We’re excited to share that ENow has been included as a Representative Vendor in the Gartner® Market Guide for Microsoft 365 Governance Tools (January 12, 2026), by Lina Al Dana, Dan Wilson, and Max Goss.
We believe, this recognition reflects something we hear every day from organizations. Microsoft 365 has become essential infrastructure, but the way it’s governed has not kept up with how quickly it has been adopted and expanded.
According to the report, “only 5% of organizations report achieving maximum value from their Microsoft 365 investment.”
That number says a lot.
Most organizations are not struggling to deploy Microsoft 365. They are struggling to manage it in a way that actually delivers measurable value. Over time, environments grow organically. New Teams are created, SharePoint sites multiply, permissions evolve, and data accumulates. What starts as flexibility slowly turns into fragmentation.
At the same time, IT teams are being asked to enable more, not less. More collaboration, more self-service, and now more AI-driven productivity through Copilot. Without a governance model in place, those goals start to compete with each other instead of reinforcing one another.
Microsoft’s native tools provide an important foundation, but most organizations quickly realize they are not enough on their own.
The report also states that “Sixty-eight percent of organizations reported using third-party add-on products to manage and govern Microsoft 365.”
That shift is not about replacing Microsoft. It is about extending it.
As environments scale, teams need a way to see across workloads, not just within individual admin centers. They need consistent policies that apply everywhere, not just in isolated configurations. And they need automation, because manual governance simply does not scale.
What governance tools ultimately provide is a layer of coordination. As the market evolves, governance tools are increasingly designed to unify signals across Microsoft 365 rather than operate in silos. Many platforms, like ENow, integrate data from multiple admin centers into a single view, reducing context switching and giving administrators a clearer understanding of what is happening across their environment. They connect signals across the environment and turn them into something actionable, whether that is enforcing a policy, identifying risk, or cleaning up what no longer belongs.
Gartner mentions, “Content sprawl, oversharing, and data loss were identified as the biggest challenges to Microsoft 365 deployment.”
These challenges show up in different ways, but they tend to follow a familiar pattern.
Sprawl is usually the first signal. Collaboration is working, people are creating, but without structure, environments quickly become difficult to navigate and even harder to maintain. It becomes unclear which workspaces are active, who owns them, and what should be retained versus removed.
Oversharing follows close behind. Permissions that were set with good intentions expand over time, often without visibility. External access, broad sharing links, or inherited permissions can quietly introduce risk that is difficult to detect without centralized insight.
Then there is the operational side. Managing Microsoft 365 at scale often means working across multiple admin interfaces, relying on manual processes, and reacting to issues after they surface. That creates a persistent gap between how governance is designed and how it actually plays out in the environment.
The Gartner analysts found that “seventy-one percent of respondents identified security and governance concerns among their top challenges to deploying Microsoft 365 Copilot.”
Copilot has brought a new level of urgency to governance conversations.
It is not introducing entirely new risks. It is making existing ones more visible and more impactful. When AI is generating responses based on your environment and available content, it depends heavily on the quality, structure, and accessibility of your data.
If content is overshared, Copilot can surface it. If permissions are too broad, those boundaries are reflected in what AI can access. If environments are cluttered or outdated, that noise can influence results and user perception.
This is why governance is now directly tied to AI outcomes. It is no longer just about control or compliance. It is about ensuring that what your organization builds on top of Microsoft 365, including AI, is accurate, secure, and aligned with how the business actually operates.
As organizations expand their use of Copilot and AI-driven services, the need for additional governance controls becomes more pronounced. Gartner found that a significant majority of organizations require enhanced capabilities to manage AI-related risks, including the ability to assess readiness, enforce access boundaries, and monitor how AI interacts with organizational data.
To keep up with this complexity, governance has evolved well beyond simple reporting or provisioning.
At its core, modern governance is about bringing visibility, structure, and automation together in a way that reduces effort while increasing control. That includes understanding how workspaces are used, applying consistent standards when new ones are created, and managing their lifecycle as they age.
In more mature environments, governance is also becoming more automated and workflow-driven. Many platforms incorporate low-code or no-code orchestration to automate administrative actions, enforce policies, and trigger remediation when issues are detected. This shift reduces reliance on manual processes and helps organizations maintain consistency at scale.
It also means identifying where licenses are underutilized, where risks are emerging, and where policies are drifting from their intended state, then taking action without requiring constant manual oversight.
A few capabilities tend to define more mature approaches:
Individually, these are useful. Together, they form the foundation for a scalable governance model.
We believe ENow’s inclusion as a Representative Vendor reflects our focus on helping organizations bring these areas of governance together.
Across Microsoft 365, Entra ID, and Copilot, the challenge is not just visibility or control in isolation. It is understanding how everything connects. Where risk is emerging, where inefficiencies exist, and how to take action without slowing down the business.
That is where governance starts to become operational. Not something that is defined once and revisited occasionally, but something that is continuously measured, adjusted, and enforced as the environment evolves.
ENow’s solutions for Microsoft 365 governance span areas including:
Microsoft 365 environments are becoming more complex, not less. They are more collaborative, more distributed, and increasingly shaped by AI.
Governance is what allows that complexity to stay manageable.
ENow is proud to be recognized in this market and to continue helping organizations move from reactive administration to a more proactive, controlled, and confident approach to Microsoft 365.
Ready to learn more? Request early access to ENow's 365Gov Score for Microsoft 365 governance!
Gartner, Market Guide for Microsoft 365 Governance Tools, 12 January 2026.
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