Microsoft
Microsoft partnership
We are a Microsoft Cloud Solution Provider based in Accra. That means we hold the commercial relationship for your Microsoft cloud subscriptions, advise on licensing with sight of your real consumption, and stay accountable for the environment those licences pay for — while ownership of your tenant and data stays firmly with you.
The basics
What a Cloud Solution Provider actually is
CSP is one of the more misunderstood terms in enterprise technology buying. It is worth being precise, because the distinction determines who you call, what you can negotiate, and what you keep.
Cloud Solution Provider is Microsoft’s partner model for selling and supporting cloud subscriptions. Under it, an accredited partner buys Microsoft cloud services and provides them to customers together with provisioning, billing, licence guidance, and support. The alternative is buying directly from Microsoft, or through a volume licensing agreement negotiated at enterprise scale. All three routes deliver an identical product. What differs is who sits between you and the platform.
The split of responsibility is cleaner than most buyers expect. Microsoft builds and runs the service: the datacentres, the platform, the security of the infrastructure, the feature roadmap, and the published service level commitments. None of that changes because a partner is involved. Your users get the same Microsoft 365, the same Azure regions, and the same product behaviour they would get buying direct.
What the partner adds is everything around the platform. We provision tenants and subscriptions, adjust seat counts as your organisation changes, invoice you on an agreed cycle, and answer the phone when something is wrong. Where an issue genuinely needs Microsoft, we raise and manage the case rather than handing you a portal link. Just as importantly, we advise on licensing with visibility of your actual consumption — which is a materially different conversation from reading a price list, because we can see the seats nobody is using and the features you are already entitled to but have never switched on.
What does not change is ownership, and this is the part worth being emphatic about. Your tenant belongs to your organisation. Your data belongs to your organisation. Your own staff keep global administrator rights. Our ability to support you comes from delegated administration, which is granted by you, visible to your administrators, scoped to the roles required, and revocable at any point without a negotiation and without interrupting service. A CSP relationship is a commercial and support arrangement layered onto a tenant you continue to own outright.
What Microsoft delivers
The platform itself. Microsoft builds, hosts, patches, and secures the underlying services, publishes the service level commitments, and owns the availability of Microsoft 365, Azure, and Dynamics 365 infrastructure.
- Service availability and platform SLAs
- Datacentre operations and physical security
- Feature development and product roadmap
- Backend patching of the service itself
What the partner delivers
Everything around the platform. As your CSP we provision subscriptions, hold the commercial relationship, advise on licensing with sight of your actual consumption, and act as first-line support with a route into Microsoft when a case needs to go further.
- Provisioning, seat changes, and renewals
- Billing, invoicing, and licence advice
- First-line support and case escalation
- Configuration, security baselines, and enablement
What stays with you
Ownership. The tenant is yours, the data inside it is yours, and the subscriptions are recorded against your organisation. Our access is delegated, scoped, visible to your administrators, and revocable at any time without disrupting the service.
- Tenant ownership and global administrator rights
- Ownership and control of all your data
- The ability to revoke delegated access
- The right to transfer the CSP relationship away
Practice areas
Where our Microsoft work concentrates
Licensing on its own is a transaction. These are the areas where we take delivery and operational responsibility, and they are the reason the commercial advice holds up.
Cloud Solution Provider
We provision, bill, and support Microsoft cloud subscriptions directly, holding commercial ownership while you retain full control of your tenant and data.
Modern Work
Microsoft 365, Teams, SharePoint, OneDrive, and Intune delivered as a governed platform with adoption support behind it.
Azure infrastructure
Landing zones, migration, networking, and cost governance for production workloads on Azure.
Security
Entra ID, Conditional Access, and the Microsoft Defender stack configured to reduce exposure measurably.
Data & AI readiness
Permission hygiene, sensitivity labelling, and use-case selection so Copilot and analytics tooling can be adopted safely.
Why a partner
What changes when someone local owns the relationship
Buying Microsoft cloud is straightforward. Operating it well — with the right plans, the security baselines enabled, and a reachable owner when something breaks — is where the value is won or lost.
Most organisations do not have a licensing problem so much as an ownership problem. Subscriptions get bought under time pressure, renewals arrive without warning, nobody is entirely certain which users need which plan, and when something breaks the only route to help is a support portal several time zones away. The technology works. The commercial and operational wrapper around it does not.
A partner who only resells cannot tell you whether a plan genuinely covers your risk profile, or whether you are paying for identity governance features nobody has enabled. A partner who only does technical work cannot correct a renewal that has been mispriced for two years. Holding both means our advice has to survive contact with your invoice as well as your architecture, and that constraint tends to improve the advice.
Licensing clarity
Right-size Microsoft 365 and Azure commercial models with advice based on your actual consumption, not a price list.
Technical depth
Architecture, migration, security, and workplace delivery from the same team that manages your subscriptions.
Local presence
Based in Accra, with a working understanding of regional connectivity, procurement, and compliance conversations.
Licensing
Right-sizing, not upselling
A licence review is the least glamorous piece of work we do and frequently the most valuable, because it usually pays for itself before anything is implemented.
Licence positions drift. Someone leaves and the seat stays assigned. A project team is given a premium plan for a specific need and keeps it for three years after the need ended. A department buys an add-on that duplicates an entitlement already included in the tier above. None of this is negligence; it is what happens when purchasing decisions are made month by month without anyone holding the whole picture.
We start by mapping users into role groups — frontline, knowledge worker, executive, contractor, service account — and matching each group to the least expensive plan that genuinely covers what those people do. The output is written down with the reasoning attached, so the position can be defended in a budget review and revisited sensibly when circumstances change. Sometimes the recommendation is to spend more, because a tier upgrade removes the need for separate tooling; more often it is to spend less on plans and more attention on what you already own.
