Why pay for M365?

There are many reasons why I chose this platform and am willing to bear the cost initially (which will also have the effect of keeping me cost vigilant).  I would eventually like to look for ways to transition costs, once stabilized, to an operation costs budget.  I will not seek to do that until I have determined the additional entitlements we can eliminate and the thresholds at which volume licensing becomes available to us. And, of course, until we have an operation cost budget and a sustainable way to fund it.

Here's the thing:  10 years ago you would have had to stand up an enterprise data center or at least invest in collocated hosting, and even then, much of the security administration was not directly available to you.

Times have changed.  Drastically.  I have available to me now - we all do - the ability to stand up an enterprise grade globally distributed highly secure datacenter for $12.50 per month.  Within this infrastructure, I, and my delegates, can maintain granular control over the security we implement and set policies which will allow us to secure our data directly as opposed to just securing the box we put it in so to speak.  it is called zero trust security with access and identity management and gives us access to resources I can't even begin to explain right now.

There are things I have envisioned which require this infrastructure which are part of the legacy I want to leave. If I am to consider this project my legacy, then I have to bring all of my life skills to bear on it and this is one of them.  You will understand, in time, the functionality and the peace of mind this will buy us. 

It also positions us to take advantage of the new pay as you go pricing model tied to most Azure services which represents significant cost savings.

Folks, we cannot even consider some of the things we are considering storing and consolidating unless we have a highly secure infrastructure.  Much of my vision dies without that.  I just ask you to trust me and give me time to work my magic. You will thank me when you can pull out your phone and scan an old family recipe and have OCR extract the text and securely transmit it to our clan's citadel along with your notes, or when you can do the same with those old family photos and documents.  

I envision a feature which automatically builds and updates a family tree based on registration information and the ability to granularly control access to certain repositories, such as if each of the clan leaders wanted to maintain a private repository for their branch only.

I just have so many ideas and many of them depend on this infrastructure.  But it keeps coming back to this most compelling reason:  This is our clan's data.  It doesn't take much imagination to picture the consequences of a breach.  We need enterprise grade security, and we need full control.  So many hosting services have contract loopholes which allow them to sell some or all of your data.  I deeply need to maintain confidence for myself and for all of our members that our data is safe, and no sassenach is going to change some policy somewhere which exposes our data before we know about it.

So it's M365 with Azure Active Directory, or we could build our own globally distributed datacenter. Glad we live in the times we do, eh?