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Blog · 2026-08-06

M365 Management for Verkada Customers: Closing the SaaS Spend Gap Behind Your Cameras and Doors

HTS Managed · Cloud · Microsoft 365 + SaaS Licensing

A multi-site healthcare provider runs 6 clinical sites on HTS Managed and pays $6,646 a month for a single pane of glass across cameras, access control, and the network. The cameras and doors get most of the attention. The line item the customer's CIO (chief information officer) defends in front of the board sits behind them: the M365 (Microsoft 365) tenant, the SaaS (software as a service) tail, and the user accounts that drift between the HRIS (human resources information system) record and the systems those employees can still log into. HTS Cloud is how that healthcare provider — and any Verkada mid-market customer — gets that line item under control.

SaaS sprawl is the new access-control gap

The Verkada customer already trusts HTS to monitor cameras and operate doors. That trust continues into the productivity stack: the same people who badge into a clinic log into Outlook, Teams, OneDrive, and 200-plus other cloud apps the same day. The cybersecurity perimeter is the identity, not the door — and the identity is unmanaged more often than the buyer wants to admit.

Three findings anchor the case. M365 waste is structural: CoreView found 56% of M365 licenses inactive, underutilized, oversized, or unassigned [1]; LicenseIQ's 2025 scan found 27% of M365 seats with no login in 30+ days [2]; Gitbit puts the dollar impact at 22% of M365 expenditure [3]. The SaaS portfolio is bigger than IT knows: Torii's 2026 benchmark reports 830 SaaS applications per organization on average, 61.3% outside IT oversight [4]; aggregated Zylo 2025 data places the average company at 305 apps with $21 million per year wasted [5]. Orphaned accounts are an active exposure: Grip Security's 2025 report found that more than half of identity-based SaaS breaches involve accounts that should have been deprovisioned; Gartner's 2026 estimate is that 89% of CISOs rank orphaned accounts as a top-three SaaS security governance issue [6][7]. HTS Cloud exists because the buyer who chose HTS to manage the physical layer should not need a second firm for the digital layer on top of it.

What license right-sizing returns, in dollars

A CSP (cloud solution provider) engagement is best evaluated on the right-sizing report: what would I have paid if I had been paying attention? A worked view on a 1,000-seat mixed-tier M365 deployment — the footprint a 6-site healthcare network like the one above runs — yields a typical reclaim of 108 inactive E3 seats at $39/month ($50,544 per year), 18 Power BI Pro seats flagged at Syskit's 60%-unused benchmark [8] ($1,728), 11 Visio seats at Syskit's 90%-unused benchmark [8] ($11,880), and 24 mixed-tier seats for $4,128 more. Total opportunity: roughly $68,280 per year, or about 17% of the current run rate. That is the number the CIO puts on the desk of the CFO (chief financial officer), not a deck. The review is quarterly, run against Entra ID sign-in logs.

User lifecycle: closing the HRIS-to-tenant gap

The largest source of M365 waste is the time between the HRIS termination event and the moment the M365 account is disabled, the license reclaimed, and the federated SaaS downstream deprovisioned. In practice, that gap runs weeks to months. HTS Cloud closes it three ways:

Auto-deprovisioning collapses the orphan-account window from weeks to seconds.

M365 tenant administration as a managed service

A 100-employee company absorbs 12 to 20 hours per week of M365 administration — onboarding, offboarding, license assignment, password resets, group changes, DLP (data loss prevention) policy maintenance, conditional access tuning, Microsoft vendor coordination — into a sysadmin's existing role. At a fully loaded internal cost of $65/hour, that is $40,000 to $67,000 per year in labor that does not produce strategic value. HTS Cloud takes the work on three rails: CSP licensing at wholesale pass-through (every commercial SKU in scope, billed at Microsoft list, monthly, on one invoice); tenant setup, migration, and health audit against the CIS (Center for Internet Security) Microsoft 365 Benchmark, with Entra ID conditional access, MFA (multi-factor authentication) enforcement, and Intune enrollment; and Defender integration — Defender for Business inside Business Premium, Defender for Endpoint P1 inside E3, Defender for Endpoint P2 inside E5 [9] — with ASR (attack surface reduction) rules, EDR (endpoint detection and response) in block mode, and vulnerability management, with alerts routed into the same surface that carries Sentinel's camera events. HTS does not mark up the Microsoft license. The management fee is $4 to $8 per user per month depending on customer size, covering tenant administration, right-sizing, SaaS inventory, user lifecycle, and the monthly executive summary. Migration is the only one-time line item, at $25 to $50 per user.

