Cloud Services - Built on Microsoft Azure

Advantage helps UK SMEs plan, migrate, manage, and optimise their Microsoft cloud environment — built on Microsoft Azure. The service covers six areas:

• Azure Infrastructure and Migration — moving servers, workloads, and data to Azure with a structured, low-disruption migration designed for performance, security, and cost efficiency
• Microsoft 365 and the Modern Workplace — getting full value from Microsoft 365 including Teams, SharePoint, Copilot, and advanced security
• Dynamics 365 in the Cloud — implementing, optimising, and managing Business Central and Customer Engagement cloud environments
• Cloud Backup and Data Protection — automated Microsoft 365 backup via Advantage CloudVault365™
• Cloud Security — comprehensive Microsoft 365 and Azure security via Advantage Secure365™
• Windows 365 Cloud PC — full Windows experience streamed from the cloud to any device

For SMEs already using Microsoft products, Azure is the natural cloud foundation — because every Microsoft product your business uses already runs on it. Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365, Power Platform, and Copilot are all Azure-native. Using Azure means seamless integration across your entire Microsoft estate with no multi-cloud complexity.

Beyond integration, Azure brings enterprise-grade security with built-in threat intelligence and identity management, AI-ready infrastructure (all of Microsoft's AI services including Copilot run on Azure), global reliability across 60+ regions with 99.9%+ uptime SLAs, flexible pay-as-you-go pricing, and compliance certifications covering hundreds of global and industry-specific standards — including those required by financial services and healthcare organisations.

No — and this is one of the most important and widely misunderstood points about cloud services. Microsoft operates on a shared responsibility model: Microsoft ensures the availability and infrastructure of Microsoft 365, but the responsibility for backing up your data within it sits with you as the customer.

If files are deleted, data is corrupted, or a ransomware attack encrypts your Microsoft 365 content, Microsoft's native retention policies may not be sufficient to recover everything you need. Advantage CloudVault365™ provides automated, policy-driven backup for SharePoint, OneDrive, and Exchange — ensuring fast, reliable recovery without depending on Microsoft's limited native restore capabilities.

Microsoft's AI capabilities — including Copilot across Microsoft 365 and Dynamics 365, Azure OpenAI, and Machine Learning services — all run on Azure. The value you can extract from these AI tools is directly determined by the quality of your underlying cloud environment.

Specifically: how well your data is structured, how your identities and permissions are managed, and how your security is configured all affect what AI can access and therefore what it can do for your business. A poorly configured cloud environment limits AI capabilities — Copilot cannot summarise a document it cannot access, or draw insights from data that is not properly structured. A well-architected environment built to AI-ready standards unlocks the full potential of Microsoft's AI tools. Advantage designs cloud environments with AI readiness as a foundational requirement, not an afterthought.

Advantage takes clients through a five-stage structured process:

• Assess — reviewing the current environment: on-premise infrastructure, existing cloud services, licensing, security posture, data structure, and business requirements
• Design — designing an Azure architecture right-sized for the business, balancing performance, security, compliance, and cost — with every design decision explained in plain language
• Migrate — managing the migration to minimise business disruption, carefully sequencing the movement of email, servers, applications, and data
• Secure and Optimise — hardening the environment with security policies, identity controls, backup, and disaster recovery; reviewing Azure consumption to eliminate waste
• Manage — ongoing AI-enhanced managed IT support monitoring and managing the cloud environment, handling incidents, applying updates, and supporting the team day to day

Windows 365 is Microsoft's Cloud PC service — a full Windows experience streamed securely from the cloud to any device, anywhere. Rather than running Windows from a physical machine's local hardware, the processing happens in Azure and is delivered to whatever screen the user is working from — a laptop, tablet, thin client, or even a personal device.

For SMEs this means: no hardware dependency for specific users, simplified device management through Microsoft Intune, consistent security regardless of the device being used, easy provisioning of new starters without waiting for hardware, and a clear path to reducing capital expenditure on end-user computing. It is particularly valuable for organisations with remote or hybrid teams, or those managing a mix of device types across the business.

After a merger or acquisition, many organisations find themselves with two separate cloud or on-premise environments — different Microsoft tenants, different security configurations, different licensing structures, and potentially different Microsoft 365 or Dynamics 365 setups. Consolidating these into a single, well-architected Microsoft environment is one of the most technically complex aspects of post-merger integration.

Advantage has built EdgeFusion™ specifically for this scenario — a structured accelerator covering tenant consolidation, data migration, identity management, and the technical integration of both businesses onto a single Microsoft cloud platform. The cloud consolidation work runs in parallel with system consolidation (Dynamics 365 CRM and ERP) to deliver a unified Microsoft environment across the combined organisation.

Cloud waste is a common problem for SMEs — unused licences, over-provisioned Azure resources, duplicate services, and suboptimal configurations that were set up quickly and never reviewed. Advantage addresses this through the Secure and Optimise stage of every cloud engagement and as an ongoing component of managed services.

Specifically: Azure consumption is reviewed to identify resources that can be right-sized, reserved (which reduces cost significantly for predictable workloads), or decommissioned; Microsoft 365 licensing is audited to remove unused licences and ensure clients are on the right plan; and security configurations are reviewed to identify services being paid for that are already covered by existing licences. The goal is a cloud environment that delivers maximum value at the right cost — not the lowest cost at the expense of capability.

Yes — many of Advantage's cloud engagements are with businesses that are already in the cloud but unsure whether their environment is secure, optimised, or well-configured. Being in the cloud and getting the most from it are two very different things. Common situations Advantage addresses for existing cloud customers include:

• Microsoft 365 environments that were set up quickly with default configurations and have never been properly secured or optimised
• Azure environments with unreviewed resource consumption generating unnecessary cost
• Dynamics 365 or Microsoft 365 environments that are not ready for Copilot adoption due to data governance or permissions issues
• Environments that have grown organically and lack a coherent architecture

An Advantage cloud assessment can identify the gaps and produce a prioritised improvement plan without requiring a full re-migration.

The starting point is an assessment conversation with the Advantage team — understanding your current environment, where the pain points are, and what you want your cloud infrastructure to enable. For most SMEs this leads either to a structured migration engagement or a cloud optimisation project depending on where you currently are.

Get in touch via our contact page, call 020 3004 4600, or email hello@advantage.co.uk.