Case study

From incumbent MSP to an in-house team that runs its own tenant.

A mid-market company under new ownership. A few hundred employees, a Windows fleet, a corporate iPhone fleet, and an IT function that belonged to someone else.

Mid-marketNew ownership500+ employees400+ endpointsMicrosoft 365

The situation

The incumbent MSP owned everything: the tenant, the licensing, the network, and the knowledge of how it all fit together. Licensing had grown into a pile of SKUs nobody could explain. Phishing had gotten further than it should have. Corporate iPhones sat on a carrier MDM that nobody managed.

New ownership wanted an IT function that could stand on its own, survive the next diligence, and be run by people on the payroll rather than a vendor with a renewal date.

Not a bigger invoice. A smaller dependency.

What we did

Four phases, one standard.

Phase 1

Identity and licensing

  • Every account reconciled against the HR census
  • Licensing standardized into four bands by role, orphaned SKUs retired
  • CSP relationship moved off the incumbent

Phase 2

Security standard

  • Tenant-wide baseline enforced: admin-only quarantine, Safe Attachments, Conditional Access, device compliance
  • Personal-device enrollment locked down
  • A retention policy found that had silently blocked cleanup for years

Phase 3

Endpoints and mobile

  • Windows fleet on Autopilot and Intune with compliance gating
  • Corporate iPhones moved to Apple Business Manager and Intune
  • BYOD scoped to app protection instead of full enrollment

Phase 4

Operations and handoff

  • Password management with SSO, deployed once
  • Knowledge base and help desk stood up for the internal team to run
  • Board-level reporting on tooling, spend, and AI exposure

Where it landed.

4Licensing bands, down from a pile of SKUs nobody could explain
1Written standard for every setting in the tenant
0Vendors between the internal team and their own environment

End state: their own team runs it on a documented standard, with Corbel holding the architecture and escalations.

Start with a call

If this sounds familiar

Most companies in this position don't need a new MSP. They need the tenant built properly once, a standard their own people can hold, and someone senior to call when it matters. That's the engagement.

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