Most businesses find out the same way: a rumour, an unanswered ticket, then a letter from an insolvency practitioner. By then the question is what is at risk while you move. This page is the order to deal with it in. It applies whether the company has gone into administration, been sold to a group that is winding it down, or has simply stopped picking up the phone.
If you have heard the rumour but not seen the letter, check first. Companies House lists every appointment of administrators and every strike-off within a day or two of it happening, and The Gazette publishes the formal notices. Search the company name at find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk and look at the filing history. A dissolved company with a similar name is often a dormant shell being tidied after a sale, not the trading business. A change of registered office and directors usually means an acquisition. An appointment of administrators means what it says.
What keeps running, and what stops
The first surprise is how little changes on day one. Your email, your files and your phones were never physically in the provider’s office. They run on Microsoft’s servers, on a carrier’s network, on a data centre the provider rented. All of that carries on.
What stops is the paying and the answering. Services the provider bought on your behalf and resold to you are paid for by the provider, and when the provider stops paying, each one expires on its own timetable. Nobody is watching the monitoring alerts or holding the password you need. The risk is a series of small expiries over the following weeks, each one a surprise.
In an administration the administrator may keep the business trading for a while and will usually try to sell it, or sell its client contracts, to another provider. You may be told your contract has transferred. That can be fine, and it can also be the moment to decide for yourself. Either way, the steps below protect you while the lawyers work it out.
The seven things to secure in the first week
Work through these in order. The first three can be done in an afternoon by someone in your own business, before any new provider is involved.
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Your Microsoft 365 tenant. Make sure someone employed by your business holds a global administrator account, with multi-factor authentication on it, and that the recovery email and phone on the tenant are yours. Then open Settings, Partner relationships in the Microsoft 365 admin centre. A provider that managed your tenant will be listed there with delegated admin rights. Do not remove it yet, because you may need their help to hand over, but note that it exists. Once a new provider is in place, that relationship is ended there.
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Your domain name. Find out which registrar holds it and whose name the registrant is in. If the registrant is the provider, you need it changed to your business before anything else, because the domain is your email, your website and your sign-in. Check the renewal date while you are there. A domain that lapses because the provider’s card was declined takes days to recover and your email bounces throughout.
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Your Microsoft licences. If your Microsoft 365 licences were bought through the provider rather than directly from Microsoft, they sit under the provider’s partner agreement. If the provider stops paying Microsoft, the subscriptions are suspended after a grace period and your staff cannot sign in. A new partner provisions equivalent subscriptions and the old ones are cancelled once yours are live. It takes a day, and it is the step that most often gets left until the morning nobody can log in.
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Your backups. Ask where they are, what they cover and who can restore them. If the backups run on the provider’s own platform or are stored under the provider’s account, take a copy now, while someone can still give you access, because once that platform is switched off there is nothing to restore from.
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Your phone numbers and lines. Your numbers can be ported to another provider, and the rules oblige the losing provider to respond to the request. The difficulty is when nobody there is answering requests. Find out which carrier sits behind the provider, because that is who the port actually comes from, and look at the broadband and any leased line the same way: billed by the provider, or by the carrier direct? A line that was resold to you stops when the reseller stops paying for it.
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The tools on your machines. The provider’s monitoring agent and remote access tool are on every computer you own, and whoever controls the provider’s console can sign in to them. In an orderly handover they are removed by the new provider; if the business has stopped answering, remove them yourself or have them removed, and change the local administrator passwords the provider set.
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The passwords and documents they held. Firewall, switches, Wi-Fi, the server, the website, the line of business applications. Ask in writing for every credential and every document for systems you pay for. Keep the reply. Where no reply comes, the new provider rebuilds access from the device, which is slower, and that is why it is last on the list.
How a takeover works, and how long it takes
A new provider starts with the same list. We audit every device, server, licence, domain, phone number and contract, and who holds the keys to each, then bring the estate under our own management: monitoring and patching tools on every machine, endpoint protection, Microsoft 365 policies set to our standard, and the old provider’s delegated access ended once ours is in place. Licences are re-provisioned under our partner agreement and the old subscriptions cancelled. Numbers are ported on agreed dates, usually 7 to 14 working days from the request, with the old service kept until the new one is tested.
For a typical business the tenant, the domain, the licences and the devices are back under control within the first week, and the phones and lines follow their porting dates. Our guide to switching from an unresponsive supplier covers the slower, planned version of the same move, where contract dates set the pace. When the provider has closed, the dates are set by what expires next.
If you would rather hand the list to someone, tell us what your provider held. We will say on the first call what is at risk this week and what can wait.