SaaS inventory beyond M365

Right-sizing is only half the spend. The other half is the SaaS tail — the 200 to 400 applications the customer is paying for that nobody is actively tracking. HTS Cloud builds the inventory in four layers: IdP (identity provider) federation through Entra ID, Okta, or Google Workspace (the IT-sanctioned core, typically 15.5% of the actual portfolio [4]); AP / finance records matched against a vendor database of roughly 8,000 known SaaS products; email-domain scan against SaaS signup databases (the contractor's personal Figma with admin rights, the former employee's Notion workspace with access to the company roadmap); and OAuth grants in the M365 tenant, rated by scope, catching the 31% of departed employees who still have access to a previous employer's apps [6]. The output is one inventory — vendor, product, seat count, monthly run rate, owner, last activity, SSO (single sign-on) status, OAuth (Open Authorization, the standard protocol that lets third-party apps access user data without sharing passwords) scope, right-sizing recommendation per line. For a 100-user mid-market customer, applying Zylo's 51% unused-license benchmark to the non-Microsoft SaaS tail suggests $25,000 to $60,000 per year in additional reclaimable spend [5].

The healthcare provider proof point: a managed-service engagement, not a software sale

The customer is a multi-site specialty medical group running a mainstream healthcare IT stack: an EHR (electronic health record), a workforce-management platform, analytics, procurement, and an HL7 (Health Level Seven) integration engine.

Before HTS Cloud, the healthcare provider managed the M365 tenant directly: right-sizing was ad-hoc, there was no formal SaaS inventory, and orphaned accounts ran an estimated 2 to 4 weeks before they were closed. With HTS Cloud, the IT director opens the HTS dashboard weekly; the M365 audit log feeds the HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) review; Defender alerts flow into the same surface that carries Sentinel's camera events. The result is M365 license pass-through at Microsoft list on a single HTS invoice, quarterly right-sizing reviews (target: $40,000 to $80,000 per year on the 1,000-seat deployment), HRIS-driven user lifecycle with a deprovision SLA under 60 seconds, SaaS inventory across 200 to 400 applications, and a monthly executive summary the CIO can forward to the CFO. HTS Cloud for this customer is not a software sale. It is a managed-service engagement with named account ownership, defined SLAs, and a real cost line on the customer's P&L (profit and loss statement). By day 60 the customer has a documented CIS M365 Benchmark health audit with gaps closed, an HRIS connector live and tested, a first quarterly right-sizing review as a one-page report, an initial SaaS inventory reviewed with IT and finance, and a monthly executive summary in the CIO's inbox on the first business day of every month. The right-sizing savings show up on the same invoice as the management fee that produced them — the same posture that earns a Verkada customer the right to also trust HTS with the cloud spend behind the cameras and the doors.

Want to see what an HTS Cloud right-sizing review looks like on your tenant? Email sales@harristechnologyservices.com with your M365 seat count and your HRIS platform, and we will set up a no-cost, no-commitment review.

References

  1. CoreView, Microsoft Office 365 License Optimization Report. https://www.coreview.com/whitepaper/microsoft-office-365-license-optimization-report
  2. LicenseIQ, The 27% Problem: Why Most Microsoft 365 Tenants Are Paying for Inactive Users (2025). https://blog.licenseiq.app/post/the-27-problem-why-most-microsoft-365-tenants-are-paying-for-inactive-users
  3. Gitbit, 2026 State of Microsoft 365. https://www.gitbit.org/docs/22-points-of-microsoft-365-cloud-cost-is-wasted
  4. Torii, 2026 Benchmark Report: AI Isn't Consolidating SaaS — It's Expanding Shadow IT. https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2026/2/24/3243646/0/en/Torii-2026-Benchmark-Report-AI-Isn-t-Consolidating-SaaS-It-s-Expanding-Shadow-IT.html
  5. tools8020, Real Cost of SaaS Sprawl 2026 (aggregating Zylo 2025). https://tools8020.com/blog/saas-sprawl-2026/
  6. Grip Security, 2025 SaaS Security Risks Report and SaaS Breach Surge. https://www.grip.security/blog/saas-sprawl-more-extensive-than-you-think
  7. CloudNuro, Orphaned Accounts: Hidden Security Risk of Poor Offboarding (2026, citing Gartner 2026). https://www.cloudnuro.ai/blog/orphaned-accounts-hidden-security-risk-of-poor-offboarding
  8. Syskit, Are You Overpaying for M365? (2024). https://www.syskit.com/blog/are-you-overpaying-for-m365
  9. Controlled Networks, Microsoft 365 — 2026 Pricing & Packaging Update. https://www.controllednetworks.com/resources/microsoft-365-pricing-2026

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