The short answer
Azure integration connects your own applications to Microsoft's cloud: single sign on through Entra ID, group based access control, Azure Functions for scheduled and event driven work, and the storage or data pipelines behind your reporting. We build and maintain it in house.
What the work usually covers
- App registration, sign in through Entra ID, and token handling in your app.
- Group based access, so roles are managed by your IT admin.
- Conditional access and MFA respected rather than worked around.
- Azure Functions for overnight syncs, webhooks and file processing.
- SQL Database, Blob Storage and pipelines for reporting data.
- Deployment, monitoring and alerting, with the region chosen deliberately.
Identity is usually the first Azure integration a business actually needs
Most Azure requests start as one sentence: can staff log into our system with their work account. It sounds like a convenience feature. It's the highest value item on the list.
Offboarding stops being a checklist
Someone leaves on a Friday. Today that's a list: disable the email, remove them from the CRM, change the shared password on the job tool, remember the invoicing system nobody documented. Miss one and a former employee still has your customer list. When your application trusts the directory rather than its own passwords, you disable the account once and everything shuts with it.
Password resets stop being a help desk job
Every internal app with its own login is a password someone will forget, usually the week they're travelling. Once it trusts the same directory, self service reset in Microsoft 365 covers it and MFA is enforced centrally rather than per app.
Access becomes auditable
Sign in logs sit in one place: who signed in, when, from where, which application, and whether MFA was satisfied. When an insurer or a cyber questionnaire asks who had access in March, that's a report, not a guess.
The practical pieces, at a general level
Your application is registered in the directory, which gives it an identity and permitted redirect URLs. Sign in runs over OpenID Connect and your app receives a token proving who the person is. Permissions come from group membership, so who can see payroll is a group your IT admin manages rather than a checkbox nobody updates. Tokens expire on purpose, and handling refresh separates a set up that lasts a fortnight from one that lasts years.
The mistake worth avoiding is building your own login screen and adding single sign on later. Retrofitting means migrating users, sorting out accounts that exist in the app but not the directory, and re testing every permission.
Then data and functions
Functions handle work that shouldn't live in your web application: nightly syncs, webhook receivers, file processing, anything that runs whether or not a browser is open.
One honest note. Moving data into Azure does not organise it. If three systems disagree about a customer's name, they still disagree after the pipeline runs. Deciding the source of truth is the work. Australian data residency is a choice made at deployment, not an assumption.
How the work runs
Map access
Systems, roles, and how people are offboarded today.
Scope and price
Fixed number, dates in writing, identity first.
Build
Registration, sign in and group mapping, then functions and data.
Hand over
Documentation and monitoring your IT provider can maintain.
Who this suits, and who it doesn't
It suits businesses on Microsoft 365 with an internal application, or one being built, and anyone whose offboarding depends on someone remembering six steps.
It doesn't suit a team with no Microsoft footprint, though the argument holds with any directory. It also won't fix an application whose permission model was never designed. Identity says who someone is. Your software decides what they can do.
Why build it with us
We run the infrastructure as well as the code.
The team maintaining Microsoft 365 sits with the developers writing the token handling, so the tenancy and the app aren't two suppliers blaming each other.
Cloud agnostic where it matters.
We're AWS Certified and work across both, so we'll say when Azure isn't the right home for something. See AWS support.
No lock in contracts.
You own the tenancy, the repository and the documentation.
"Our IT provider says they'll handle it."
Sometimes they should. An MSP managing your tenancy can create the app registration and the groups. What they generally won't write is the code that validates tokens and maps groups to permissions. That part is ours.