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Jasco Blog
The real value of your license
Microsoft Licensing SKU
As the heading suggests, we’re going to dive into a topic today that should be real for everyone using a Microsoft Licensing SKU. An interesting aside is that the SKU (Stock Keeping Unit) is a term originating from inventory management. Back when we needed to identify physical items stored in a warehouse. Now defined as “the smallest unit of a product that can be sold from inventory, purchased, or added to inventory”.
I’m going to focus on the Microsoft 365 Business Premium licensing SKU as there have been changes to what is included in the licensing that you may not be aware of. You might not be using all that you’re entitled to. Microsoft 365 Business Premium is for organisations that have up to 300 users.
Before we go any further I want to refer to the amazing work that Aaron Dinnage from Microsoft has done, to help people understand licensing visually. This information can be found at https://m365maps.com
While we wont dissect this licensing diagram in any more depth, the products in each column refer to the main product suites included. In this case Office 365, Enterprise Mobility and Security, and Window devices.
Probably the biggest change is the inclusion of some advanced security features that everyone should be using. When you turn on these advanced security options you reduce the risk of attackers disrupting your business. The three core pieces to this are Defender for Office 365 (for our Office apps), Defender for Business (for our devices) and Information Protection (for our data). Let’s take a look at just some of the included features.
Defender For Office 365
The advanced protection in Defender for Office 365 extends features into SharePoint, OneDrive and Teams. One of these features is called safe attachments. Safe attachments checks files to see if any of the files behaviours look suspicious before you open the document. Similarly, safe links checks that any internet links in Email messages, Microsoft Teams or Office apps are checks before someone clicks on them.
Microsoft Defender for Office 365 Features service description – Service Descriptions | Microsoft Learn Another great addition is impersonation settings to protect against phishing. Impersonation settings prevent internal and external senders that might ask for sensitive information, or be in financial role from being impersonated. These can be similar looking email addresses or domains such as “contoso.com” vs “ćóntoso.com”.
Defender for Busisnesss
Defender for Business is packed full of advanced security to help protect your devices. One of the key features is called endpoint detection and response (EDR). EDR goes above and beyond standard antivirus software to provide behavior-based detection and response actions.
Overview of endpoint detection and response capabilities | Microsoft Learn
Automation investigation and response with self-healing for detected threats, automatically checks for suspicious and malicious verdicts. It automatically applies actions such as sending files to quarantine or stopping a process. This is incredibly important to help stop the spread of malicious attacks across your organisation.
Automated investigation and response in Microsoft 365 Defender | Microsoft Learn
Another important feature of Defender for Business is Vulnerability Management. Vulnerability Management allows you to see the vulnerable software and configurations on your computers and provides recommendations to address these. This is important to make sure that vulnerabilities are visible and can be applied before they are taken advantage of.
Information Protection
Information Protection is a set of capabilities that help you discover, classify, and protect sensitive information. One key area of Information Protection is Data Loss Prevention (DLP). DLP can classify documents or messages such as sensitive or confidential. It can then apply policies so that based on that classification so that information doesn’t fall into the wrong hands.
Just the Beginning…
We hope you enjoyed this overview of some of the security solutions that are part of the Microsoft 365 Business Premium suite. There are many ways that Microsoft 365 can help you protect your data, devices, and identity from cyber threats. Microsoft 365 Business Premium also offers many other features and benefits that you may ‘already own’ and can help you boost your productivity, collaboration, and innovation. To learn more about what Microsoft 365 Business Premium can do for your business, contact us today. We’d love to hear from you and help you find the best solution for your needs. Thank you for reading!
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