Most IT spend in India is planned. Renewals are not — they arrive as an email nobody reads, and the first real signal is a user who cannot sign in, or a firewall quietly dropping web traffic on a Monday morning.

This is what actually happens when the major licences lapse: which ones fail loudly, which ones fail silently, and how long you really have to fix it. Written for Indian businesses, with the procurement and GST realities that make the timelines tighter than the vendor documentation suggests.

The 2026 change nobody has budgeted for

Microsoft is removing the free 30-day grace period that used to follow a lapsed Microsoft 365 subscription, replacing it with paid Extended Service Terms from 4 May 2026. If your renewal process has quietly relied on that month of slack — and for a lot of Indian SMBs it has, because purchase orders take three weeks — that cushion is going away. From 2026, the expiry date is the deadline, not the start of one.

Microsoft 365 — a staged shutdown, not a cliff

Microsoft 365 moves through defined states rather than switching off:

  • Expired (about 30 days): everything keeps working. Users notice nothing. This is the stage Microsoft is now monetising.
  • Disabled (roughly day 31 to 120): users are locked out of Outlook, Teams, OneDrive and SharePoint. An administrator can still sign in to the admin centre and export data.
  • Deletion: Microsoft holds data in a limited-function state for about 90 days, and deletes it no later than 180 days after cancellation. After that it is unrecoverable.

The practical risk is not the first 30 days. It is that an organisation discovers the lapse in the disabled stage, when mail has already stopped and someone has to explain it to a client.

Google Workspace — suspension is faster than people expect

A suspended Google Workspace subscription locks users out of Gmail, Drive, Docs, Calendar and Chat immediately. The administrator keeps limited admin console access, which is the window you use to run the Data Export tool.

Suspended accounts typically get around 20 days of read-only grace before data enters a deletion queue. Beyond 60 days of suspension the account is moved out of the partner's management, and beyond a year it is cancelled outright. That is a materially shorter runway than Microsoft's.

Firewalls — the failure mode that looks like an internet outage

This is the one that causes the most damage, because the common assumption is wrong in both directions.

Your firewall does not brick. A FortiGate with an expired contract keeps passing traffic and keeps enforcing policy. IPS, antivirus and application control carry on scanning — but with whatever signatures were last downloaded. Four months after expiry you are inspecting today's traffic against last quarter's threat intelligence, which is worse than it sounds and nearly invisible on a dashboard.

But web filtering fails closed. When FortiGuard web and DNS category filtering expires, the FortiGate cannot rate a URL — and by default it drops the traffic. Unless allow on rating error was enabled beforehand, the symptom is that the internet appears to stop working for the whole office. Static URL and domain filters keep working, which is why partial connectivity often masks the real cause.

Separately, when FortiCare lapses you lose technical support, firmware updates and RMA. A hardware failure during that window is your problem, not the vendor's. Sophos, SonicWall and Palo Alto follow the same broad pattern: the appliance keeps running, the protection and the support entitlement do not.

Endpoint security and SASE

Endpoint agents behave like the firewall: the agent stays installed and appears healthy, but definition and engine updates stop and the management console access lapses. The endpoint looks protected in every screenshot and is not. For anyone holding ISO 27001, SOC 2 or working toward DPDPA readiness, that gap is hard to defend in an audit.

SASE and other cloud-delivered security is the opposite — it is a service, not a box. When the subscription ends, access ends. There is no stale-signature grey area, which at least makes the failure obvious on day one.

Adobe and AutoCAD — your files are safe, the software is not

Autodesk subscriptions move Expired → Suspended → Cancelled. Your DWG files remain on your device or storage throughout and can still be viewed with the free Autodesk Viewer, but the application itself stops. Cloud storage included with the subscription may become inaccessible after around 30 days, which catches out teams who treated it as primary storage.

Adobe Creative Cloud follows a similar shape: apps drop to reduced functionality and cloud storage entitlements shrink, while files already saved locally stay yours. In both cases the licence is the thing you lose, not the work.

