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

You've chosen upon Microsoft 365 and the Azure cloud for your business. Congratulations. We think you've made the best choice.

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

Other strategies like Business Standard and E5 have their benefits, however we discover that thinking about Microsoft 365 Business Premium vs E3 offers companies the best bundle of functions that are crucial for any organization.

In this post, we will cover the differences in between Business Premium and Microsoft's very first business offering. You may find that neither offering is for you, choosing the less expensive 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 strategy is different from the legacy E3 offering, called "Microsoft Office E3."

If you have a question about any of these strategies or wish to consult our tech experts on which M365 bundle will move your business furthest forward, get on a call with us as soon as possible.

What is Microsoft 365?

A style portraying Microsoft 365 Business Premium vs E3

Microsoft 365 is Microsoft's subscription productivity suite that can connect all of your favorite Microsoft Office applications together with world-class cloud capabilities and air-tight security.

M365 comes packaged in many various plans for home, company, and business. With differing costs and functions, Microsoft provides you choices for what bundle fits your circumstance the best.

What is Azure cloud?

Graphic illustrating numerous computers sending out 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 released in 2010, fixing issues consisting of storage, calculation, and analysis of information through virtualization.

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

Cloud services enable businesses to reduce their overhead by suppressing storage expenses, while also 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 leading offering for small to medium-sized organizations, an upgrade on its Business Basic and Business Standard offerings.

Service Premium costs $20 per user each month and features a 50 GB mail box storage limit and a 1 TB storage limit in OneDrive. Just 300 Business Premium licenses can be assigned to a business prior to it need to start buying enterprise strategies.

What is E3?

Microsoft 365 E3 is M365's initial enterprise strategy, can be found in as the second-most crammed plan feature-wise behind E5.

E3 costs $32/user/month and includes limitless mailbox and OneDrive storage. There is no cap to the number of business users can be on E3 strategies. It also features some of the leading security functions available.

Why Business Premium and E3?-- Microsoft Intune

A graphic showing linked devices to Microsoft Intune

ITSG spotlights Business Premium and E3 as favored M365 plans because they offer a lot of features that make your cloud experience better.

The crucial function that makes these strategies elite is Microsoft Intune, which manages access for mobile phones, including smartphones, tablets, and laptops.

It likewise allows managers to set additional security measures on non-company gadgets and limits on what remote workers can access.

Why does that make Intune a gamechanger?

Anyone who has needed to set up a new computer or smartphone has likely needed to spend hours personalizing their settings, bring back files, and remembering passwords.

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

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

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

Without any trouble and no server, Intune conserves money and time that you can allocate elsewhere.

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

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

Why Business Premium and E3?-- What else?

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

Both strategies feature Microsoft's best-in-class communication center, Teams, as well as SharePoint Online and Planner.

Both Business Premium and E3 feature Litigation Hold and eDiscovery, which are essential features that protect your company from losing information that is important to any legal procedures. Although, Business Premium might encounter storage issues if Litigation Hold is used to freeze too much data.

Security

The genuine value you get with E3's cost boost is its additional security functions, which are expansive. E3 features Microsoft Advanced Threat Analytics (ATA), Credential Guard, App Locker, Windows Information Protection (WIP), and the complete variation of Azure Active Directory.

E3 likewise features the capability to secure emails with the click of a button. This ensures that delicate details is opened by the intended getting party, who must log in with a Microsoft or organization account.

A screenshot of Outlook in Microsoft 365 E3, with how to place file encryption on an e-mail.

Company Premium just comes with Microsoft Defender for Office 365 (formerly referred to as Advanced Threat Protection).

Let's rapidly review just what you get with these features.

The headliner here is ATA, which is a tool that examines the traffic coming in and out of your network, identifying the habits of entities within your organization. By learning the behavior of users and other celebrations accessing your data, ATA can precisely discover and inform you in the case that anything is suspicious.

Credential guard uses virtualized security to keep login qualifications concealed from all software, except for programs that need them. This extra security shops information in a separated area to minimize the opportunities of credential theft.

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

Mentioning user error, Windows Information Protection avoids the unintentional leak of data by staff members through e-mail, social networks, and comparable apps. WIP informs users that their action will share or disclose work info before the action is verified. This security ends up being more vital as employees remain remote.

Furthermore, with WIP, services can preserve an archive after an employee leaves, while still deactivating their license.

All these functions are looped with the complete variation of Azure Active Directory, where you can keep an eye on and govern your business's whole cloud environment. The full version allows for extra functions like group access management, advanced security reports, multi-factor authentication with conditional access, and more.

Business Premium's Microsoft Defender is a cloud-based email filter that determines destructive links and attachments prior to they enter your environment. Defender also determines harmful files and links in SharePoint, OneDrive, and Microsoft Teams.

Microsoft Defender is enough to protect your business overall and is an excellent first step in securing your cloud. If you want the most protection Microsoft can provide, that will need among their business plans.

E3 and its innovative security functions allow organizations to thoroughly balance which workers have access to perform which tasks, developing a structured, safe cloud environment.

Everything else

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

One huge perk of E3 is the ability to access the Microsoft Office suite via a remote desktop, suggesting you can release its efficiency apps to shared computers in your company.

The capability to trigger shared computer systems from another location likewise includes E3. With remote desktop services, every user on your shared computer can continue to work on their files.

Exclusive to business strategies is Azure rights management, which safeguards data that is shared externally. When safeguarded files are emailed to another business, the defense remains on the file.

Like Litigation Hold and eDiscovery, Azure rights management is vital for compliance and may be needed.

E3 even more solidifies your compliance with data loss prevention (DLP). If your service handles delicate, proprietary, or consumer information, DLP can determine and protect it from being shared. Using web "deep content analysis" and data-matching