Insights

This article was updated in November 2025 to reflect the renaming of the Microsoft 365 E5 Security add-on to Microsoft Defender Suite and its associated pricing and feature changes.

Tl;dr: What is Microsoft Defender Suite?

Microsoft Defender Suite is a security-focused licence bundle that can be added to Microsoft 365 E3 to give organisations access to the advanced security and threat protection solutions that are included in Microsoft 365 E5. It’s a more cost-effective way to acquire the security products than purchasing standalone licences or the full Microsoft 365 E5 plan.

There is a similar add-on called Microsoft Defender Suite for Business Premium which similarly enables SMBs with Microsoft 365 Business Premium licences to add those E5 security capabilities to their licensing.

Why we love the Microsoft Defender Suite

The security capabilities within the Microsoft Defender Suite enable the implementation of a Zero Trust approach, which is considered best-practice in modern security.

This makes the Microsoft Defender Suite a popular investment, as it offers companies of any size market-leading security tools.

What’s even better, is that most organisations are using Microsoft 365 in some form – and by keeping your security tools within the Microsoft stack, you can benefit from strong integration, less complexity and reducing third party costs.

The Microsoft Defender Suite provides an optimal selection of Microsoft’s security products, combining them in a cost-effective package, which can deliver real value and elevate your security to a whole new level.

Before the Microsoft Defender Suite (formerly named “E5 Security”) became available, organisations could only achieve this level of security by either:

• Purchasing Microsoft 365 E5: the highest-spec (and most expensive) licence with a large portion of the cost going towards voice/telephony and Power BI Pro, which most companies simply didn’t need
• Creating a licensing mix and match: combining E3 and E5 offerings across Office 365, Windows 10 and EMS to get most of the security tools but causing licensing complexity and missing out on the discount of the Microsoft 365 bundle

Luckily, the Microsoft Defender Suite has solved this issue, offering far greater value for the customer.

Are compliance tools included in Microsoft Defender Suite?

No, compliance tools are included in a separate suite.

This article is focused on the Microsoft Defender Suite, however the Microsoft Purview Suite is also available to purchase (formerly named “Microsoft 365 E5 Compliance add-on”), which you can read about in our article “Microsoft 365 E5 Compliance Overview”.

Microsoft Purview Suite for Business Premium has also been released for SMBs with Microsoft 365 Business Premium.

Microsoft Defender Suite UK pricing

We have included UK pricing as a reference, which is accurate as of November 2025 but subject to change from Microsoft. Since the launch of the New Commerce Experience (NCE) there are different ways to licence Microsoft solutions – a) Annual commitment, paid annually, b) Annual commitment, paid monthly (this has a 5% price increase to paying annually), Monthly commitment, paid monthly (this has a 20% price increase). Buying annual commitments gives you better pricing, however you cannot decrease the number of licences you have in that year, whereas monthly commitments mean you can flex up and down every month – but it comes at a higher cost.

All pricing listed below show Annual commitment with annual payment, or Monthly commitment with monthly payment, excluding VAT.

For Microsoft 365 Business Premium

• Microsoft Defender Suite for Microsoft 365 Business Premium = £92.40 per user per year or £9.24 per user per month.
• Microsoft Purview Suite for Microsoft 365 Business Premium = £92.40 per user per year, or £9.24 per user per month.
• Microsoft Defender and Purview Suites for Microsoft 365 Business Premium = £138 per user per year, or £13.80 monthly.

For Microsoft 365 E3

• Microsoft Defender Suite (formerly E5 security) = £110.40 per user per year, or £11.04 per user per month
• Microsoft Defender Suite for FLW (formerly F5 security) = £74.40 per user per year, or £7.44 per user per month

The benefits of the add-on

The Microsoft Defender Suite add-on contains Microsoft’s top security products, such as Microsoft Defender XDR along with Entra ID Plan 2.

This offering is particularly special because of the quality and potential of these tools and their advanced capabilities.