That last point deserves emphasis. The most common finding in a licence review is not overspend but under-use: multi-factor authentication left optional, Conditional Access policies unwritten, device compliance never enforced, retention and sensitivity labelling untouched. These are capabilities you have already paid for. Switching them on is usually the highest-value change available, and it costs nothing but the effort of doing it properly.
What a licence review covers
A scoped piece of work with a written output, typically completed inside a few weeks depending on estate size and access.
- Every active subscription, its term date, and its renewal mechanism
- Assigned seats compared against seats with genuine recent activity
- Duplicate entitlements arriving through more than one plan or add-on
- Users mapped into role groups and matched to the least expensive suitable plan
- Security and compliance features already paid for but not switched on
- Add-ons that would be cheaper than a wholesale tier upgrade, and the reverse
- Eligibility for education, non-profit, or other preferential pricing where applicable
- A renewal calendar with named owners and the date each decision must be taken
Ownership
What you keep control of
The most common concern about moving to a CSP partner is losing control of the environment. It is a reasonable question to ask, and the answer is specific rather than reassuring in general terms.
The tenant is registered to you
A CSP relationship changes who sells and supports your subscriptions. It does not change who owns the tenant. Your organisation remains the tenant owner, and your own staff retain global administrator rights throughout.
Your data remains yours
Content in Exchange Online, SharePoint, OneDrive, Teams, and Azure belongs to your organisation. A partner has no proprietary claim over it, and no ability to withhold it in a commercial dispute.
Delegated access is scoped and visible
Support access is granted through Microsoft's delegated administration model. It is recorded, auditable in your own tenant, and can be limited to the specific roles required rather than blanket privilege.
Access can be revoked immediately
You can remove a partner's delegated administrative relationship from your tenant at any time, without opening a support case with us and without interrupting the service your users depend on.
You can transfer away
Subscriptions can move to another CSP partner or to a direct agreement as their terms allow. We will provide the documentation and tenant records required to make that clean rather than obstructive.
Nothing renews unreviewed
We contact you ahead of every term date with current usage and a recommendation. A renewal that arrives as a surprise is a failure of stewardship, not an administrative inevitability.
We put these points in writing at the start of every CSP engagement rather than leaving them to be discovered later. A relationship that depends on the customer finding it difficult to leave is not a relationship worth having.
Transition
How moving your Microsoft licensing to us works
Four stages, each with a decision point you control. For most organisations the whole sequence is commercial paperwork and configuration rather than technical disruption.
Review term dates and current position
Before anything moves, we establish what you hold and when each agreement can change. Subscriptions have different terms, anniversaries, and transfer rules, and moving one at the wrong point in its cycle can mean paying twice. We map every subscription, its billing frequency, its term date, and any constraints attached to it, then confirm what is genuinely transferable and when.
Licence position and proposal
Next we compare entitlement against use. Users are grouped by role, plans are matched to what each group actually needs, and the result is a written proposal showing the recommended position, the cost difference against your current spend, and the reasoning behind each change. You should be able to challenge any line in it — that is the point of writing it down.
CSP transfer
The transfer itself is a commercial change rather than a technical migration. Your tenant stays where it is, your data does not move, and users continue working. We coordinate the transfer with your existing arrangements, sequence subscriptions where a staged move avoids overlap, and confirm each one has landed with the correct seat counts and billing terms.
Enablement and ongoing stewardship
Once the commercial position is clean, attention moves to what you are now paying for. We enable the security baselines already covered by your plans, tidy tenant configuration inherited from previous arrangements, and set a review cycle covering consumption, cost, posture, and upcoming renewals so the position does not drift again.
A staged transition is normal. Subscriptions can move as their individual terms allow, so there is rarely any need to wait for a single convenient date, and never any need to rebuild your environment.
A note on badges
Gold and Silver no longer exist
Partner tiers changed in 2022. If you are comparing providers, it is worth knowing what the current terminology means.
Microsoft retired the Gold and Silver competency tiers in 2022 and replaced them with the Microsoft Cloud Partner Program. Under the current model, partners earn Solutions Partner designations in specific solution areas, measured against performance, skilling, and customer success criteria that are reassessed rather than awarded permanently.
This matters when you are evaluating providers. A partner still leading with “Gold Partner” is using terminology that has not existed for years, which tells you something about how current the rest of their information is likely to be. The useful questions now are narrower: which Solutions Partner designations do you currently hold, in which solution areas, and are you an active Cloud Solution Provider able to transact and support subscriptions directly?
We hold the Cloud Solution Provider relationship, and the practice areas set out on this page describe where our Microsoft delivery capability genuinely sits. We do not publish designation badges here, because designation status is point-in-time and worth stating accurately rather than decoratively. Our current designations are confirmed on request, and we are happy to evidence them directly during procurement.
Questions
Frequently asked
What organisations ask before moving their Microsoft licensing to a partner.
It is Microsoft's partner model for selling and supporting cloud subscriptions. A CSP partner provisions your services, manages billing, provides first-line support, and escalates into Microsoft on your behalf — while you retain ownership and administrative control of the tenant.
Where this leads
The services behind the partnership
A CSP relationship is the commercial foundation. These are the practice areas that make it worth having.
Microsoft licensing
Start with your current licence position
Send us the outline of your Microsoft estate and we will come back with what a review would cover and what it is likely to find.
- Suite 2134, Atlantic Towers, Liberation Road, Accra, Ghana
- info@aagcloudconnect.com
- +233 243 182 362
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