’t just mean a missed checkbox. It means tangible weaknesses: inactive admin accounts, unprotected identities, and open access to sensitive data.
When we scan your Microsoft tenant, we also calculate your Secure Score. The report will benchmark your Secure Score, show you how to improve it, and prioritises changes that make the biggest impact, fast. Once you know the gaps, your team can take specific steps, enable MFA, restrict admin access, implement conditional access policies that directly raise your Secure Score and harden your environment.
Do you know your current Secure Score and what’s affecting it? If not, your environment could be more vulnerable than it looks.
Microsoft 365’s collaboration tools, especially SharePoint and OneDrive, work brilliantly when they’re managed intentionally. But without oversight, they quickly become overgrown. Over time, collaboration platforms grow cluttered. Files and sites pile up. Teams leave. Data stays. What once enabled productivity becomes a liability. Data sprawl leads to higher storage costs, poor collaboration, and increased exposure of sensitive or outdated information.
A simple scan of your Microsoft tenant will visualise your data footprint across SharePoint and OneDrive. It shows which sites are active, which users are engaging, and where cleanup is long overdue. From here, your team can archive or clean up unused sites, reclaim storage, and put better governance in place. It’s the first step towards a leaner, faster, more secure workspace - that doesn’t bury your business under its own information.
Do you know which data is still useful and which is just weighing your tenant down? If you’re not sure, you’re overdue for a review.
Microsoft 365 isn’t just email and cloud storage. It’s a productivity suite packed with tools that can transform how teams communicate, plan, and collaborate. But most businesses only use a fraction of what they pay for. Powerful apps like Teams and Planner are often licensed across the company but used by just a few. Some tools never get rolled out. Others are forgotten after onboarding. The result is a growing mismatch between what’s bought and what’s used. If you can relate to this, you're losing value. These tools were meant to drive collaboration, automation, and productivity, but that value is lost when adoption stalls.
A report from scanning your tenant will show these adaptation gaps. It shows actual product usage per app and per user group, so you can see what’s being used and what’s not. With this insight, you can focus training where it matters, decommission tools that don’t fit, or adjust licensing to match real-world usage. This will allow you to maximise your ROI on the tool your teams use.
Are your teams making the most of what you’re already paying for? Are they using the full Microsoft 365 suite or just a few basics? If adoption isn’t measured, value is left on the table - along with the money.
The five problems above aren’t rare. They’re routine and happening inside businesses every single day. But they’re also fixable. All it takes is visibility. That’s why we built SmartCheck, to help teams like yours get clarity and control over their Microsoft 365 setup.
SmartCheck is a quick, secure, and non-intrusive scan of your Microsoft 365 environment that reveals:
SmartCheck is specifically designed to give you the clarity you need to take back control. It takes just 10–15 minutes to set up, requires read-only access from a global admin, and it’s completely free. No disruption, no access to your content - just a fast, secure scan of how your Microsoft 365 is really being used.
Every Microsoft 365 environment tells a story. We help you read it and write a better one. Let’s take a look under the hood and fix what’s holding your environment back.