Microsoft Business Standard vs Business Premium – What's the Difference?

At first glance, Microsoft Business Standard and Business Premium look almost identical. You get email, Teams, Word, Excel, OneDrive and SharePoint either way, so for day-to-day work most people won’t notice a big difference.

Business Standard is a solid choice for businesses that mainly need productivity and collaboration tools without the added layers of advanced security and management. For many smaller businesses, it provides everything needed to communicate, store files and work efficiently across teams.

Where it changes is in the stuff you don’t see: security and device management.

Business Premium includes advanced protection features designed to help defend your business against cyber threats, secure company data, and manage devices more effectively. It also gives businesses greater control over user access, company laptops and mobile devices, which can be especially important for organisations with remote or hybrid teams.

Business Standard: Good Tools, Manually Managed

Business Standard gives you the apps your team needs. But when it comes to security, a lot of it still depends on people doing the right thing and IT keeping an eye on things manually.

It’s a workable setup, but there’s more room for little things to slip through the cracks. Business Standard is a solid choice for businesses that mainly need productivity and collaboration tools without the added layers of advanced security and management.

But with the growing need for robust cybersecurity and the risk of emerging and zero day threats, Business Premium does provide that little bit more added protection which could be critical in saving your business from a data breach.

Business Premium: Built For Secure, Managed Businesses

Business Premium includes everything in Standard, then adds two key building blocks in the background:

Microsoft Intune
Microsoft Entra ID (formerly Azure Active Directory/AAD)

Most users will never need to open either of these, but they’re what let us properly lock things down and manage devices day to day.

It also includes a few other security features that are worth calling out, because they’re usually the bits that stop the nastier incidents:

Microsoft Defender for Business – stronger endpoint protection (helps detect and respond to things like ransomware and suspicious activity on PCs)

Microsoft Defender for Office 365 Plan 1 – extra protection against phishing, including scanning links and attachments before you open them

Sensitivity labels and encryption (Microsoft Purview Information Protection) – lets you label data (e.g.“Confidential”) and control what people can do with it

What This Means in Reality

If a laptop goes missing, we can stop it accessing company data and (if it’s set up for it) remotely wipe work data – without waiting for someone to remember what needs doing.

With Intune and Entra ID in place, Naglotech can manage users and devices automatically rather than relying on one-off manual checks.

In practice, that means we can:

Add extra phishing protection, including checking links and attachments before they’re opened
Automatically make sure antivirus is installed and running
Enforce security rules like device encryption and screen locks
Deploy fixes and settings in the background using scripts
Make sure every laptop and PC is logged in your official device register
Quickly remove access if a device is lost or someone leaves

Most of this happens quietly in the background, so your team can just get on with their work.

Why This Matters for Cyber Essentials

Cyber Essentials isn’t just about having security tools - it’s about being able to show they’re in place on every device.

Business Premium makes that a lot easier because:

You can account for devices more reliably (known, managed and tracked)
Security settings are enforced automatically
There’s a clear audit trail showing devices and users are protected

That’s the kind of evidence Cyber Essentials looks for, and it lowers the chance of failing the assessment because one small setting was missed.

Quick summary

Business Standard: good productivity tools, more manual IT work
Business Premium: the same tools plus automatic security and device management

If you want a setup where device security is largely handled in the background (and you’re not relying on checklists and memory), Business Premium gives Naglotech the tools to run it properly.

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Microsoft Business Standard vs Business Premium

Amanda Carter