Cybersecurity
Microsoft 365 Business Premium: the security you may already be paying for
Most organisations on Business Premium use a fraction of its security capability. That unused portion is often the cheapest security improvement available to them.
· 6 min read
Business Premium includes a substantial security and device management stack. In most of the tenants we review, a large part of it is switched off — not deliberately, but because nobody configured it after the licences were purchased.
What is included and commonly unused
Conditional access. Rules that control who can sign in, from where, and under what conditions. Requiring multi-factor authentication and a compliant device closes the most commonly exploited attack path there is. It is included, and it is frequently not enabled.
Intune device compliance. Policies that define what a compliant device looks like — encryption on, patch level current, no jailbreak — and the ability to block non-compliant devices from company data. Included, often unconfigured.
Defender for Office 365. Safe attachments and safe links, which detonate attachments in a sandbox and rewrite links so they are checked at click time rather than at delivery. Included.
Sensitivity labels. Document classification and encryption that travels with the file. Included, and admittedly the one that needs the most thought to deploy well.
Why it stays unconfigured
Two reasons, both understandable. The licence purchase and the configuration work are separate events, often months apart and sometimes involving different people. And the default state is permissive — nothing breaks if you do not configure it, so nothing forces the issue.
Where to start
If you are going to do one thing, make it conditional access requiring multi-factor authentication for all users, with a break-glass account excluded. It closes more real risk than anything else on the list and it can be deployed in a controlled way in an afternoon.
After that, device compliance, then Defender policies, then labelling. That order reflects risk reduction per unit of effort rather than any framework's sequence.
The point worth holding onto is that none of this is a new purchase. If you hold Business Premium licences, you have already paid for it.