Yep, there’s Microsoft 365 E5 with all its security features. However, most companies are hesitant to choose this license mainly due to financial reasons. Luckily, Microsoft just announced new packages that include the most useful security tools at lesser cost: Microsoft 365 E5 Security & Microsoft 365 E5 Compliance.
However, please keep in mind that it often depends on your purchasing department and licensing partner when it comes to actual prices. So, I can’t give you guidance on that.
For technical guidance, please visit my security baseline posts about Microsoft 365 E3 and Microsoft 365 E5.
Microsoft 365 E5 Security (Identity & Threat Protection)
The focus of this package is to put the most useful and popular security features of Office 365, Windows 10, and Enterprise Mobility + Security into a single license. It includes:
- Azure Advanced Threat Protection
- Microsoft Defender Advanced Threat Protection
- Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection including Threat Intelligence
- Microsoft Cloud App Security
- Azure Active Directory Premium P2
Pricing: $12 per user per month
Microsoft 365 E5 Compliance (Information Protection & Compliance)
This package focuses on advanced compliance controls, including:
- Office 365 Advanced Compliance
- Advanced eDiscovery (collecting data for legal cases)
- Advanced Data Governance (retention and deletion policies)
- Customer Lockbox: approve or reject access by Microsoft support personnel
- Office 365 Privileged Access Management
- Customer Key: provide and control the encryption keys for your Office 365 data
- Azure Information Protection P2
Pricing: $10 per user per month
The downside
Unfortunately, the prices mentioned above only apply to Microsoft 365 E3 customers. It is hard to say how much you can save as enterprise licensing costs may vary depending on your licensing conditions.
If you only want to add more security & compliance solutions to your existing Microsoft 365 E3 license adding Microsoft 365 E5 Security and Microsoft 365 E5 Compliance will be a bit cheaper than the full-blown M365 E5 license. As always, choosing the right license can be as tricky as working on a challenging technical problem. 😉
Recommendations
When I talk to customers about Microsoft Cloud Security it often turns out that they have already been using Office 365 for a few years without taking security into consideration. Often because most features must be licensed separately. This can never be an ideal condition if you think about identities and cloud services being the new perimeter and control plane, which they certainly are. So, I really appreciate every change that makes it easier (and cheaper) to use Microsoft Threat Protection and other features to protect identities like Azure AD PIM and Azure AD Identity Protection.
Microsoft 365 E5 Security (Identity & Threat Protection): From my point of view this is the most interesting offering of the two. It includes all important security features. I highly recommend using all of them no matter which licenses you use to get them.
Microsoft 365 E5 Compliance (Information Protection & Compliance): If you deal with compliance on a regular basis and you want to use automatic classification functionality with Azure Information Protection P2 this package might be interesting.
Leaving these new packages aside: Protect your identities, data, devices, and services in this cloud-first Microsoft world! Microsoft offers all tools you need for that.
Thanks for reading!
Chris