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Include Other Vendors When Making Your Microsoft 365 Licensing Comparison

At Infused Innovations, we prefer when our customers purchase a given feature set only once. Too often, we see a company purchase Enterprise Mobility + Security (EM+S) for the sole purpose of enabling Self-Service Password Reset (SSPR) with writeback for on-premises AD. That same company also owns Okta for SSO, AirWatch for MDM, and Netskope for CASB.

When we explain to the CFO that they already own EM+S, which contains similar functionality as those three other vendors, it's usually a pretty quick discussion to get approval to start a proof of concept deployment standardizing on Microsoft 365. The budget that was allocated for the other vendors can then be used to purchase new security features like Microsoft Defender for Endpoint (previously MD ATP) and Azure Sentinel.

Circle the solutions you have deployed above. Is the price more than $57/user/mo?

Infused Innovations partners with a few other security vendors to fill some gaps, including KnowBe4, CyberArk, and SecPod, but Microsoft's 60+ security products cover most customer's needs. The added benefit to standardizing on Microsoft services is that they all integrate with the Microsoft Intelligent Security Graph, which allows the services to work with each other and reduce false positives.

Even if you think you have a good grasp of your Microsoft 365 and Office 365 Licensing, I’d encourage you to sign up for one of our free cyber security assessments to have one of our experts review what you already own and create a strategic cyber security roadmap for your organization.

Which Microsoft 365 licensing plan should I buy?

I already expressed my thoughts that you’re (likely) on the wrong Microsoft license. For an organization of any size with an online presence, you should seriously consider one of the Microsoft 365 plans. (Unless you have purchased parts of the bundle through an EA, non-profit, or educational SKU.)

Just as you can purchase a new car without adaptive cruise control to save money in exchange for having to manually turn cruise control on and off, you can purchase Office 365 by itself to reduce your initial costs at the expense of having manually review logs. But with the projected shortfall of 3.5 million cyber security professionals by 2020, you may actually be increasing your overall costs if you don't invest in automation now.

Microsoft spends over $1 Billion a year on security research and uses AI to interpret 6.5 trillion signals daily via the Intelligent Security Graph. With over 3,500 security engineers, it’s possible that Microsoft has more employees in its cyber security department than you have in your entire organization. All you have to do to take advantage of this combined risk intelligence and automation is purchase the correct Microsoft 365 license. And as of September 2019, you can now ingest your Microsoft 365 threat analytics data into Azure Sentinel for free!

Are you an educational organization? Read up here. Are you a non-profit organization? Read up here.

Microsoft 365 F1 for Frontline Workers

In April 2020, Microsoft changed the old Microsoft 365 F1 plan to Microsoft 365 F3. The new M365 F1 plan has no email or OneDrive storage. It's essentially Microsoft Teams plus EM+S E3 to provide a secure device to access Microsoft Teams on.

What appears to be an oversight, is that EMS E3 appears to be available for only $4/mo now if you add the M365 F1 plan to any Office 365 plan. We'll see if Microsoft addresses this by restricting licensing assignments.

Here's a comparison of the Microsoft 365 Frontline worker plans:

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