A mixed fleet is a business running more than one desktop platform and more than one productivity suite at the same time, most commonly Windows with Microsoft 365 alongside Macs and Google Workspace. Almost every Melbourne business over about thirty staff is one, whether anyone planned it or not. The design team bought Macs, the accounts team runs Windows because the practice software demands it, and the founder set up Google Workspace in 2016 and never looked back.
Most providers respond to this by proposing a migration. That is usually a sales position rather than a technical one. A mixed fleet is entirely runnable, but only if you are honest about which layer must be unified and which layers should be left alone.
Identity is the only thing you genuinely must unify
Everything else in a mixed environment can be tolerated. Two identity stores cannot.
The moment a person exists as a separate account in Microsoft 365, in Google Workspace and again in Apple’s ecosystem, you have three joiner processes, three leaver processes and three places to enforce multi-factor authentication. When someone resigns on a Friday afternoon, the account you forget is the one that gets used. This is the single most common failure we see in businesses that grew into a mixed fleet rather than designing one.
Unified identity does not mean one vendor. It means one authoritative directory that every other system trusts, and one onboarding and offboarding checklist that closes every door at once.
Make Entra ID the anchor and Google the relying party
If you are running both suites, the direction of federation is not a matter of taste. It is determined by what the two vendors actually support.
Microsoft publishes a first-party integration for using Microsoft Entra ID as the identity provider for Google Workspace, listed in the Entra gallery as the Google Cloud / G Suite Connector by Microsoft, with SCIM provisioning alongside it. Google documents the other half from its side, confirming that Workspace supports single sign-on from third-party identity providers over both SAML and OIDC, and ships a pre-built Microsoft Entra OIDC profile.
The reverse is not a supported architecture. Microsoft’s Google federation feature is scoped to business-to-business guest users, and Microsoft states plainly that it no longer performs validation testing of independent identity providers for compatibility with Entra ID. Anyone proposing Google Workspace as the primary identity provider for a Microsoft 365 tenancy is proposing something neither vendor documents.
One caveat worth writing into your runbook: Google restricts single sign-on for super administrators, and super admins signing in to the admin console must use their Google password rather than federated credentials. Keep at least one break-glass Google super admin outside single sign-on, store the credential properly, and test it. If you skip this, read what happens when you are locked out of your Google Workspace admin account before you find out the hard way.
Apple will federate with one identity provider, not two
Apple Business, the portal formerly known as Apple Business Manager, can federate with Google Workspace, with Microsoft Entra ID, or with a generic provider over OIDC or SCIM. Apple’s documentation is explicit that you can link to one of these at a time, not several.
That single sentence settles a lot of architectural arguments. If your Macs and iPhones are going to draw their Managed Apple Accounts from a directory, you must choose which directory, and in a Microsoft-anchored environment that is Entra ID.
There is a second trap here that catches people badly. Before Apple will federate a domain it must be verified and captured, and turning on Domain Capture gives every staff member with a personal Apple Account on your company domain a fixed thirty days to move their personal data off it. Apple states the date cannot be extended and that turning on Domain Capture cannot be undone. Staff with a decade of personal photos and App Store purchases attached to a work email address will not take this well if it lands unannounced. Communicate before you press the button, not after. The full sequence is covered in the guide to Apple Business, the portal formerly called Apple Business Manager.
Device management does not consolidate, and that is fine
Identity converges. Device management does not, and chasing a single pane of glass here usually costs more than it saves.
Windows provisioning through Autopilot, macOS enrolment through Apple’s Automated Device Enrolment, and Chrome or Android enrolment through the Google admin console are three genuinely different pipelines with three different trust models. One console can hold all three records, but the underlying work is still platform-specific. What matters is that every device is enrolled in something, that the something reports compliance back to your identity provider, and that nothing is unmanaged.
If you already pay for Microsoft 365 Business Premium or E3, you already own Intune, and Intune will manage Macs. Whether it manages them well enough is a real question with a real answer, covered in what Intune can and cannot do on a Mac and in the head-to-head on Jamf and Intune compared honestly. The practical mechanics of enrolling and managing a Mac fleet are a separate discipline again, and it is the one most generalist providers quietly skip. We have written separately about why most Melbourne MSPs cannot support Macs properly, because the gap is structural rather than a matter of effort.
On the Google side, the equivalent baseline work is in the Google Workspace admin console settings that matter, and the day-to-day device story sits alongside your broader approach to mobile device management.
Running both suites costs more than two subscriptions
The licence line is the visible cost. It is rarely the largest one.
Only one system can own your mail. Your domain has one set of MX records. Google documents split delivery and dual delivery as the two ways to run a second mail platform alongside Gmail, and in both cases the second system receives forwarded copies rather than authoritative delivery. You pay for two mail platforms and get one authoritative mailbox store, plus permanent complexity in SPF, DKIM and DMARC alignment on forwarded messages.
