Written by the Nostra team · Reviewed October 2026
For its price, Business Premium is one of the best security bundles in the industry: anti-phishing with Safe Links and Safe Attachments, endpoint protection with EDR capability, device management through Intune, conditional access to control risky sign-ins, and data protections like DLP and sensitivity labels. The ingredients are enterprise-grade. That part of the marketing is true.
Configuration: every one of those tools ships in a default or partial state; conditional access policies, Defender policies and Intune baselines all need deliberate setup, and most tenants we assess run far below their licence's potential — reflected in a low Microsoft Secure Score. Monitoring: Defender raises alerts, but an alert nobody reads at 2am is a log entry, not a defence; detection without response only documents the breach. Backup: Microsoft operates resilient infrastructure but explicitly recommends third-party backup — retention windows and ransomware both defeat the recycle bin.
Take Premium as the foundation, then add four things: hardening to a recognised baseline (CIS/Microsoft) with your Secure Score tracked and maintained; continuous Microsoft 365 backup outside Microsoft; 24/7 monitoring and response on the alerts Defender raises; and the human layer — security awareness training and phishing simulation. This is exactly the thinking behind Cloud Shield 365, Nostra's managed protection built on top of the Microsoft stack: the licences you already own, actually doing their job, watched around the clock.
Written by the Nostra team | Reviewed October 2026
Usually no — Defender for Business is competitive when properly configured. The gap isn't the engine; it's configuration and 24/7 response.
Microsoft provides resilience and short retention windows, not backup. Deleted or encrypted data past those windows is gone — Microsoft's own service agreement recommends third-party backup.
Most unmanaged tenants sit low; a well-managed SME tenant should sustain a high score appropriate to its licences. The trend matters as much as the number — it should be maintained monthly, not achieved once.
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