Microsoft 365 for Business and Enterprise

Microsoft 365 Business (formerly known as Office 365) is the leading office suite for productivity and collaboration, offered through Blaze Networks with a flexible licensing model to meet the demands of your business without large capital outlay.

Microsoft 365 Business is a key tool for driving personal and team productivity and collaboration in your business. In addition to the core suite of Office applications (Excel, Word, PowerPoint, Outlook and OneNote), Microsoft provide Exchange mail server, SharePoint, Microsoft Teams and OneDrive as well as many other cloud-based collaboration applications.

With Microsoft 365 Business Premium and other business packages, Microsoft provide the peace of mind of knowing your services are available with a guaranteed 99.9 percent uptime and financially backed service-level agreement.

More than 50,000 new businesses subscribe to Microsoft 365 each month and 85% of Fortune 500 companies use this Microsoft Cloud service. Currently there are over 85 million commercial subscribers and over 25 million consumer subscribers. Recently the UK Department of Defence has moved all their services to Office 365 demonstrating the trust businesses have in the security features which Microsoft have implemented.

Blaze Networks are a Microsoft Solutions Partner, with specific accreditation in Microsoft’s “Modern Work” solutions area. (The Solutions Partner accreditation category replaces Microsoft’s now-retired “Gold Partner” accreditation, which Blaze also carried).

Microsoft’s Solutions Partners for Modern Work demonstrate a broad capability to help companies boost productivity and make the shift to hybrid work using Microsoft 365. We deploy, drive adoption of, and manage Microsoft 365 apps and services to help customers work, learn, organize, connect, and create, helping to empower personal computing with deployment and modern management services for Windows and Windows 365.

These and further Microsoft accreditations demonstrate our technical knowledge and expertise to provide the best possible service to our customers. (See Blaze Networks’ profile on Microsoft’s Partners guide.)

As Blaze Networks are also a Managed Services Provider (MSP) we can provide a direct connection into Microsoft’s Network from the Blaze Private Core Network – offering a fast, low latency, secure and reliable connection directly into Microsoft’s Network using ExpressRoute.

Advantages of using Blaze as your Microsoft 365 Provider

Fully Managed, with No Capital Outlay

Blaze offer very competitive Microsoft 365 licensing prices across all Microsoft 365 Business and Microsoft 365 Enterprise plans.

Should you require it, Blaze can offer Microsoft 365 as a fully managed service. (Customers have the option to co-manage administrative functions relating to end-users through the 365 portal).  

For Microsoft Teams users we are able to offer the service with no capital outlay required by customers and without the need for network related setup like VPNs to connect home workers or VLAN’s to segment the local business network.

A Cost-effective Microsoft 365 Provider

Blaze offers significant cost advantages compared with other Microsoft 365 providers in the UK.  

Do you licence Microsoft (Office) 365 from another Microsoft 365 provider?  Not a problem: we can bring your existing licences over to Blaze and integrate seamlessly with your existing deployment without any disruption to end users.  Your complete O365 environment can then be managed by Blaze Networks. 

Microsoft 365 Support Expertise

Blaze are a Microsoft Gold Partner with a comprehensive range of expert-backed IT Support Services. We invest in the very best tools, systems, and automation to enable our highly qualified and certified engineers to manage customer solutions to the very highest standard.

Blaze’s ability to implement large-scale infrastructure sets us aside from the competition. These capabilities are underpinned by our experienced (UK-based) teams, processes and infrastructure management capabilities, orchestrated through our national service desk in Macclesfield, England.  Our support approach includes:

• Security, drawing on our deep understanding of system hardening techniques and based around the customers’ requirements and manufacturers best practices. We lead with security – because if you don’t, the chances are you will be wide open to cyberattack.
• 24/7 Service Desk with a vast array of team capabilities, backed-up by dedicated support from Microsoft.
• A fully compliant, clean service desk environment that connects into your server environment. Blaze Networks are fully audited to PCI-DSS standards and our AoC (Attestation of Compliance) is available upon request to help simplify your own PCI-DSS certification.

Microsoft 365 Modules

Features that are available through Microsoft 365 include:

Microsoft Office

The workforce is becoming increasingly mobile and utilising a larger number of devices to work on. The Office suite with Microsoft 365 can be installed on up to 5 devices for the same user, so they have office installed on their PC, Laptop, Tablet, Phone and Home PC. As part of the subscription you can upgrade to new versions of Office once they are released allowing you to benefit from new features, increased security and providing consistency across your company so that all users use the same version of Microsoft Office.

Exchange Online

Microsoft business email and calendaring products help you stay on top of what matters with a clear, unified view of your email, calendar, and contacts. Microsoft Exchange is the leading email product with more than 80% market share. Microsoft extends this functionality to the cloud with Microsoft 365, offering high levels of redundancy, numerous security features such as Data Loss Prevention whilst not having to have large capital expenditure. Each user gets a 50GB mailbox as standard, with some plans providing unlimited archiving space for any size of mailbox.

SharePoint Online

Allows for collaboration, storage, sharing of documents. SharePoint can also be used for a company intranet site and is the as the underlying sharing technology used by several other 365 services.

Microsoft Teams

Video, Audio Calls, Conference Meetings, Instant messaging and collaboration on files are all possible with Microsoft Teams. Microsoft Teams can also provide Cloud PBX functionality which provides a phone system hosted in the Cloud. Optionally, Blaze can also supply SIP trunk connections and  Microsoft Teams Phone System provides full PBX functionality and allows Microsoft Teams users to call any external phone number, including mobiles (a feature not included in the standard Microsoft Teams product).

Protection against Ransomware

To provide additional security against Ransomware and help reduce customers’ cyber-insurance premiums, Blaze provides Blaze Vault Backup for Microsoft 365. This provides ransomware protection for your entire Microsoft 365 environment. Customers have the security of immutable, validated backups of Microsoft 365 and access to rapid restoration of data and services in the event of incidents or errors. corrupting or deleting data.

Dealing with Poor Call and Video Conferencing Experience

In all cases where calls are carried over the employee’s home broadband connection, the quality of the call is dependent on the quality of connection: Upload speed is critical for voice, yet this is usually an order of magnitude slower than download speeds on consumer broadband from pay TV companies and “value” suppliers. Where this is a problem (perhaps for key employee roles) a Blaze private broadband connection should be considered.  At present this has a lead time of 30 days. 

Whichever combination of solutions would be of use, businesses also needs to maintain the same degree of security and control over access to systems and data that is achieved for workers operating within its corporate offices.  As a Managed Solutions Provider (MSP), Blaze is intently focused on delivering solutions which enable productivity, collaboration, and security to companies moving to a remote workforce configuration.

Planning ahead will allow Blaze to properly plan all elements of your remote workers’ needs, ensuring both the infrastructure and the business is ready to fully support your remote workloads without issue.

OneDrive for Business

OneDrive provides business customers with 1 TB of usable storage for documents and a more secure alternative than the likes of Dropbox. Allows synchronisation across all of a User’s devices, providing a seamless end user experience.

ExpressRoute

Blaze Networks have an ExpressRoute connection from the Blaze Private Core Network directly into Microsoft’s datacentres so our customers can benefit from lower latency, reliable, direct private connection directly into Microsoft’s networks rather connecting over the internet. This is particularly important to provide Quality of Assurance for audio and video calls, as well as providing a higher level of security.

To find out more, please contact us.