Microsoft 365 Service Premium vs E3, and One Powerful Tool in Both That Will Revolutionize Your IT

So, you've decided upon Microsoft 365 and the Azure cloud for your business. Congratulations. We think you've made the best option.

Now that you've selected M365, it is time to choose a strategy. While there are numerous to choose from, IT Support Guys usually manages M365's Business Premium and E3 (enterprise) offerings.

Other strategies like Business Standard and E5 have their advantages, however we discover that considering Microsoft 365 Business Premium vs E3 offers business the very best bundle of features that are essential for any company.

In this post, we will cover the differences between Business Premium and Microsoft's first enterprise offering. You may discover that neither offering is for you, opting for the cheaper Business Standard plan, or the immersive E5 plan.

Keep in mind, for the purposes of this post, all recommendations to "E3" specify to Microsoft 365 E3. This plan is different from the legacy E3 offering, known as "Microsoft Office E3."

If you have a concern about any of these plans or want to consult our tech experts on which M365 package will move your organization furthest forward, get on a call with us as soon as possible.

What is Microsoft 365?

A design depicting Microsoft 365 Business Premium vs E3

Microsoft 365 is Microsoft's membership efficiency suite that can tie all of your preferred Microsoft Office applications together with first-rate cloud abilities and air-tight security.

M365 comes packaged in many different plans for home, service, and business. With differing rates and features, Microsoft gives you choices for what package fits your situation the very best.

What is Azure cloud?

Graphic highlighting several computer systems sending data as much as the Microsoft Azure cloud, an essential component of Microsoft 365 Business Premium vs. E3 Azure is Microsoft's cloud computing platform that was launched in 2010, solving Hop over to this website problems consisting of storage, computation, and analysis of information through virtualization.

Azure deals services like Software as a Service (SaaS), Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), and Platform as a Service (PaaS).

Cloud services allow businesses to minimize their overhead by suppressing storage expenses, while likewise centralizing information for much better file sharing, and boosting backup and disaster recovery efforts.

What is Business Premium?

Microsoft 365 Business Premium is M365's top offering for small to medium-sized businesses, an upgrade on its Business Basic and Business Standard offerings.

Service Premium costs $20 per user per month and features a 50 GB mailbox storage limit and a 1 TB storage limit in OneDrive. Just 300 Business Premium licenses can be assigned to a business before it must start buying enterprise plans.

What is E3?

Microsoft 365 E3 is M365's preliminary enterprise strategy, coming in as the second-most packed plan feature-wise behind E5.

E3 costs $32/user/month and includes unlimited mailbox and OneDrive storage. There is no cap to how many business users can be on E3 strategies. It likewise comes with a few of the top security functions offered.

Why Business Premium and E3?-- Microsoft Intune

A graphic revealing connected gadgets to Microsoft Intune

ITSG spotlights Business Premium and E3 as preferred M365 strategies since they provide many features that make your cloud experience much better.

The crucial feature that makes these strategies elite is Microsoft Intune, which manages gain access to for mobile phones, including smartphones, tablets, and laptop computers.

It also allows supervisors to set extra security measures on non-company gadgets and limitations on what remote workers can access.

So why does that make Intune a gamechanger?

Anyone who has needed to establish a brand-new computer or smart device has likely had to invest hours tailoring their settings, restoring files, and keeping in mind passwords.

Those days are in the past with Intune, which allows you to produce a default image for deployment. When you established a brand-new computer system, Intune allows you to hit the ground running without lost time.

Paired together with Azure Active Directory, Intune gets rid of the need to run your own server.

With top-shelf identity management and endpoint management in the cloud, Intune and Azure AD makes on-premise identity and endpoint management redundant.

With no trouble and no server, Intune conserves money and time that you can assign in other places.

If you already have a server, Intune and Azure AD are still suitable with your environment.

In addition, with Azure sync, you can marry your on-premise and cloud servers to develop a hybrid setup, the supreme option for your IT.

Why Business Premium and E3?-- What else?

Beyond Intune, there are other functions available in both Business Premium and E3 that make them stand above the less-expensive strategies.

Both strategies feature Microsoft's best-in-class communication hub, Teams, along with SharePoint Online and Planner.

Both Business Premium and E3 include Litigation Hold and eDiscovery, which are necessary functions that protect your company from losing data that is important to any legal proceedings. Although, Business Premium might encounter storage issues if Litigation Hold is utilized to freeze excessive data.

Security

The real worth you get with E3's price boost is its extra security functions, which are extensive. E3 comes with Microsoft Advanced Threat Analytics (ATA), Credential Guard, App Locker, Windows Information Protection (WIP), and the full variation of Azure Active Directory.

E3 likewise comes with the ability to encrypt emails with the click of a button. This makes sure that sensitive information is opened by the intended receiving party, who need to log in with a Microsoft or organization account.

A screenshot of Outlook in Microsoft 365 E3, with how to position encryption on an email.

Business Premium just features Microsoft Defender for Office 365 (formerly referred to as Advanced Threat Protection).

Let's rapidly go over simply what you get with these functions.

The headliner here is ATA, which is a tool that examines the traffic can be found in and out of your network, diagnosing the habits of entities within your organization. By discovering the habits of users and other parties accessing your information, ATA can accurately spot and notify you in the event that anything is suspicious.

Credential guard utilizes virtualized security to keep login qualifications hidden from all software, other than for programs that require them. This additional security shops data in an isolated location to reduce the possibilities of credential theft.

AppLocker permits supervisors to control which files and applications that users have access to, including executable files and installer files. This safeguards you internally, as user mistake is a leading reason for cybersecurity breaches.

Mentioning user error, Windows Information Protection prevents the unexpected leak of information by workers through e-mail, social media, and comparable apps. WIP informs users that their action will share or divulge work details before the action is validated. This protection ends up being more important as employees remain remote.

Additionally, with WIP, businesses can protect an archive after a worker leaves, while still deactivating their license.

All these functions are looped with the complete variation of Azure Active Directory, where you can keep track of and govern your business's whole cloud environment. The complete version permits additional functions like group access management, advanced security reports, multi-factor authentication with conditional gain access to, and more.

Service Premium's Microsoft Defender is a cloud-based e-mail filter that identifies destructive links and accessories before they enter your environment. Protector likewise identifies harmful files and links in SharePoint, OneDrive, and Microsoft Teams.

Microsoft Defender suffices to safeguard your company general and is a good primary step in protecting your cloud. If you desire the most defense Microsoft can use, that will require among their business strategies.

E3 and its sophisticated security features allow companies to thoroughly balance which employees have access to perform which jobs, creating a structured, safe cloud environment.

Everything else

If you are not as fretted about your security, consider some of the other features of E3 that you might lose out on with Business Premium.

One huge perk of E3 is the ability to access the Microsoft Office suite by means of a remote desktop, suggesting you can release its productivity apps to shared computer systems in your business.

The ability to activate shared computer systems from another location also comes with E3. With remote desktop services, every user on your shared computer can continue to work on their files.

Also special to enterprise plans is Azure rights management, which protects data that is shared externally. When secured files are emailed to another company, the security remains on the file.

Like Litigation Hold and eDiscovery, Azure rights management is imperative for compliance and might be needed.

E3 even more solidifies your compliance with data loss prevention (DLP). If your organization handles delicate, exclusive, or consumer data, DLP can recognize and secure it from being shared. Utilizing