Monthly Archives: December 2021

Microsoft made several announcements during late 2021 which will impact Microsoft 365 services. Microsoft announced the following:

Price changes
An update to the pricing of all licenses for Microsoft 365 will take place on 1 March 2022. Exact figures in GBP (£) are not yet available, we expect these around 1 February 2022. Going by the USD ($) pricing, we are likely to see a ~20% increase across all licenses.

Microsoft say that this is the first substantive pricing update since Office 365 (now Microsoft 365) was released back in June 2011, and since initial release they have added 24 new apps – including Microsoft Teams – and over 1,400 features.

Flexibility changes
All licenses will move from monthly to annual flexibility. Agreements for Microsoft 365 services are already on an annual basis, and you will continue to be able to add new licenses as/when required. However, this change will mean that you can no longer remove licenses on a monthly basis. Existing licenses can be re-used, e.g. if a team member leaves after six months then this license can be reallocated to a new starter for the remaining six months.

For example
(EDIT: Confirmed pricing is now available, the table below has been updated accordingly. For full pricing details please see here.)

All prices are per user and subject to VAT.

Free ‘Audio Conferencing’
The Microsoft 365 Audio Conferencing add-on, which previously required a paid license per user, will become part of Teams at no additional cost. This extends your audio conferencing capabilities, enabling users to dial-in and join a Teams meeting from virtually any device.
(EDIT: We have since learnt that this will not be automatically included and will need to be added to a license on a request basis. Please contact us to apply this.)

We appreciate some changes are less than ideal, and we – like more or less every Microsoft Partner – have fed back and pushed back against these to Microsoft. Furthermore, here is what we are doing to help:

• It will be possible to retain monthly flexibility for your licenses with the additional pricing premiums as indicated in the example above, with a special arrangement in place with Microsoft for your organisation. Please contact us to arrange this.
• Any promotional pricing for which your organisation is eligible will be automatically applied to any/all of your licenses.
• Free one-month trials will be available for multiple additional products including Teams Phone, Project, and Visio.
• All new annual licenses will have their pricing locked in for the duration of their term.
• You will be able to cancel or change a new annual license within the first 24 hours at zero cost, and within the first 24 to 72 hours seven days at minimal cost (EDIT: Microsoft has extended this period after complaints from partners including us).

We will post and send out a further update with more information in the new year, as well as Microsoft’s official GBP (£) pricing once available. Our website will also be updated with this new pricing once it is announced.

Like many providers around the world, we became aware of a critical vulnerability in the Log4j software developed by Apache Software Foundation on Friday 10 December. This software is generally used in web server applications, and a zero-day attack exploit was discovered – referred to as CVE-2021-44228 or “Log4Shell” – impacting versions 2.0 to 2.14.1.

We quickly reviewed our systems within 24 hours, and identified that there were a few systems that could have potentially been affected. These included some servers running cPanel using a specific email search add-on and some dedicated customer servers running Java environments – both of which include the Log4j software.

Based on our investigation, we have not detected that any of our services were negatively affected by this exploit. We take proactive measures to protect all our systems, and many of these measures helped in this incident. For example, keeping as up-to-date as possible, ring-fencing servers by role – e.g. disabling email capability on a web server, only running environments such as Java if necessary for a service. This well-maintained and ‘only as required’ approach helps to reduce exposure to such vulnerabilities and the subsequent risks.

We continue to monitor the situation and are ready to act appropriately on any further relevant intelligence regarding “Log4Shell”. In addition, measures designed to defend against attempted activity related to this vulnerability have been implemented, such as further checking and manual updates to all servers, removal of the specific cPanel email search add-on, and updating Java environments.

Further information on this vulnerability is available from the National Cyber Security Centre.