The Real Reasons Your Business Needs Microsoft Business Premium Licensing

Moving Beyond Business Standard

MS Business Standard has served us well in the past, offering Microsoft licensing on a subscription basis so that we always had the latest versions of Microsoft apps. In the last few years, however, the proliferation of scams, cyber threats, and other digital nasties has prompted us to implement more protection on business IT systems.

These have made cloud systems like Microsoft 365 just as vulnerable as on-premises servers and systems.

These days, Microsoft Business Premium is our go-to recommended license as it includes several key features that standard licensing does not, allowing us to significantly improve a business’s security posture. These improvements cannot be understated; features like enforcing MFA, a raft of conditional access policies, and hardening the system with Defender make a huge difference.

Read on to understand more about how Microsoft Business Premium fits into the concept of the Modern Workplace.

Modern Workplace with Microsoft 365

In our modern work modes, gone are the days of traditional nine-to-five schedules, with long commutes on the train or in the car. While these schedules remain a reality, for many, they only occur a few days a week, among work-from-home or time spent travelling for business.

The modern workplace provides many benefits, such as flexibility and productivity. Still, it also comes with some challenges, such as ensuring smooth communication and securing devices as people work outside the office. Cloud platforms have played a significant role in supporting hybrid work, with Microsoft 365 being one platform designed to accommodate the demands of modern workplaces worldwide.

Now that our time of rushing into remote work and making do with the systems we had on hand has primarily ended, how can you adequately support your modern workplace?

And what role does Microsoft 365 Business Premium play?

Empowering and engaging your distributed workforce

One of the most convincing reasons to adopt Microsoft 365 is to support your distributed workforce. With many people working between home and the office, sometimes even while in transit, you need a platform that allows people to access their work regardless of location or setup. Employers must now deliver an experience where people can open their laptops and do their best work, no matter what.

Microsoft 365 helps organisations support distributed workforces by providing a complete set of tools for collaboration and communication. It includes familiar applications like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, as well as applications with the latest communication features – like Teams – which makes it easy to connect with colleagues online.

A suite of applications for communication and collaboration

You might have encountered some serious roadblocks to collaboration since adopting hybrid work, such as files shared via email, stored locally on PCs or being unable to tell if someone is online.

Microsoft 365 serves as a solution for enhancing collaboration. It is a cloud-based platform that enables users to collaborate and communicate if they have an internet connection and work offline if they don’t.

Tools like Microsoft Teams facilitate collaboration by integrating messaging, document sharing, and video calling into a single application. You can also connect your SharePoint site to Microsoft Teams, making it a central hub for accessing additional information about projects. Additionally, Microsoft 365 helps eliminate communication barriers, leading to improved collaboration.

Cost-effectiveness and scalability

Traditionally, your IT infrastructure would have existed as physical servers that you would need to purchase, maintain, and store. You would need to update these systems every three to five years, and such infrastructure does not have the flexibility to scale as your business grows.

Microsoft 365 offers great opportunities to optimise your IT costs and scale as your users increase or decrease. This means that you can save money on infrastructure costs while gaining access to the flexibility of cloud platforms.

Microsoft 365 benefits the remote workforce by covering a broad range of applications that integrate and work well together. You might be using solutions from third-party vendors and paying for monthly subscriptions. With Microsoft 365 Business Premium, you can access all the functionality these disparate apps provide in one solution and at a much lower monthly price than all your third-party apps combined. When you need to add or remove users, you can add or reduce the number of licenses you pay for, allowing you to scale to your business needs quickly.

Cybersecurity tools for securing your data with Business Premium

Cybersecurity is one of the most critical concerns for businesses everywhere. A recent Notifiable Data Breaches report covering the period of January to June 2022 found that 63% of all reported breaches occurred as a result of malicious or criminal activity. The threats will continue to increase in severity with the proliferation of distributed work.

Microsoft 365 includes some enhanced cyber security features for better securing your business, in addition to collaboration and communication tools. It includes built-in security tools, such as:

  • Multi-factor authentication (MFA) requires someone to use two or more methods of verifying their identity when logging into their accounts. You can enforce MFA on users to ensure they receive a code texted to their mobile device or supplied via an app like Microsoft Authenticator.
  • Conditional access blocks people based on conditions, such as their location. For example, if someone logs into their account from Sydney at 2pm, and then attempts to login again from London an hour later, you can block their access and secure the account. You can also leverage conditional access policies to prevent users from syncing company data to their personal devices.
  • Microsoft Intune is a cloud-based solution for managing endpoint devices, including mobile phones, laptops, desktop computers, and virtual devices. It can also manage access to company data on personal devices, which is useful if people use their personal devices to access company data.

The above are only a few of the many cybersecurity solutions you get with a Microsoft 365 Business Premium subscription.

Microsoft Business Premium features

Revolution can support your transformation to a modern workplace

The technology and applications leveraged within your business can hugely impact productivity and the employee experience across a distributed workforce. Building a modern workplace is about more than simply purchasing the technology needed; you need to fully implement and optimise it to ensure that your team can get the most from it.

We can work with you to understand your business goals, requirements, and unique applications and then build a strategy to optimise your technology and transform your business into a modern workplace. Even after finishing the project, we will ensure that the technology performs as expected and that your staff use it appropriately. If necessary, we will tweak the solution.

Contact sales@rvn.co.nz to investigate how Microsoft 365’s Modern Workplace can help your business.

An article by Revolution IT in Auckland

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