In short: EtherInsights covers the analysis side of a Microsoft estate: cloud cost attribution and forecasting, Microsoft 365 security posture, Copilot readiness and day-two management. It is the tooling behind the TCO modelling and the estate reviews we run at assessment. It is an analysis platform, not a managed service and not a remediation tool: it tells you what is true and what it is costing, and somebody still has to act on it.

Who this is for
  • Your Azure bill has grown and nobody can attribute it to anything
  • Intune reports a compliant estate and you are not confident the number means anything
  • You are being asked whether Copilot is safe to switch on
  • Nobody has reviewed sharing, guests or site ownership in a couple of years
  • You are weighing a renewal and want the numbers before the conversation
What it costs to leave it

Unattributed cloud spend does not announce itself. It shows up as a slightly higher bill each month, a renewal nobody can challenge on detail, and eventually a cost-cutting exercise aimed at the wrong things because nobody could see which were the expensive ones.

Plays from YouTube. Nothing is requested from YouTube, and no cookie is set, until you press play.
The permissions question, which is the one that decides whether a pilot is safe to run. Plays from YouTube. Nothing is requested from YouTube, and no cookie is set, until you press play.

What it actually surfaces

The three things that are true of almost every estate and visible from none of them.

In cost:

  • Spend attributed to an owner, a project and an environment rather than to a subscription.
  • Non-production resources running around the clock, which is routinely the single largest recoverable line.
  • Licences assigned to nobody, and licence tiers that do not match what the person actually does.

In endpoint reporting:

  • What the device estate is genuinely running, as opposed to what was deployed to it.
  • Patching and update state across the estate over time, rather than at the moment you looked.
  • Devices that have gone quiet, separated from devices that are actually compliant.

In security and readiness:

  • What your existing Microsoft licence already covers, and how much of it is switched off.
  • Sharing, guest access and site ownership that has drifted since anyone last looked.
  • Whether the permissions model would survive Copilot, which inherits it exactly.

Why the cost and security questions belong together

Because they are the same question asked twice, and splitting them is why both go unanswered.

A licence assigned to a leaver is a cost problem and an access problem at once. An E5 tier bought for security features nobody enabled is money spent and risk not reduced. Reviewed separately, months apart, by different people, each exercise finds half the picture and neither produces a decision.

That is also why we use it at assessment rather than only in delivery: the estate review and the cost review are one pass over the same data.

What it is not

It is an analysis platform, not a managed service, and not a remediation tool.

It will tell you that thirty per cent of your Azure spend is non-production running overnight. It will not switch those machines off, negotiate your renewal, or tidy your sharing model. Somebody still has to do that, and pretending otherwise is how visibility tools end up as dashboards nobody opens.

If you have an internal team who will act on the findings, the tooling on its own is genuinely useful. If you do not, the findings will sit there, and the honest recommendation is to buy the work rather than the visibility.

What we do with EtherInsights

  • Run the estate and cost review as one pass rather than two exercises months apart
  • Attribute Azure spend to owners, projects and environments so the numbers can be argued with
  • Quantify shelfware against sign-in data and your leavers list
  • Assess Copilot readiness against your actual permissions and sharing model
  • Act on the findings, which is the part the tooling deliberately does not do

Related

Frequently asked

How is this different from Azure Cost Management, which is free?

Azure Cost Management is genuinely good and you should be using it. It shows you Azure spend. What it does not do is put Azure spend, Microsoft 365 licence assignment and security posture in one view, which matters because the expensive problems live across that boundary: a licence assigned to a leaver, an E5 tier bought for features nobody switched on, a non-production subscription nobody owns. If your estate is Azure-only and somebody reviews it regularly, the native tooling may be all you need, and we would say so.

Do we have to buy the tool to get an assessment?

No. The free estate and cost reviews use it, but what you receive is the written findings, and you keep those whether or not you engage us and whether or not you ever license anything. Buying the tooling makes sense if you have people who will act on it continuously rather than once. If the review is a one-off decision point, take the findings and act on them, which is cheaper for you.

Will it tell us whether Copilot is safe to turn on?

It will tell you what Copilot would be able to surface, which is the question people mean when they ask. Copilot inherits your existing permissions exactly, so the risk is not the AI, it is oversharing that has sat harmlessly for years because nobody had a fast way to search across it. The assessment shows where the permissions model is loose, which sites and files are shared more widely than anyone intended, and what would have to change first. Whether to proceed is then a business decision rather than a technical unknown.

Other vendors we support

Not sure where you stand with EtherInsights?

Tell us what you are running and we will tell you plainly whether it needs action, including when the answer is that it does not.

Ask us