White Paper Sneak Peek | Improving Performance and Driving Down the Cost of Microsoft 365

Microsoft 365 service plans E3 and E5 — which have retained their names despite a broader rebrand from Office 365 to Microsoft 365 — are enterprise-grade plans featuring productivity tools like:

• Word Excel
• PowerPoint
• Outlook
• OneNote
• SharePoint
• OneDrive
• Microsoft Teams
• Microsoft Stream

While Microsoft’s popular cloud-based tools are meant to enhance productivity and drive innovation within an organization, the software has shortcomings in critical areas of business productivity and security, like its limited reach in:

• Data archiving
• Data backup
• Data protection

Gaps in the technology’s native capabilities can lead to decreased performance and avoidable high-costs associated with:

• Persistent security threats
• Slow eDiscovery
• Inability to recover deleted data

What is Missing From Microsoft 365’s SLA?

Regardless of the plan you enter into with Microsoft, you won’t see a ‘yes, absolutely’ statement in their SLA for the ability to recover data that has been accidentally or maliciously deleted or corrupted from the various workloads within Microsoft 365.

Instead, customers receive a long list of ‘it depends’ statements.

In other words, if your data is deleted or damaged due to common occurrences like:

• Spam
• Phishing
• Malware
• Business email compromise (BEC)
• Account takeover attempts
• Weak authentication
• A convoluted forensic analysis process
• Blending archiving and backup practices

Or, if your data loss prevention and discovery processes are too slow, you can’t rely on Microsoft 365’s native capabilities to pull you out of the mud.

For organizations that need certainty for data protection and recovery – rather than exceptions with lots of wriggle room for Microsoft to effectively say “it’s your own fault,” it’s critical for IT directors to closely evaluate the initial adoption and ongoing use of Microsoft 365.

A Balancing Act: How to Achieve Maximum Protection and Compliance?

To protect you from the shortcomings in Microsoft’s native retention policies, we’ve partnered with Osterman Research to create our latest white paper, “Improving Performance and Driving Down the Cost of Microsoft 365,” which helps you:

• Develop a clear understanding of your organization’s requirements, processes, legal situation, and regulatory compliance mandates as these intersect with the capabilities offered in Microsoft 365
• Shortlist and prioritize the buying criteria for your organization
• Understand how third-party vendor solutions can supplement the native capabilities in Microsoft 365 to improve performance, reduce risk, reduce administrative effort, drive down costs, and offer a better fit between requirements and capabilities

Additionally, we’ll take a look at the cost ownership issues with both the E5 and E3 Plans, which retail for $57.00 and $32.00 per user per month, respectively.

You’ll learn when it’s possible to employ Plan E3 in combination with third-party solutions to supplement or replace some of the native capabilities in Microsoft 365 in a cost-effective way. We will also explore when the E5 plan is best suited for you.

Upon reading this white paper, you’ll be able to articulate the risks and benefits of Microsoft 365 enterprise plans to IT architects, security professionals, and those responsible for the organization’s legal, risk and compliance practices at your organization. From there, your team can collaboratively and strategically decide how to maximize the performance and minimize the costs of your Microsoft 365 partnership.