Staying on A1?

[getoffmymac]

Hi Team,

 

Ok here's the scenario

 

25 School trust

 

We've been told by Microsoft we can't move from our existing OVS agreements until next year/renewal cycle. At that point we would look to consolidate agreements into a single ESS (Campus).

 

We use Win 10 LTSC and Office 2021 LTSC, mixture of A1 and A1 plus deployed to staff and students. We've got some bits in a Azure (P1 and E5 license) and use CDM for mounting Sharepoint/Teams where majority of files are saved these days.

 

We have a higher staff ratio than some due to a number of SEMH schools and the cost from Softcar to move to M365 A3 is about £100,000 extra on top of our OVS

 

Our security stack consists of Darktrace (Email and SAAS), Wazuh, Fortigate etc so we haven't really gone down the defender route (yet).

 

Are we mad for considering staying on A1 (not plus for obvious reasons) until the next renewal or should I consider O365 A3 which is considerably cheaper than M365 and keeps desktop apps, live events and gives us bookings etc.

 

Any opinions much appreciated

[miloshmedia]

I have a site that kept to OVS and A1. A3 didn’t provide great benefit at the time and we just added a P1 license. There was/is too much on prem reliance to move to a licensing model that leans on cloud so heavily.