A 60-person mid-tier accountancy moved to us in November 2025. Six months in, IT spend is down 41% on a like-for-like basis and helpdesk tickets are down 60%. Here's exactly what we changed — none of it is clever; almost all of it is removing things their previous provider had quietly accumulated.
The starting position
Their monthly bill from the previous IT provider was £14,200. That included:
| Line item | Was | Now |
|---|---|---|
| Microsoft 365 (Business Premium × 60) | £1,440 | £1,260 (re-negotiated, same product) |
| "Managed antivirus" (3rd-party) | £540 | £0 (M365 Defender included) |
| Backup product | £1,200 | £180 (M365 Backup at the right SKU) |
| Remote-management agent | £540 | £0 (included in our managed services) |
| Spam filter (3rd-party) | £660 | £0 (M365 EOP is sufficient) |
| Hosted phone system | £1,800 | £960 (VoIP at our wholesale rates) |
| Office firewall + maintenance | £480 | £480 |
| Managed services + helpdesk | £7,540 | £4,520 |
| Total / month | £14,200 | £7,400 |
Savings: ~£6,800/month. They paid for the migration project (~£8k one-off) in six weeks.
What we removed
The expensive bits were duplicated services. They had a third-party antivirus running alongside M365 Defender (slowing every laptop down) and three different backup products covering the same data. The previous provider charged for each "managed".
What we kept and improved
- Microsoft 365 Business Premium — same product, better commercial terms.
- Their existing firewall — perfectly fine, just needed a config tidy-up and proper monitoring.
- VoIP — moved off their hosted system to ours; same handsets, same numbers.
What we added
- Conditional Access lockdown (UK-only sign-in, MFA-required, impossible-travel alerts).
- M365 Backup at the right SKU — point-in-time restore, immutable.
- Quarterly cost review — looking specifically for SKU changes Microsoft has released that we should move them onto.
Ticket volume — the surprise
Tickets dropped 60% in the first 90 days. The biggest single cause: conditional access killed the "I'm locked out from holiday in Italy" emails dead. The second-biggest: removing the third-party AV that was triggering false positives on Excel macros.
What this didn't include
We didn't:
- Replace any hardware
- Re-image any laptops
- Change any user passwords
- Migrate any data between platforms
The whole thing was a configuration project. Cheap to do, easy to undo if they'd hated us.
What it should mean for you
If your monthly bill has crept up by line item and you can't remember the last time someone removed something — book a 30-minute free review. We come, we look at every line, we say honestly which would matter if you stopped paying for them. No commitment, no sales pitch you can't walk out of.
Email hello@londonict.com with "cost review" in the subject.