Microsoft invests millions in product development and testing and has unmatched telemetry and intelligence. Microsoft analyses over 100 trillion signals daily (as of November 2025).

Because of this, few companies can compete with Microsoft’s security solutions.

Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is a great example of this; from the first download of the BadRabbit virus it took only 14 minutes to completely block the ransomware to any other user that received an email. Combined with Microsoft Defender for Office 365 and any trace of this threat was removed from anywhere within the tenancy – you can read about it in detail here.

What products are included in the Microsoft Defender Suite add-on?

Microsoft Defender Suite includes the following products that aren’t included in Microsoft 365 E3:

Cloud access security broker solutions

• Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps
• Office 365 Cloud App Security

Identity and access management solutions

• Microsoft Entra ID Plan 2
• Microsoft Entra ID Protection
• Risk Based Conditional Access / Identity Protection
• Privileged Identity Management
• Access Reviews
• Entitlement Management

Threat protection solutions

• Microsoft Defender XDR
• Microsoft Defender for Office 365 Plan 2
• Microsoft Defender for Identity
• Microsoft Defender for Endpoint Plan 2
• Microsoft Defender for IoT – Enterprise IoT
• Microsoft Defender Application Guard for Office
• Microsoft Security Exposure Management
• Safe Documents

Microsoft Defender XDR – Microsoft’s XDR platform

‘Microsoft Defender XDR’ alongside Microsoft Defender for Cloud forms Microsoft’s extended detection and response (XDR) solution.

The combination of the products and services provides a holistic and integrated approach to your security. All the pieces integrate and can feed data to one another to build up a simple picture of your security, which balances tight security with great user experience. Having this simplified management is invaluable, as complexity is the enemy of security – having multiple, separate pieces that cannot integrate or are difficult to damage leaves you exposed to more risk of threats, vulnerabilities and likelihood of mistakes. Of course, the other advantage as mentioned earlier, is cost.

If you’d like to better understand XDR, you can read our EDR, XDR, MDR & MXDR explained summary.

What do the core products do?

Entra ID Plan 2: Cloud-based directory and identity management service to unify user accounts for improved security and management. Features include single-sign on (SSO), self-service password reset and password-less abilities.

Microsoft Defender for Office 365: Advanced email protection delivering additional malware and URL link protection (‘Safelinks’) and email detonation chambers. This also includes Office 365 Threat Intelligence – a single pane of glass for actionable insights into your threats, which pulls data from across all these services. Features include: interactive threat explorer, red team/blue team simulations to find your security holes and one-click actions based on threat alerts.

Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps: Reports and analyses web browsing activity and gives visibility into your cloud apps and services.

Microsoft Defender for Identity: Threat detection software which uses machine learning to understand typical behaviour and then detects and acts upon any network anomalies.

Microsoft Defender for Endpoint: An advanced post-breach and Endpoint Detection & Response (EDR) solution, which detects advanced attacks, automatically investigates and gives simple reaction options (all within minutes).

Looking to implement Microsoft 365?

Chorus is a leading provider of Microsoft 365 consultancy services. Watch our on-demand webinar “Building a Microsoft 365 implementation roadmap” to hear from our experts on how best to approach a Microsoft 365 rollout. This includes a phased roadmap suggestion covering all the products within Microsoft 365.

Microsoft-verified MXDR services

We have built managed security services using Microsoft Defender XDR and Microsoft Sentinel. If you are considering MDR and MXDR services to give you managed security and threat protection, you can find out more about our managed security services here.

Summary

Microsoft Defender Suite is a great option for SMBs that want to acquire the powerful security products from Microsoft 365 E5 licences, without having to pay for the other non-security E5 products.

When Microsoft 365 E5 Security (now Microsoft Defender Suite) launched, we were excited as it enabled us to give our customers the best security solutions, without requiring a full Microsoft 365 E5 licence, which remains a large cost commitment.