Building a Productized Microsoft 365 Security Offering for Your MSP

Summary

MSPs that can productize a comprehensive Microsoft 365 security offering produce more consistent results for customers and achieve better profitability by avoiding the costs that come with purchasing numerous third party software products. Microsoft 365 Business Premium includes everything required to support configuration, ongoing management, and device security, but manually managing it for multiple tenants is frequently time-consuming. Multi-tenant management platforms like inforcer allows MSPs to productize and deliver these services at scale while enhancing profitability.

Vendor consolidation is one of the most significant forces reshaping the MSP market right now. Many MSPs are becoming more aware of the downsides of their “third party stack, where they end up purchasing multiple individual products to manage different elements of a customer’s environment such as anti-virus software, an MDM solution, and email protection.

A Microsoft 365 Business Premium license contains all of these solutions and more, but these licenses can be difficult to manage across multiple tenants. The costs of the third-party stack and the difficulties of scaling with Business Premium can make it seem as though MSPs are between a rock and a hard place. Then there’s the basic issue of convincing customers to upgrade to Business Premium if they don’t already have that license.

But there’s a solution. Below, you’ll learn how creating productized offerings can help you showcase the value of Business Premium. We’ll also show you how inforcer’s multi-tenant management platform can streamline your management of these licenses, creating a profitable service for your MSP in the process.

Vendor Consolidation: Why Modern MSPs Should Productize

The MSP world moves quickly. A few decades ago, most MSPs operated on a break-fix model. But over the last 20 years or so, many shifted to managed services as a way to secure recurring revenue instead.

When COVID-19 hit and ushered in a new era of remote work, they had to shift again and embrace a cloud-first method of working. Today, the new development MSPs have to stay ahead of is AI.

That brings us to now: cloud-first is the default expectation for modern MSPs, and demand for managed AI services is growing fast. These factors make security an utmost priority for both MSPs and the SMBs they serve.

Creating a productized Microsoft 365 security offering allows MSPs to leverage customers' existing licensing for their security services, since the capabilities are all included in Business Premium. This cuts down on the need to manage third party vendors and invoices, improving margins and reducing tedious admin work that consumes billable hours while providing a more seamless and consistent experience for customers.

In other words: productizing Microsoft 365 makes your MSP more competitive while making your value clearer and easier to deliver.

What Productizing Microsoft 365 Means for MSPs: Moving From Projects to Products

To productize Microsoft 365 security, you need a way to offer clearly defined services that you can explain easily and deliver consistently at a predictable price point. This creates greater customer loyalty and keeps you having conversations about managed recurring revenue with customers instead of relying on project-based work.

In an ideal scenario, the customer knows what they’re getting because they already have the right license. You know what you’re delivering. And when renewal time comes, they’re not looking to your competitors for support because you’re handling their needs already.

Productizing Microsoft 365 is not about losing specificity. In fact, it’s about creating a consistent and repeatable way to deliver specialized support in numerous areas where your customers need it.

Core components of a productized M365 security offering

A productized Microsoft 365 security offering is more than a list of features. It’s a promise to customers that their Microsoft 365 environment will be properly configured, continuously monitored, consistently secured, and actively managed, with expert support available when they need it. These are the service components that sit inside that promise.

Licensing uplift and initial configuration

Most SMBs on Microsoft 365 Business Premium are using a fraction of what their license includes. The enterprise-grade security and productivity tools are there. They’re just not configured.

Instead of merely configuring each tenant’s Microsoft 365 settings as one-off projects, MSPs can create long-term revenue sources by identifying and remediating configuration drift for them on an ongoing basis.

This removes friction for customers, accelerates licensing uplift across your base, and still leaves higher-value tasks available as paid project work.

Related: What the New Microsoft 365 E7 License Means for MSPs & Their Tenants

Device configuration and management

Devices are a significant attack surface, and for most SMBs, they’re also the source of the most day-to-day friction. Autopilot and Intune address both, but they require real configuration effort and ongoing attention as Microsoft evolves the platform.

