Recover access safely
If you're locked out or think you've lost tenant control, we help confirm what access still exists and recover it properly, not just patch around it.
Microsoft 365 and cloud security
A tenant one departing staff member can't lock you out of.
Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace quietly become business-critical. Suburban Secure reviews and stabilises the setup — administrator access, MFA, recovery and file sharing — before a forgotten account or missing setting turns into a lockout.
What this work can include
- Global administrator and break-glass access review, so no single account can lock out the whole organisation.
- MFA enforcement, security defaults and conditional access readiness (where the licence supports it).
- Tenant ownership documentation, audit logging and account recovery.
- Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace configuration, including discounted non-profit platforms.
- SharePoint, Drive, Teams and Meet governance, and controlled external file sharing.
- Offboarding processes so access doesn't outlive employment or volunteering.
Start with a tenant hygiene review
A fixed-scope review maps who can administer your tenant today, what happens if that person is unavailable, and what's missing before it becomes an emergency.
Request a review See the full managed email hosting serviceOne Global Administrator is one of the most common risks we see.
A shared administrator account makes responsibility hard to trace. An administrator nobody else can reach makes recovery harder. Review named access, MFA and documented emergency access together, then test that the people responsible understand the recovery process.
Document ownership
Written documentation of who administers what, and a break-glass path for when the usual admin isn't available.
Educate the owner
Plain-English handover so whoever inherits the tenant next understands what was set up and why.
Plan for a provider outage as well as an account lockout
A well-managed tenant still depends on its provider. Decide how staff will communicate and customers will reach you when email or collaboration tools are unavailable.
Keep authorised access to essential contacts and response instructions outside the affected platform. Test the fallback's sign-in dependencies, and check whether your phones, website administration and support portal rely on the same service.
Backups support data recovery; they do not automatically provide a live replacement for an unavailable cloud service. Emergency administrator accounts also cannot bypass a provider-wide outage. A review should make those limits clear.
Start with a short exercise
Assume email is unavailable for half a working day. Can your team coordinate, update customers and continue essential tasks?
Read Townsville Computer Man's Microsoft outage guide
Build your incident response planAlready had support and want a self-check first? See the Microsoft 365 next steps checklist, or run the Small Business Cyber Security Hub self-assessment.
We're having trouble logging into email or Microsoft 365 — can you help?
Yes. Login problems are often a symptom of a bigger issue: an expired password reset process, an admin account nobody remembers the details for, or multi-factor authentication (MFA) tied to a phone that no longer exists. We can recover access and, more importantly, fix the underlying account and recovery setup so it doesn't happen again.
Our two-factor authentication (2FA/MFA) needs resetting — what should we do?
If you have a documented "break-glass" admin account, a reset can often be done safely in minutes. If nobody is sure who the administrator even is, that's a sign the tenant needs a proper hygiene review before it becomes a lockout. Either way, it's worth getting sorted properly rather than patched again.
Why is having just one Global Administrator for Microsoft 365 a problem?
A single administrator can become a point of failure, while a shared administrator login makes activity difficult to attribute. We review named accounts, appropriate role separation, MFA and documented emergency access. These reduce the risk of account loss or misuse; they cannot guarantee access during every provider outage.
We think we've lost access to our own Microsoft 365 tenant — what now?
We first confirm the organisation’s ownership and what access still exists, then assess the available recovery options. Recovery depends on the circumstances and the provider’s verification process. A tenant review can improve administrator access and recovery documentation afterwards.