We’ll say it plainly: for most businesses, running on Microsoft 365 Business Standard or below is a breach waiting to happen. Not because Standard is bad software — it’s fine for email and Office — but because it leaves out almost everything that actually defends you. And the gap between it and Business Premium is far smaller than most people think.
What you’re missing without Business Premium
Business Basic and Standard give you the apps: Outlook, Word, Excel, Teams, the usual. What they don’t give you is the security layer that stops a bad day becoming a bad month. Step up to Business Premium and you get:
- Microsoft Defender for Office 365 — advanced anti-phishing, plus scanning of links and attachments as they’re clicked. This is exactly what catches the kind of attack we wrote about in our Adversary-in-the-Middle post.
- Defender for Business — proper endpoint protection on your computers, not just the free antivirus that ships with Windows.
- Intune device management — enforce encryption and PINs, separate work from personal data, and remotely wipe a lost or stolen laptop or phone before anyone gets into it.
- Conditional Access (Entra ID P1) — the control that says “only trusted, healthy devices in expected places can sign in.” It’s one of the single best defences against stolen passwords and session tokens.
- Data protection — sensitivity labels and policies to stop confidential information walking out of the door.
On Standard, none of that is there. One phished login or one misplaced laptop, and there’s very little standing between an attacker and your data.
Now the bit that surprises people: the price
Here’s where it stops being a debate. On an annual plan, Business Premium works out at about £16.90 per user, per month (£202.80 a year). Business Standard is around £12.96.
That’s a difference of about £4 a month per user — roughly £47 a year — for the entire security stack above. Put another way: for less than the price of a couple of coffees a month, per person, you go from “we’ve got Office” to “we’re genuinely defended.” (You can play with the numbers in our Microsoft 365 cost calculator.)
Weigh that against the cost of a real incident — the downtime, the lost data, the customers told their details may have leaked — and the maths isn’t close.
And it can pay for itself
Here’s the part most businesses miss entirely. Business Premium isn’t just security — it bundles in tools you may already be paying for separately:
- Teams handles your chat, video meetings and calls — so you may not need Zoom or Slack.
- OneDrive and SharePoint give every user a terabyte of secure storage and proper file sharing — often replacing Dropbox or Google Workspace.
- Bookings, Planner, To Do and more are all in the box too.
Add up what you’re spending on those separate subscriptions and the upgrade to Business Premium frequently costs nothing on balance — and plenty of businesses actually come out ahead, paying less overall while being far better protected.
Where we stand
We feel strongly enough about this that it’s simply our policy: every user we look after is on Business Premium — no exceptions. We won’t knowingly run a network with the holes that Standard leaves open, because when something goes wrong, it’s our clients who carry the cost. With us, your team is properly licensed and properly protected as standard — it’s the baseline we build everything else on, not an optional upsell.
The bottom line
A few pounds more per user for the full Microsoft security suite — often offset entirely by the subscriptions you can then cancel. Staying on Standard to “save money” usually isn’t saving anything; it’s just deferring the bill until something goes wrong. For most businesses, Business Premium is simply the floor.
If you’re not sure what you’re on — or you’ve got a drawer full of separate app subscriptions — we’ll happily take a look and show you the numbers.