What Is Microsoft 365 Business Premium?
Microsoft 365 Business Premium is the top-tier licence in the Microsoft 365 business range, designed for organisations with up to 300 users. It combines the productivity tools most businesses already rely on - Outlook, Teams, Word, Excel - with a serious set of security and device management capabilities that would cost far more if purchased separately.
The security side is what sets it apart. Business Premium includes endpoint detection and response, advanced email threat protection, identity management, conditional access, and mobile device management. These are not bolt-on extras - they are fully integrated into the platform and designed to work together.
For most small and medium-sized businesses, it represents the most cost-effective way to get genuine enterprise-grade protection without stitching together half a dozen separate products.
Productivity and Collaboration
The productivity side is what most people already know. You get the full desktop versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and OneNote - installed on up to five devices per user. You also get Exchange Online with 50GB mailboxes, Microsoft Teams for chat and video conferencing, and 1TB of OneDrive cloud storage per user with SharePoint team sites for shared documents.
None of this is unique to Business Premium - you get the same productivity tools with Business Standard. The difference is everything that comes on top.
Security and Threat Protection
This is where Business Premium justifies its price. The security capabilities included would genuinely cost more than the entire licence if you tried to replicate them with third-party products.
Microsoft Defender for Business provides full endpoint detection and response (EDR) across all your devices. This is not basic antivirus - it is behavioural analysis, automated investigation, and real-time threat response. It watches what processes are doing, flags suspicious behaviour, and can automatically isolate a compromised device before an attack spreads. For most businesses, this replaces the need for a separate EDR product entirely.
Defender for Office 365 handles advanced email security. It goes well beyond basic spam filtering - scanning attachments in a sandbox before delivery, rewriting URLs to check them at the point of click, and using AI to detect impersonation and business email compromise attempts. Phishing is still the number one way businesses get breached, and this is a meaningful layer of defence against it.
Conditional Access lets you define rules about who can access what, and under what circumstances. You can block sign-ins from countries you do not operate in, require multi-factor authentication when someone connects from an unfamiliar device, or prevent access to sensitive data from unmanaged personal machines. It is the foundation of a zero-trust security approach and one of the most impactful things you can configure.
Microsoft Purview Information Protection allows you to classify and protect sensitive documents and emails with sensitivity labels. A document marked as confidential stays protected even if someone forwards it outside your organisation - you control who can open it, print it, or copy from it regardless of where the file ends up.
Microsoft Entra ID P1 (formerly Azure AD Premium) is the identity platform underpinning all of this. It provides self-service password reset, group-based access management, dynamic groups, and the conditional access engine. It is also where you get risk-based sign-in policies that can automatically challenge or block logins that look suspicious.
Device Management
Business Premium includes Microsoft Intune, which gives you full control over the devices that access your company data.
With Intune, you can enforce security policies across all your laptops, desktops, tablets, and phones. That means requiring encryption, enforcing PIN or biometric locks, pushing security updates, deploying applications, and remotely wiping a device if it is lost or stolen. You can manage Windows, macOS, iOS, and Android devices from a single console.
Windows Autopilot takes this further by automating new device setup. A new starter can unbox a laptop, connect to the internet, sign in with their company credentials, and the device configures itself - apps install, policies apply, security settings lock in - all without IT needing to touch the machine. For businesses without a large IT team, this is transformative.
For personal devices, Intune supports mobile application management - protecting company data within specific apps without taking control of the entire device. If someone leaves the business, you can wipe company data from their personal phone without affecting their personal photos, messages, or apps.
Business Premium vs Business Standard
Business Standard gives you the productivity tools - Office apps, Teams, Exchange, SharePoint, OneDrive. It is a solid licence for email and collaboration. But it includes none of the security or device management features.
No EDR. No advanced email protection. No conditional access. No Intune. No Autopilot. No information protection labels. You are left either buying these capabilities separately - which adds up quickly - or going without them.
The monthly price difference between Standard and Premium is relatively modest when you consider what you are getting. If you were to replicate the security stack alone using third-party products - a standalone EDR, an email security gateway, an MDM platform, a conditional access solution - you would spend considerably more than the upgrade cost. Business Premium is one of the better deals in business IT.
Common Misconceptions
"We only need Premium for Intune"
This is the one we hear most often. Intune is just one piece of what you get. Defender for Business, Defender for Office 365, Conditional Access, Entra ID P1, Purview Information Protection, and Autopilot are all included. Thinking of Business Premium as "the Intune licence" dramatically undersells what is in the box.
"It is overkill for a small business"
The threats facing a 10-person firm are fundamentally the same as those facing a large enterprise. Ransomware does not check your headcount before encrypting your files. Business Premium gives small businesses access to the same calibre of security tooling that large organisations use - at a price point that makes sense.
"We already have antivirus"
Traditional antivirus and EDR are not the same thing. Antivirus scans files against a database of known threats. Defender for Business provides real-time behavioural analysis, automated investigation and response, and visibility into attack chains that signature-based scanning simply cannot match. If you move to Business Premium, your existing antivirus product is almost certainly redundant.
"Our team is too small to need device management"
Even a five-person business benefits from being able to enforce encryption, push security updates, and wipe a lost laptop remotely. Intune is not complex to manage and it does not require a dedicated IT department. It just means your devices are consistently secured and you have a way to respond when something goes wrong.
Getting the Most Out of It
The biggest mistake businesses make with Business Premium is paying for it and only using the productivity tools. Many of the security features are not fully enabled out of the box - they need to be configured properly to deliver real protection. Conditional Access policies need to be designed for your organisation. Defender needs its policies tuned. Intune needs device compliance policies and app deployment set up.
We help businesses migrate to Business Premium, configure the full security stack, set up Conditional Access policies that balance security with usability, deploy Intune and Autopilot, and provide ongoing management to keep everything optimised as Microsoft rolls out new features.
If you are currently on Business Basic or Business Standard and want to understand what upgrading would look like, get in touch. We will walk you through the benefits, the cost, and what the migration involves.