IronKeep vs Microsoft GCC High

The license is the easy part

GCC High now offers Business Premium at around $22 per user per month — a real option for small teams. But the license is not the hard part. Getting into GCC High is.

Any email platform switch involves importing mailboxes. But GCC High is not a normal switch. You cannot upgrade your existing Microsoft 365 tenant. GCC High is a completely separate cloud built on Azure Government. Every user account must be recreated, every SharePoint site rebuilt, every Teams channel reestablished, and every security policy reconfigured from scratch. This is not an IMAP import — it is a full infrastructure rip-and-replace that typically costs $50,000–$200,000 and takes months even for small organizations.

Enterprise E3 and E5 GCC High licenses — which add advanced eDiscovery, Defender for Endpoint Plan 2, and Purview Information Protection — run $54 or more per user per month. For a 25-person team on E3, that is over $16,000 per year in licensing alone, on top of the rebuild.

Everyone rebuilds, even if only a few handle CUI

GCC High forces organizations to either rebuild their entire tenant for all users or manage complex dual-tenant environments. Many employees — HR, finance, marketing — never touch CUI, but they all go through the same rip-and-replace. You cannot run half your team on commercial Microsoft 365 and half on GCC High under a single email domain without significant cross-tenant complexity.

External collaboration is painful

Collaborating with vendors, subcontractors, or primes outside your GCC High tenant requires cross-tenant B2B configuration. Guest access requires additional licensing. Sharing files with someone on commercial Microsoft 365 is not straightforward. For small contractors who collaborate constantly with external partners, this creates friction in every interaction.

Features lag behind commercial Microsoft 365

New Microsoft features arrive in commercial tenants first, then GCC, then GCC High. Some features never make it to GCC High at all. You are paying more for less functionality. The platform you are locked into will always be a step behind the one your non-defense competitors use.

You need a Microsoft partner just to get started

You cannot purchase GCC High directly from Microsoft. You need an authorized partner to provision your tenant, manage migration, and handle ongoing administration. This adds cost, complexity, and a dependency on a third party before you have even sent your first compliant email.

Microsoft's own security track record is a risk

In 2023, a Chinese state-sponsored group known as Storm-0558 forged authentication tokens using a stolen Microsoft signing key and accessed Exchange Online mailboxes of 22 organizations and over 500 individuals, including the U.S. Secretary of Commerce and the U.S. Ambassador to China. Microsoft did not detect the breach — the State Department did.

The DHS Cyber Safety Review Board investigated and concluded that the intrusion was “preventable and should never have occurred,” describing it as the result of “a cascade of Microsoft’s avoidable errors.” The Board found Microsoft’s security culture “inadequate” and called for an overhaul.

Months later, in January 2024, Russian state-sponsored hackers (Midnight Blizzard) compromised Microsoft executive email accounts through a legacy test tenant, accessing correspondence related to government customers and source code repositories. The CSRB cited this second breach as further evidence of systemic security failures.

When you build on Microsoft’s cloud, you inherit their security posture — including their attack surface, their key management practices, and their incident response track record.

How IronKeep is different

Switching email providers always involves importing your mailboxes. But IronKeep does not require you to rebuild your entire IT environment. There is no tenant rip-and-replace, no authorized partner, and no months-long provisioning process. Compliance is built into the architecture, not bolted onto a consumer productivity suite.

• Standard mailbox import — no infrastructure rebuild, no partner required
• Per-tenant encryption with zero-operator key access — a compromised platform key cannot unlock your data
• Minimal attack surface — purpose-built for compliance, not a sprawling productivity suite
• Designed for CMMC Level 2, NIST 800-171, DFARS, and ITAR