Rencore
Petrochemical Provider: From Cloud Sprawl to Proactive Governance
A 1,200-employee petrochemical service provider deployed Rencore to remediate Microsoft 365 cloud sprawl, reinstate external sharing securely, and shift IT from reactive to proactive governance.
Customer
Anonymized Petrochemical Service Provider
Industry
Petrochemical
Region
United States
Employees
1,200
Results
F1 through E5
License tiers managed
Reinstated securely
External sharing
Reactive to proactive
Operations shift
This petrochemical service provider is a 1,200-employee company that migrated to Microsoft 365 with licenses spanning F1 through E5 tiers, then faced significant cloud sprawl as employees created Teams for social groups, temporary initiatives, and one-off meetings. Each team generated associated SharePoint sites and Office 365 Groups. Rencore provided centralized visibility, automated policy enforcement, and secure external sharing controls that shifted IT operations from reactive firefighting to proactive governance.
Use cases
Challenge
A petrochemical service provider with 1,200 employees migrated to Microsoft 365 with a mix of license tiers ranging from F1 (frontline workers) to E5 (knowledge workers and executives). The migration succeeded technically, but governance did not keep pace with adoption. Employees created Microsoft Teams for every conceivable purpose, project teams, social clubs, one-time meetings, temporary task forces, and each team automatically generated an associated SharePoint site and Office 365 Group.
Within months, the tenant contained hundreds of teams, many of them abandoned or redundant. External sharing had been disabled entirely as a blunt security measure because the IT team lacked visibility into what was being shared and with whom. This decision blocked legitimate collaboration with clients and contractors, creating friction that drove users toward shadow IT alternatives. The IT team spent most of their time reacting to individual requests and incidents rather than managing the environment systematically.
Solution
The company deployed Rencore Governance to regain control of the Microsoft 365 environment. The platform provided immediate inventory visibility across all teams, SharePoint sites, and Office 365 Groups, including metadata on creation date, ownership, activity levels, and membership.
For sprawl remediation, Rencore identified inactive and orphaned teams using configurable activity thresholds. The IT team established lifecycle policies that flagged dormant teams for review and archived those confirmed as abandoned. For external sharing, Rencore provided granular controls that allowed the company to reinstate sharing for specific sites and use cases while maintaining audit visibility. Instead of a blanket block, the team could approve external sharing on a per-site basis with automated monitoring of what was shared externally.
Automated policy enforcement replaced manual checks. Policies covered naming conventions, team creation approval workflows, and guest access rules. Violations surfaced in dashboards rather than requiring the IT team to discover them reactively.
Results
The company brought its Microsoft 365 license tiers, from F1 through E5, under unified governance for the first time. External sharing was reinstated with appropriate security controls, eliminating the shadow IT workarounds that had developed during the blanket block. IT operations shifted from reactive incident response to proactive governance, with automated policies catching compliance issues before they required manual intervention. The sprawl of abandoned teams and orphaned SharePoint sites was systematically addressed through lifecycle automation rather than periodic manual cleanup campaigns.
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