A Security Architect Reacts: Microsoft Licensing

Gareth Young 

Hi, everyone welcome to a security architect reacts. My name is Gareth Young, I am the founder and Chief Architect of Levacloud. 

Today I’m going to be reacting to Microsoft licensing

it (Microsoft Licensing) can be quite confusing if you don’t work with it every day. It’s a bit of a maze, and the area where I see a lot of confusion is around the E5 security and compliance capabilities. 

A lot of organizations believe that if they’re going to invest in these capabilities, they must go to full E5. For some organizations that’s not in their budget or they don’t want to commit to the full E5 license because they only want to use a subset of it. I thought it would make sense just to clear the air on that one and maybe share some hints and tips that we tell our customers when they’re exploring this kind of security and compliance capability 

So let me just bring up a view here. 

So this is a Microsoft licensing Matrix, and it is available to download from the Microsoft website. If you Google, Microsoft 365 E3, There will be a link on the page there to get you to this and it covers all of the Consumer cloud license. 

Now there are a lot of similarities between this. What I’m about to tell you, and also the government cloud and education cloud. So, government G3, G5, education A3 A5. So on and so forth. 

First off, we have two different types of licensing for Office 365. We have the Office 365 licensing and also the Microsoft 365 licensing. The Office 365 licensing itself doesn’t come with a whole lot outside of the productivity tools, If you want to get add-on capabilities such as conditional access or Azure Active Directory Premium, then you need to go for the O365 E1 or O365 E3 plus the enterprise mobility and security add on to get that uplift. That’ll sort of bring you to a similar feature level to the other type of license (M365 E3) 

We’re going to talk about the Microsoft 365 E3 and E5 now. 

One thing that’s interesting to note, as you’ll see there is an E5 security and an E5 compliance mentioned here. So those are the add on licenses. If you only want E5 security tools like Defender for Endpoint, Cloud app security or Azure AD identity protection. If you just want those but don’t want all the compliance capabilities that come with E5, then for $12.00 per user per month you can just bolt it on to, you know, an existing M365 E3 or an E1 or E3 with the enterprise mobility and security add on. 

Taking that approach makes it a lot more affordable to get access to these advanced enterprise level security and compliance capabilities. 

You can also go a step further, and it’s not in this particular matrix, so in fact the individual security tools within E5 can be licensed individually. So, let’s say for example that as an organization you wanted to adopt Defender for Endpoint for all your devices, but for whatever reason the other security tools within E5 just don’t meet your needs right now or they don’t fit your use case. 

Well, if you talk to a cloud reseller like levacloud, we can resell those individual licensing SKUs on a per product basis. 

On the other side of things there’s also the frontline worker plans; F1, F3 and F5. Same applies with these. You can add on those security and compliance capabilities through an add on license. The same kind of rules apply there as well and we’re also able to add on the individual product licenses and as a reseller. 

Hopefully this is useful and opens a few more options for you as you look at these different security and compliance capabilities.  

This document is available on the Microsoft website, but any questions feel free to reach out to me direct and I can guide you, we’re used to working with this stuff daily. 

So thanks for joining me and we’ll catch you on the next one. 

You can view the licensing matrix here

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