This is a quick post, as I often get asked by our customers about the newly included Microsoft Defender capabilities in the Microsoft 365 Business Premium licensing SKU. There is a good article by Microsoft that details what features are included with Microsoft Defender for Business, so I will leave this here as well just in case our information quickly gets out of date: Compare security features in Microsoft 365 plans for small and medium-sized businesses | Microsoft Docs
Here is a table comparing the features of Microsoft Defender for Business alongside the other Defender for Endpoint SKUs:
Microsoft is giving SMEs with the M365 Business Premium SKU a comprehensive feature set. You certainly get a lot of bang for your buck here, and traditional A/V companies like McAfee must be worried about the impact this could have on their business and upselling licenses.
One question I got asked the other day was that they were happy with the solution from an end-user perspective in that it covers the Windows 10/11 estate (as well as iOS and Android now!). Still, they wanted to also protect their Windows Server estate using Defender. There is a Microsoft Defender for Servers plan, which offers centralised threat and vulnerability management: Microsoft Defender for Servers – the benefits and features | Microsoft Docs
There are two SKUs for Defender for Servers:
Pricing is £3.889/Server/month for P1 and £11.574/Server/month for P2. Licensing will presumably have to be done via your Azure tenant, as Defender for Servers is an Azure SKU rather than an M365 SKU (even though you can manage the Servers from the M365 Defender portal once onboarded!). It can be deployed to any Servers running within your on-premises infrastructure, but it will probably be a manual onboarding process rather than automatic.
I haven’t deployed this to any customer yet. Still, you may also have to deploy Azure ARC, but that is free as long as you are only the control plane functionality and not the policy guest configuration functionality: Pricing – Azure Arc | Microsoft Azure.
So there you have it in a nutshell 🥜! A quick overview of Windows Defender for Business licensing and the options for Defender on Windows Server.