Leveling Up: Security & Compliance for SMBs with M365 Business Premium

For small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), the cybersecurity landscape has shifted dramatically. Threat actors no longer discriminate by company size; they target vulnerabilities wherever they exist. For years, Microsoft 365 Business Premium has been a minimum standard for SMBs, offering a value-based mix of productivity and protection.

However, as we move into 2026, the need for advanced detection, response, and governance has outgrown the minimum viable toolset. Microsoft has answered the call by rolling out new add-on licenses for Microsoft 365 Business Premium, attempting to bridge the gap between SMB licensing and the full-blown Enterprise (E5) stack.

At SecureSky, we specialize in Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM) and Managed XDR (MXDR), and we are excited to break down what these new Advanced Security (Microsoft Defender Suite) and Advanced Compliance (Microsoft Purview Suite) add-ons to Business Premium licensing mean for your organization.

The Foundation: What You Already Have

Before we dive into the new capabilities, it is important to remember what the standard Microsoft 365 Business Premium license already provides:

• Microsoft Defender for Business: Best-in-class endpoint security (EDR) and vulnerability management.
• Microsoft Entra ID P1: Conditional Access, Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA), and secure single sign-on.
• Microsoft Intune (Plan 1): Mobile device and application management (MDM/MAM).
• Defender for Office 365 (Plan 1): Protection against phishing and malware in email and collaboration tools.

This baseline delivers essential foundational security coverage. The new add-ons can add multiple layers of controls to additionally strengthen your security and compliance posture.

Advanced Security: The Microsoft Defender Suite

Official Name: Microsoft Defender Suite for Business Premium

The "Advanced Security" add-on is a game-changer for organizations looking to deploy multiple elements of an XDR (Extended Detection and Response) strategy without the cost and complexity of an E5 license. It injects high-fidelity signals into your security operations—an ideal upgrade for companies leveraging security solutions like Microsoft Sentinel.

What’s Included:

• Microsoft Defender for Endpoint (Upgrade to Plan 2):
  • Why it matters: While the standard Business Premium includes robust EDR, Plan 2 adds advanced threat hunting and six months of data retention, enabling deeper forensic investigations—a key requirement for Tier 4 Operations support.
• Microsoft Defender for Office 365 (Upgrade to Plan 2):
  • Why it matters: Adds automated investigation and response (AIR), attack simulation training to educate users, and advanced threat trackers to visualize campaigns targeting your organization.
• Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps:
  • Why it matters: Shadow IT is real. This full-featured CASB (Cloud Access Security Broker) gives you deep visibility into the cloud apps your employees are using, allowing you to control data travel and enforce policies across third-party applications (like Salesforce, Okta, or AWS).
• Microsoft Defender for Identity:
  • Why it matters: Identity is the new perimeter. This tool monitors your on-premises Active Directory signals to identify and investigate advanced threats, compromised identities, and malicious insider actions. It is critical for detecting lateral movement attacks.
    
    

The SecureSky Perspective: For SecureSky’s MXDR clients, these additional data sources (Identity and Cloud Apps) significantly enhance the fidelity of alerts we ingest into Microsoft Sentinel. It allows us to correlate an endpoint detection with suspicious identity behavior, ensuring that complex attack chains are detected before they spread.

Advanced Compliance: The Microsoft Purview Suite

Official Name: Microsoft Purview Suite for Business Premium

Regulatory requirements (GDPR, HIPAA, CMMC) do not pause for SMBs. The "Advanced Compliance" add-on brings sophisticated data governance and risk management tools that were previously out of reach for many smaller organizations.

What’s Included:

• Microsoft Purview eDiscovery (Premium):
  • Why it matters: Litigation and internal investigations can be costly. Premium eDiscovery offers an end-to-end workflow to preserve, collect, review, and analyze content, significantly reducing the time and legal costs often associated with data discovery.
• Microsoft Purview Audit (Premium):
  • Why it matters: In the event of a breach, logs are everything. Premium Audit retains audit logs for longer periods and provides deeper visibility into mail access events (like MailItemsAccessed), which is essential for determining the scope of a compromise.
• Insider Risk Management:
  • Why it matters: It helps identify, investigate, and act on malicious and inadvertent activities within your organization, such as IP theft or data leakage by departing employees.
• Communication Compliance:
  • Why it matters: Automatically detect and remediate inappropriate messages (harassment, threats) or sensitive data sharing across Teams and email, helping maintain a safe and compliant culture.

The SecureSky Perspective: Customers, employees, and partners expect their information to be handled responsibly, no matter what size your business is. Using our proprietary posture management platform, we can now help you to validate that these advanced compliance configurations are not only enabled but effective across your M365 environment.

Better Together: The Value Play

Microsoft has structured these SKUs to be modular. You can purchase the Defender Suite (Advanced Security) or Purview Suite (Advanced Compliance) or in combined bundle at a discount—offering significant savings compared to a full E5 license.

Conclusion

With these add-ons, the barriers to entry for SMBs to access sophisticated security and compliance capabilities have been significantly reduced. Organizations of any size can now deploy high-fidelity protection used by the world’s largest enterprises.

SecureSky combines deep Microsoft ecosystem knowledge with operational experience to ensure you get the most out of these investments. From overseeing licensing, to designating and optimizing configurations, to providing round-the-clock monitoring and response, we are the partner you need to secure your business.

Ready to upgrade your security posture? Contact SecureSky today to discuss which add-ons align with your 2026 security roadmap.