What You're Missing With Your Microsoft 365 E5 Licensing

Businesses purchase Microsoft cloud licensing, and particularly Microsoft 365 E5, with the intention of enabling a set of specific features. The driving force is often cost saving instead of purchasing a complex stack of 3rd party licenses and add-ons. Granted, this can drive cost savings. However, if you were to not take advantage of every capability available, you would be, in effect, leaving money on the table. What’s more, there’s a likelihood that you could be paying 3rd parties for duplicated services. Here’s what you’re missing with your Microsoft 365 E5 licensing.

Microsoft Teams Phone 

Microsoft Teams Phone helps you stay connected with voice and video calling using Teams Phone either on computers, mobile devices, desk phones, or tablets. The goal of the platform is to help you stay in touch and facilitate doing more from just about anywhere. The all-in-one application should help you work smarter by bringing together calling, chat, meetings and collaboration. For business-critical calling, you can leverage the built-in, innovated, and AI-powered calling experience. This happens to integrate with a partner software solution.

If your organization has a wide portfolio of devices, you should be able to negotiate flexible financing options. Thus, enabling your organization to maintain all manner of devices for any calling scenario. You can easily add, monitor, and manage all the voice and video calling from the Teams admin center. Moreover, you get 3000 minutes per user per month which translates to about 50 hours of calling, 2.5 hours per day. These minutes are pooled at the tenant level, meaning that constant phone users are covered by those more moderate users.

Viva Learning 

Microsoft Viva Learning aims to empower your employees to prioritize their growth and development. The platform makes learning a natural part of your employee’s day. They can easily incorporate learning right where employees already spend their time. These employees can discover, share and prioritize learning. Suppose you have an interest in making learning collaborative. Then Viva Learning enables social learning using the collaboration capabilities found right within Teams. A neat feature is that you can add organization-generated learning content into your employee’s learning path on Viva Learning.

Data Loss Prevention With Microsoft 365 E5 Licensing

Given today’s distributed work model, organizations grow weary of people without the right clearance gaining access to pertinent information. Fortunately, you can leverage Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention (DLP). Specifically, consider DLP for End Point to monitor the actions taken on sensitive items. You can also use the platform to prevent the unintentional sharing of said sensitive items. DLP for Teams should help you block any sensitive content from getting shared with Microsoft Teams members with guest access or external access. Finally, consider leveraging Automatic Sensitivity Labeling to assign labels to files and emails the moment it matches the conditions that you have pre-specified.

The ability to apply sensitive labels to your content automatically is beneficial in a couple of ways. For starters, it eliminates the need to train your users as it pertains to each classification. Further, you essentially don’t need to depend on actual users to classify all of your content. Finally, users do not have to focus on policies that would take away from the time they would otherwise be spending working.

Defender   

As an organization, preventing, detecting, investigating, and responding to advanced threats to your enterprise’s network is of paramount importance. Defender for Endpoint Plan 2 is the new Microsoft Defender Vulnerability Management add-on that comes with leading optics and detection capabilities that should help with the remediation of endpoint vulnerabilities and misconfigurations.

Suppose your SecOp analysts and security professionals are struggling with the detection of advanced attacks on your hybrid environment. In that case, you can leverage Defender for identity to help with monitoring users and particularly their behaviors and activities. What’s more, you can protect user identities and credentials that are stored within your active directory. Overall, the tool comes in handy as it helps you leverage your on-premises Active Directory signal to identify, detect and investigate any advanced threats to your networks, compromised identities, and malicious insider actions taken against your organization.

With Defender for O365 Plan 2, you should be able to prevent and detect threats, investigate these and come up with the right response to said threats. You essentially take advantage of EOP threat management. This comes in handy when it comes to step-by-step threat protection.

An additional tool available to you is Microsoft Defender Application Guard, which should help you prevent old and newly emerging attacks to help keep employees productive. It uses a unique hardware isolation approach that can successfully destroy attackers’ playbooks. Thus, making their current attack game plan obsolete. Finally, to safeguard all your open Office documents, you have Safe Documents that utilize Microsoft Defender for Endpoint to view opened Office documents in Protected View or Application Guard for Office.