Including device management in your offering with routine policy reviews and updates delivers clear, tangible value. Customers stop dealing with laptops arriving unprovisioned or devices falling silently out of compliance.

Related: How to Manage Configuration Drift Across Multiple M365 Tenants

Endpoint protection

Many SMBs have access to Microsoft Defender for Endpoint through their Microsoft 365 Business Premium license and aren’t taking advantage of its capabilities. Including endpoint protection in your offering delivers:

• Next-generation malware protection
• Endpoint detection and response
• Attack surface reduction

It also removes third-party antivirus costs from the tenant’s stack and consolidates endpoint security into a single platform you already manage.

AI managed services and Copilot readiness

AI is no longer a future consideration for SMBs. Tenants are already asking about Copilot, and the MSPs who can answer that question confidently are winning the conversation.

But Copilot doesn't work well on an ungoverned tenant. Before it can reason safely over an organization's data, that data needs to be properly classified, labelled, and protected. Without that groundwork, Copilot becomes a liability rather than a productivity tool.

That means Copilot readiness is a natural extension of the security work you're already doing. As part of your productized offering, you should be able to:

• Assess each tenant's current data governance posture against Copilot's requirements
• Configure Microsoft Purview sensitivity labels and data classification policies
• Identify and remediate oversharing risks before Copilot surfaces them

Once tenants are ready, ongoing AI management keeps their governance policies current as their data and Copilot usage evolves. This becomes a high-value, recurring service in its own right.

How MSPs can productize security while maintaining profit margins

As noted earlier in this article, MSPs that focus on productizing Microsoft 365 have an excellent pathway to eliminating third party stack via Business Premium, since this license tier already includes everything required to create a comprehensive security offering. The challenge is that manually managing these components for multiple tenants often becomes time-consuming and inefficient.

When you’re configuring Microsoft 365 tenants manually, policy by policy, every new onboarding is a significant time investment. When you’re monitoring tenants by logging into individual portals, every review takes longer than it should. That labour cost eats up your margin.

When you standardize delivery by using a consistent baseline, deploying it at scale, and monitoring from a single platform, the time cost per tenant drops significantly. The service you’re delivering is the same or better. The resources required to deliver it are lower. That’s what MSPs need to do to make a productized model profitable as well as competitive.

How inforcer helps MSPs deliver consistent Microsoft 365 security at scale

Delivering a high-quality, well-configured environment to one tenant is straightforward. Delivering it to multiple tenants while keeping their policies current, monitoring for drift, and staying on top of Microsoft’s ongoing platform updates is where the operational model breaks down without the right tooling.

That’s the problem that inforcer is built to solve. Here’s how our leading multi-tenant management platform makes productized Microsoft 365 security viable for modern MSPs:

• Standardize policies across your entire tenant base: inforcer allows MSPs to define a security baseline for Intune, Defender, Conditional Access, Entra ID, and more.
• Monitor for drift and remediate quickly: inforcer surfaces configuration drift due to exclusions, Microsoft updates, or other changes in the landscape automatically and alerts you immediately so you can address them.
• Onboard new tenants faster: reduce setup time for new tenants by applying your proven baseline, making any tenant-specific adjustments efficiently, and delivering a correctly configured environment ready in a fraction of the time manual configuration would take.
• Offer new services without additional complexity: inforcer’s platform enables your MSP to turn once-tedious projects into cost-efficient long-term services. For example, Copilot Readiness Assessments let you evaluate the security and data governance of tenant environments, unlocking the ability to offer your tenants managed services for AI.

The MSPs that will win the next few years are the ones building this now

MSPs that standardize their security offerings by focusing on Microsoft 365 make themselves more competitive and more profitable. They eliminate the costs of third-party stack. They also help their SMB customers see more value from their existing licenses while accessing enterprise-grade security and productivity tools.

This a win for everyone, as long as your MSP has a way to do it at scale. But if you do, you have a golden opportunity to build the kind of customer relationships that pay dividends for years to come, and which competitors can’t easily displace.

inforcer provides a path for MSPs to standardize and scale their Microsoft 365 security services across every tenant they manage. Book a demo today and see how we can help prepare you for the future.