Specialist Risk Group: Governance During Rapid M&A Growth

Challenge

Specialist Risk Group (SRG), a Lloyd’s of London insurance broker, grew from 119 to 450 employees through a series of acquisitions in a short period. Each acquisition brought new users, devices, and Microsoft 365 accounts into the environment. The infrastructure team, led by a single Infrastructure Team Leader, needed to onboard acquired companies, consolidate licenses, decommission inactive accounts, and maintain security standards, all while the user base quadrupled.

The native Microsoft 365 admin centers provided the raw data, but it was scattered across separate consoles for Teams, SharePoint, Exchange, and Azure AD. There was no unified view that showed the health of the entire tenant at a glance. With M&A activity ongoing, the team could not afford to spend days pulling reports from multiple admin centers just to answer basic governance questions about license usage, disabled accounts, or Teams sprawl.

Solution

SRG deployed Rencore Governance in five working days. The platform connected to their Microsoft 365 tenant and immediately surfaced a consolidated view of users, licenses, Teams, SharePoint sites, and Power Platform resources in a single interface.

The deployment addressed three priorities. First, it provided real-time visibility into disabled and inactive accounts inherited from acquisitions, allowing the team to clean up licensing quickly. Second, it established monitoring for Teams creation and usage patterns, identifying abandoned teams and ensuring naming conventions were followed as the organization grew. Third, it gave the infrastructure team a governance baseline they could use to assess each new acquisition against consistent standards.

Because SRG adopted Rencore early in their cloud journey, governance became part of the foundation rather than a retrofit applied after problems accumulated.

Results

SRG completed the Rencore deployment in five working days, moving from initial setup to operational governance faster than any previous infrastructure tool the team had adopted. The governance approach shifted from static, point-in-time audits to real-time continuous monitoring across all Microsoft 365 services. As the company grew from 119 to 450 employees through ongoing acquisitions, the infrastructure team maintained consistent governance standards without proportionally increasing headcount. The centralized view across Teams, SharePoint, Exchange, and Power Platform eliminated the need to manually aggregate data from separate admin centers.