Identity and Access Management

Given that you likely have remote teams working for you, you want to keep an eye on the behavior of all users with access to your data and network. With Azure Active Directory P2, you get a centralized identity and access management cloud solution that synchronizes your on-premises directories and enables single sign-on.

Seeing as in line with good practice you already track user behavior within your network, the moment you notice behavior that’s out of the norm, you could block said users or ask them to perform multi-factor authentication using Risk Based Conditional Access.

Further, chances are you have important resources within your organization. Thus, you are keen on managing, controlling, and monitoring access to these resources. With Privileged Identity Management, you should be able to prevent malicious actors from getting access to your information. Further, the tool enables you to authorize users that have authority to make changes to sensitive resources.

Moreover, as your organization changes, so will be the people who have access to different sensitive information. With Access Reviews, you should be able to manage group memberships and review access to enterprise applications. You can conduct regular reviews to ensure the right people continue to have access while those with no further access. Finally, as an organization, you likely want to manage identities and access lifecycles at scales. With Entitlement Management, you should be able to automatically access request workflows, access assignments, reviews, and the expiration of permissions.

Data Lifecycle Management With Microsoft 365 E5 Licensing

To learn about retention policies and labels and how retention settings can work the content in place, leverage Rules Based Retention Policies. Further, seeing as remote work has grown in popularity, you should consider utilizing Machine Learning Based Retention to help with detecting and classifying all of your data. The trainable classifier should help with governing your data and deciding which one to protect, retain and delete. Finally, with Records Management, you can manage regulatory, legal, and business-critical records throughout your organization.

eDiscovery and Auditing 

When you need an end-to-end solution that preserves, collects, analyzes, reviews, and exports content, consider eDiscovery Premium. This solution builds on the existing Microsoft eDiscovery and analytics capabilities. It goes even further to help your legal teams manage the entire legal workflow, including communications on existing caseloads.

To gain visibility into the different auditing activities within your organization and particularly Microsoft 365, be sure to take advantage of the audit functionality within Purview Audit Premium. With this, you should be able to conduct forensic and compliance investigations, which in turn increases your audit log retention and keeps you compliant with pertinent regulations.

Insider Risk Management 

Similar to most other organizations, you are likely concerned over insider risk within the modern workplace. This insider risk is responsible for user events and activities, requiring you to find ways to mitigate said vulnerabilities. With Insider Risk Management Communication Compliance, you get solutions that work seamlessly with 3rd party indicators to help you identify, triage, and act on risk activities. To further manage insider risk, you can leverage Information Barriers, which restricts two-way communication and collaboration between groups and users using Microsoft Teams, SharePoint, and OneDrive. Using the tool, you should avoid conflicts of interest and safeguard all internal information between users and administrative areas. Moreover, you have a Customer Lockbox that supports requests t access to data. You have at the tip of your hand the power to approve or deny any requests made.

Finally, you can leverage Privileged Access Management to re-establish control over any compromised environment and isolate the use of privileged accounts that way reducing the risk of some credentials getting stolen.

Power Platform

If you are intent on creating a data-driven culture throughout your organization, be sure to leverage Power BI Pro. Using the Power Platform, share rich data visualizations and distribute findings to team members within and out of your organization. Then, enhance collaboration by having team members comment and stay current with the content being worked on.

Learn More About Microsoft 365 E5 Licensing

At Agile IT, we know Microsoft Cloud Licensing. As Microsoft experts, we are well-versed with changes to Microsoft Licensing in 2022. By understanding Microsoft licensing options,  we are better equipped to help your organization seek the most cost-effective software and cloud solution. Further, we are committed to understanding Microsoft 365 business licensing, thus helping your business streamline its enterprise operations. We can help you turn on features you were missing with your Microsoft 365 E5. That way, you can comfortably replace third-party vendors. If your Microsoft Licensing is confusing, and you want to right-size your entitlements or make sure you are getting everything you can out of your budget, schedule a free consultation. Agile IT has provided Microsoft Licensing services for over 15 years, so we know our way around. Get in touch today, and let’s get a conversation going.