Storage entitlements do not travel. Google’s pooled storage is pooled within Google. Microsoft’s mailbox and OneDrive quotas are entitlements within Microsoft. Buying more of one never offsets the other, and staff will keep the same files in both, so you pay twice to store the same bytes. Neither vendor is backing that data up for you either, which is the subject of Google is not backing up your Workspace data.
Policy parity requires an edition uplift on both sides. Conditional Access on the Microsoft side requires Entra ID P1, which is included in Microsoft 365 Business Premium and E3. The nearest Google equivalent, Context-Aware Access, is restricted to the Enterprise, Education and Frontline editions or to Cloud Identity Premium, and Google states that users without a supported edition are simply not subject to Context-Aware Access policies at all. That Google-side uplift is the cost most businesses miss, because it is not a security add-on you buy for a handful of people. It is an edition change across every user.
We are not going to publish a dollar figure here, because the honest answer depends on your exact mix of editions. What we will say is that the second suite is almost never as cheap as the second subscription line suggests.
Your security baseline does not translate across platforms
This is where mixed fleets quietly fail audits and cyber insurance questionnaires.
The Essential Eight is the framework Australian businesses are measured against, and read closely it is shaped around Microsoft products. The current maturity model, last updated in November 2023, contains no mention of macOS, Apple, iOS, Chrome or Google anywhere in the document. One of the eight strategies is restrict Microsoft Office macros, and at Maturity Level Two and above it requires blocking macros from making Win32 API calls, which is Windows-only by definition. Application control at Maturity Level Two and above requires implementing Microsoft’s recommended application blocklist. User application hardening names Internet Explorer 11 and PowerShell logging.
ASD’s own hardening library reflects the same shape. It publishes hardening guides for Windows 10, Windows 11 and Linux workstations. There is no enterprise macOS hardening publication at all, and the only Apple configuration guide covers iOS 14. Its Blueprint for Secure Cloud is described by ASD as having a current focus on Microsoft 365, with no Google Workspace equivalent.
None of that means a Mac fleet cannot be secured to an equivalent standard. It means the equivalence has to be argued and documented rather than assumed, using the model’s own allowance for vendor hardening guidance and its exceptions process. Do that work before an assessor asks, not during. The detail sits in mapping the Essential Eight onto macOS and whether you can meet the Essential Eight on Google Workspace, and the underlying platform hardening in hardening Google Workspace.
One more thing worth knowing if you are planning a multi-year uplift: ASD ran a consultation on the evolution of the Essential Eight that closed on 12 July 2026, proposing a new Essentials series with the current guidance becoming a chapter called Essentials for enterprise IT. ASD says existing adopters can expect strong alignment with their current controls. Build your roadmap anyway, but build it knowing the framework is being rewritten.
When consolidating actually is the right call
Sometimes the migration everyone keeps proposing is correct. The honest triggers are these.
Consolidate when the duplication is at the identity layer and cannot be federated away. Consolidate when a compliance obligation or a client security review requires a single enforceable policy set and you cannot demonstrate equivalence on the second platform. Consolidate when the second suite is used by fewer people than it costs to administer properly. Consolidate when the business is being sold or is acquiring, because two suites double the integration work later.
Do not consolidate because one platform is unfamiliar to your provider. That is their problem to fix, not yours to pay for.
If you do decide to move, move deliberately. The comparison itself is covered where we have already compared the two suites feature by feature, and the actual migration mechanics, including what breaks in shared drives and calendar delegation, are in the mechanics of moving off Google Workspace. If you have inherited an environment and cannot even establish who owns what, start with inheriting a Workspace tenancy nobody documented.
What a properly run mixed fleet looks like
One authoritative directory. Every other platform federated to it, including Apple. Every device enrolled in a management service appropriate to its platform, reporting compliance back to that directory. One documented joiner and leaver process that touches every system. A written, defensible mapping of your security baseline onto each platform, including the parts where the framework does not fit and you have documented an equivalent control instead. And a hardware lifecycle that does not depend on who happened to buy the laptop, which is the subject of buying, redeploying and disposing of Apple hardware.
That is achievable at 30 staff and at 200. What it requires is a provider who is competent on all three platforms rather than one who tolerates two of them: someone who works with Apple’s business deployment programmes for enrolment and device management, runs Entra ID and Intune as daily work rather than as an escalation, and can open the Google Admin console and tell you what is wrong with it.
TechAssist has run Windows, Mac and Google environments side by side for Melbourne businesses for over 20 years, with 13 certified specialists across the team. We are a Microsoft partner and a Jamf partner, and on the Apple side we are a member of the Apple Consultants Network, Apple’s programme of independent technology partners specialising in Apple solutions for small and medium-sized businesses. That combination is the point rather than the decoration. A provider holding partnerships on both sides of an argument has no commercial reason to steer the answer, and the only honest test of neutrality is whether they ever recommend the option that earns them less. We do that regularly, and you will find us doing it in the posts linked above. If you want a straight assessment of whether your mixed fleet should be unified or simply run properly, call 1300 028 324 or get in touch at https://techassist.au/contact/. We will tell you which of the two it is, including when the answer is that you do not need to change anything.