The renewal calendar that actually works in India

Vendor reminders are calibrated for markets where a renewal is a card payment. Indian procurement rarely is. Work backwards from the expiry date:

  • 60 days out — anything involving hardware support, an AMC, a purchase order or a finance approval. FortiCare, appliance AMCs, multi-year agreements.
  • 30 days out — cloud subscriptions: Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, Adobe, Autodesk. Enough time for a quote, a PO and a GST invoice.
  • 15 days out — the hard floor. Below this you are relying on nothing going wrong.

The single most useful thing you can do is stop treating renewals as events and start treating them as a list: every licence, its expiry date, its owner, and its renewal quote status, reviewed monthly.

Renew, or buy new?

Almost always renew. Renewal preserves your tenant, configuration, user data and support entitlement. Buying fresh usually means re-onboarding, re-migration and a support contract that restarts from zero — and on hardware it can mean losing RMA coverage entirely.

The genuine exception is when your requirement has changed. If headcount has moved significantly, or you are paying for an edition whose features nobody uses, the renewal date is the right moment to re-size. That is a different conversation from letting it lapse.

Frequently Asked Questions

What happens when a Microsoft 365 subscription expires?
It moves through defined stages. Historically there was a 30-day expired stage with full function, then a disabled stage from roughly day 31 to 120 where users are locked out but an admin can still sign in to export data. Microsoft retains data in a limited-function state for about 90 days and deletes it no later than 180 days after cancellation. Note that Microsoft is replacing the free 30-day grace period with paid Extended Service Terms from 4 May 2026.
Does a FortiGate firewall stop working when the licence expires?
No. The hardware keeps passing traffic and does not shut down. But FortiGuard signature updates stop, so IPS, antivirus and application control keep scanning with stale signatures. Critically, web and DNS category filtering stops, and by default the FortiGate drops all web and DNS traffic unless 'allow on rating error' was enabled in advance — which can look like a full internet outage.
What happens to Google Workspace data if the subscription lapses?
Users lose sign-in to Gmail, Drive, Docs and Calendar while the account is suspended, though an administrator keeps limited admin console access. Suspended accounts typically get around 20 days of read-only grace before data enters a deletion queue. Accounts suspended beyond 60 days are moved out of the partner's account, and beyond a year they are cancelled.
Can I still open my AutoCAD drawings after the subscription ends?
Yes. Your DWG files stay on your device or storage and can be viewed with the free Autodesk Viewer. What you lose is the software itself — the subscription moves from Expired to Suspended to Cancelled — and any cloud storage included with the subscription may become inaccessible after about 30 days.
Is it cheaper to renew or buy a new licence?
Almost always renew. Renewing preserves your tenant, configuration, user data and support entitlement. Buying new usually means fresh onboarding, re-migration and lost continuity, and for hardware it can mean losing RMA coverage entirely. The exception is when your headcount or requirement has changed enough that a different edition is genuinely cheaper — which is worth checking at renewal.
How far ahead should we start the renewal?
Sixty days for anything involving hardware support or a purchase order, thirty days for cloud subscriptions, and fifteen days as the hard floor. Indian procurement cycles and GST invoicing routinely take two to three weeks, and a lapsed firewall support contract can take longer to reinstate than to renew on time.
Do expired security licences create a compliance problem?
They can. ISO 27001, SOC 2 and DPDPA readiness all assume your security controls are operating and current. An endpoint agent running on definitions from four months ago, or a firewall with no threat feed, is difficult to defend in an audit even though the product appears to be installed and running.

We handle renewals across all of it

Invitty renews Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, Adobe, Autodesk, Fortinet, Sophos, SonicWall, endpoint security and SASE subscriptions for businesses across Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Kerala, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana and Puducherry — with a GST invoice and a quote in hours, not days. If you are not sure what is expiring or when, send us the list and we will map it.

See how IT licence renewals work with Invitty →