PAA vs Microsoft Unified Support
A support contract and a proactive assessment aren’t the same purchase.
Microsoft Unified Support is your safety net — reactive product support, incident escalation and advisory hours across the whole Microsoft estate, priced as a percentage of your annual Microsoft spend. PAA does the other half: continuous, repeatable posture assessment for Azure, M365 and Zero Trust, with evidence and remediation code, at a fixed €99 day pass or €799/month. They solve different problems. Most serious teams keep both.
| Aspect | PAA | Unified Support |
|---|---|---|
| Primary job | Proactive posture assessment | Reactive support & escalation |
| Scope | Azure + M365 + Zero Trust | The full Microsoft estate |
| Price | From €99/day · €799/mo (fixed) | % of annual Microsoft spend (tiered) |
| Predictability | Fixed; decoupled from your spend | Scales with your Microsoft spend |
| Proactive detection | 800+ checks every run, scheduled | Via advisory hours / credits |
| Remediation | Terraform / Bicep included | Guidance / engineering hours |
| Compliance evidence | Attestation with control mapping | Varies by engagement |
| 24/7 incident response | No | Yes |
What Unified Support is for
When something breaks, you open a case and Microsoft helps you fix it — across every product you run, at any hour, up to severity-A. That escalation path into the people who build the platform is real value, and nothing replaces it. It’s priced as a percentage of your total annual Microsoft spend across tiered plans, so the cost tracks the size of your estate.
What PAA does
The proactive, repeatable part. The same 800+ checks across 32 agents, every run — Azure, M365 and Zero Trust — returning a report, the remediation code to fix what it finds, and a compliance attestation with control mapping. It runs on a schedule and tells you what drifted since last time. The price is fixed: €99 for a day pass, €799 a month. It doesn’t move when your Azure bill does.
The combination most teams actually want
Keep the support contract for the days something breaks. Use PAA for the systematic posture work that repeats every quarter — so you’re not spending premium advisory hours having someone manually hunt for public storage accounts or misconfigured conditional access. PAA productizes the kind of proactive engineering review that used to mean flying in a senior specialist, and delivers it on a schedule at a predictable price.
Keep Unified Support for…
Reactive product support, 24/7 severity-A incident response, and a direct escalation path into Microsoft across your entire estate. When something is on fire, this is the number you call.
Add PAA for…
Continuous, repeatable posture assessment across Azure, M365 and Zero Trust — with evidence and remediation code — at a fixed price that doesn’t scale with your Microsoft spend.
Questions
Does PAA replace Microsoft Unified Support?
No, and it isn’t meant to. Unified Support is your contract for reactive product support, severity-A incident response, and escalation across your whole Microsoft estate. PAA does a different job: continuous, proactive architecture and posture assessment for Azure, M365 and Zero Trust, with evidence and remediation code. Keep your support contract — PAA is the proactive layer that sits alongside it.
How is PAA priced compared to Unified Support?
PAA is a fixed price: €99 for a day pass, or €799/month. Microsoft prices Unified Support as a percentage of your total annual Microsoft spend across tiered plans (Core, Advanced, Performance), with a published minimum. The practical difference is predictability — PAA’s cost is fixed and decoupled from how much you spend with Microsoft, so it doesn’t move when your Azure consumption grows.
Can PAA do the proactive assessments my support contract offers?
For Azure, M365 and Zero Trust posture, yes — that’s exactly what it’s built for. PAA runs 800+ checks across 32 agents every time, on a schedule, and returns a report, remediation code and a compliance attestation. The advantage is that you get that systematic detection at a fixed price, without spending scarce advisory hours on work that repeats every quarter.
The proactive layer, at a fixed price.
Keep your support contract. Run PAA on your own tenant and see what the proactive pass finds — from €99.
