Our Microsoft Cloud Solution Provider practice
We hold the Cloud Solution Provider relationship for our clients’ Microsoft cloud subscriptions. That means provisioning and billing sit with us, licensing advice is given with sight of real consumption, and escalation into Microsoft is our job rather than yours — while ownership of the tenant and everything in it stays with you.
- Relationship
- Cloud Solution Provider
- Practice areas
- 5
- Based in
- Accra, Ghana
- Designations
- Confirmed on request
What a Cloud Solution Provider actually is
CSP is one of the more misunderstood terms in enterprise technology buying. The distinction is worth being precise about, because it 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, a partner buys Microsoft cloud services and provides them to customers together with provisioning, billing, licence guidance, and support. The alternatives are 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. 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 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, licensing advice is given with visibility of your actual consumption, which is a materially different conversation from reading a price list. 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.
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. None of that changes because a partner is involved.
- Service availability and the published platform commitments
- Datacentre operations and physical security
- Feature development and the product roadmap
- Patching and security of the underlying service
What AAG manages
Everything around the platform. We provision subscriptions, hold the commercial relationship, advise on licensing with sight of your actual consumption, and act as first line of support with a route into Microsoft when a case has to go further.
- Provisioning, seat changes, and renewal management
- Billing on an agreed cycle and licence advice against real use
- First-line support and case escalation into Microsoft
- Security baselines, tenant configuration, and enablement
What you retain control of
Ownership. The tenant is registered to your organisation, the data inside it is yours, and our access is delegated by you. It is scoped to the roles required, visible to your administrators, and revocable at any time.
- Tenant ownership and your own global administrator rights
- Ownership of every mailbox, site, and workload in the tenant
- Granting, scoping, and revoking delegated administrative access
- The right to transfer the CSP relationship elsewhere
What AAG manages day to day
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.
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.
What the customer retains control of
The most common concern about moving to a CSP partner is losing control of the environment. It is a reasonable question, 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 auditable
Support access is granted through Microsoft’s delegated administration model. It is recorded, auditable inside your own tenant, and 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 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 provide the tenant records and documentation needed 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.
These points go in writing at the start of every CSP engagement rather than being left to be discovered later. A relationship that depends on the customer finding it difficult to leave is not a relationship worth having.
How a licensing transition runs
Four stages, each with a decision point you control. For most organisations the sequence is commercial paperwork and configuration rather than technical disruption.
- 01
Review term dates and current position
Before anything moves we establish what you hold and when each agreement can change. Subscriptions carry 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 constraint attached to it, then confirm what is genuinely transferable and when.
- 02
Licence position and written 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 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.
- 03
CSP transfer
The transfer is a commercial change rather than a technical migration. Your tenant stays where it is, your data does not move, and users keep working. We coordinate 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.
- 04
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 earlier 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 a need to wait for a single convenient date, and never a need to rebuild your environment.
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 beyond 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 the access available.
- 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 never switched on
- Add-ons that would cost less than a wholesale tier upgrade, and the reverse
- Eligibility for education, non-profit, or other preferential pricing where it applies
- A renewal calendar with named owners and the date each decision must be taken
How a case reaches Microsoft, and what happens at each stage
Every capable engineering team eventually meets a fault it cannot resolve. What matters then is how quickly the problem reaches somebody with access to the platform, and who is chasing it.
- Stage 01
- Logged and triaged by our service desk
- Cases come to us rather than to a general queue. We reproduce the fault where we can, check tenant health and recent configuration change, and separate a platform problem from a configuration problem before anything is passed on.
- What you can expect
- An acknowledgement, a named owner, and a plain statement of whether this looks like something we fix or something Microsoft fixes.
- Stage 02
- Evidence assembled to the standard the vendor needs
- Most delay in vendor support is caused by incomplete first submissions. We gather tenant and correlation identifiers, message traces, timestamps, affected user counts, and reproduction steps so the case opens with what an engineer needs to begin work.
- What you can expect
- A short written summary of the impact and the evidence being submitted, so you can see what has been claimed on your behalf.
- Stage 03
- Raised with Microsoft under the CSP relationship
- As the partner holding your subscriptions we open the support request on your behalf, at the severity the business impact justifies, and the case sits with us rather than with an individual in your team who also has a day job.
- What you can expect
- The case reference, the severity it was raised at, and the update cadence you should expect, all confirmed in writing.
- Stage 04
- Managed to closure and written up
- We chase the case, translate what comes back, and press for reassessment where progress stalls or the severity no longer reflects the impact. Nothing is closed on our side until the behaviour is corrected or the position is understood.
- What you can expect
- Updates in plain language rather than a case number, and a closing note recording the cause and any configuration change made as a result.
Holding the subscriptions is what makes this possible. Where an organisation buys direct, the same path exists but the case, the evidence, and the chasing all sit with your own team.
Microsoft 365, Azure, and security expertise
The CSP relationship is the commercial foundation. These are the practice areas that make it worth having.
Microsoft 365 and modern workplace
Teams, SharePoint, OneDrive, and Intune delivered as a governed platform with permissions you can explain.
Microsoft 365 as a governed platform people actually use, with permissions you can explain and audit.
Security across the Microsoft stack
Entra ID, Conditional Access, and the Defender tooling configured to reduce exposure that can be measured.
Measurably reduced exposure, starting with identity — where most incidents actually begin.
Microsoft CSP service detail
Licensing, provisioning, renewals, and lifecycle management delivered under the CSP relationship.
One accountable owner for Microsoft licensing, billing, and escalation — with the security features you already pay for switched on.
The marks AAG holds
These are the official partner marks supplied by AAG. On this page we describe the Cloud Solution Provider relationship and the practice areas we work in. Current designations are point-in-time and are confirmed on request, with evidence provided directly during procurement.
Frequently asked
What organisations ask before moving 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.
Microsoft's partner framework has changed over time, and designations are point-in-time: they are earned, maintained, and periodically restructured. The practical question to ask any partner is what they hold today and what it covers. Ours are confirmed on request, and the capability described on this page is what we take delivery responsibility for.
No. Subscriptions can transfer as their terms allow, so a staged move is normal. We map your term dates first and propose a sequence that avoids paying twice or breaking a support path.
Yes, and it is common. We start with a configuration review, because inherited tenants frequently carry legacy settings and permissions that should be addressed before anything is layered on top.
We recommend it. Our practice covers AWS, Google Cloud, Dell, HP, Oracle, and Veeam precisely so that a Microsoft-first position never becomes a Microsoft-only constraint.
Start with your current Microsoft licence position
Send us the outline of your Microsoft estate — the plans you hold, roughly how many people use them, and when the next renewal lands. We will come back with what a review would cover and what it is likely to find.
Your enquiry will be tagged Microsoft CSP so it reaches the right specialist first time.