The licensing decision
Most licensing comparisons written for professional firms compare E3 against E5. That is a question for an organisation with a thousand seats. The decision a ten to twenty-five person firm actually faces is Business Standard against Business Premium, and the gap between them is the entire security toolset.
// 01 / Plan_Contents
What separates them
Both plans carry the Office applications, Exchange, SharePoint, OneDrive and Teams. Both are capped at 300 seats. The productivity side is the same. What Business Premium adds is the security and device management side, and that is where the difference sits.
| Capability | Business Standard | Business Premium |
|---|---|---|
| Office apps, Exchange, SharePoint, Teams | Included | Included |
| Microsoft Intune, device management and enrolment | Not included | Included |
| Defender for Business, endpoint protection | Not included | Included |
| Entra ID Plan 1, Conditional Access policies | Not included | Included |
| Defender for Office 365 Plan 1 | Not included | Included |
| Information protection and sensitivity labels | Not included | Included |
Plan contents change. Check the current comparison on Microsoft's own plan comparison before you buy, and confirm what your reseller has actually assigned.
// 02 / Why_It_Matters
Why the gap matters if you hold client records
Three of the controls a firm is asked to evidence, by an insurer on a renewal application or by a client on a security questionnaire, sit on the Premium side of that table. Conditional Access is how you constrain where and from which devices staff can sign in. Intune is how you know which laptops are enrolled at all, which is usually where the surprise is. Defender for Business is the endpoint protection whose coverage you would be attesting to.
On Business Standard those three do not exist to configure. A firm on Standard is not doing security badly; it does not have the tooling in the plan it bought. That is a purchasing question before it is a configuration question, and it is worth knowing before a renewal application asks.
Claremont's AI Oversight engagement requires Business Premium for this reason. The work is configuring what you already own and producing the evidence, and on Standard there is nothing to configure. We say so before an engagement rather than during one.
// 03 / Copilot_Licence
The Copilot licence is a separate question, and the answer matters
Neither Business plan includes Microsoft 365 Copilot. It is an add-on licence, and there is a distinction inside it worth understanding before anyone in the firm touches client data with it.
Microsoft 365 Copilot on a commercial licence, assigned through your tenant, is covered by the Microsoft Data Protection Addendum and the Product Terms, which carry the Enterprise Data Protection commitments: prompts and responses stored at rest in your tenant’s geography, not retained by the model provider, and not used to train the public models. Where the model runs is a separate question with a different answer. The model runs in Microsoft’s cloud, not inside your tenant, and Microsoft does not yet commit to running it inside the United States for U.S. tenants.
Microsoft Copilot on a personal account is a consumer product, free or paid through Microsoft 365 Personal, Family, Premium or Pro; Microsoft no longer sells Copilot Pro. A partner who signed up individually, on a personal card, is not under those commitments regardless of what the product looks like on screen. This is the question worth asking in your own firm this week: if people are using Copilot, is it the licence assigned through the tenant, or did someone sign up on their own?
The distinction is not cosmetic. For a tax practice it is the difference between a tool operating inside your control and client information sitting with a provider under consumer terms. The Clean Room exists for the interim, and the questions page covers what the disclosure rules actually turn on.
// 04 / Boundaries
What we do not do
Claremont does not resell Microsoft licences and earns nothing on the plan you choose. We have no margin in this decision, which is the only reason a comparison written by a security firm is worth reading. Buy through whichever partner you already use.
// 05 / Next_Step
Not sure what you are on
Most firms are not, and the invoice does not always make it obvious. It takes about two minutes to check in the admin centre, and we will walk through it on a call at no charge.