Microsoft continues to add features and capabilities to the various enterprise license agreements. These enterprise license agreements or ELA or E series licenses bundle several Microsoft solutions together to help clients manage their client costs and acquisition of capabilities. Clients looking to adopt several Microsoft solutions for application, protection against advanced email threats, security, cloud, and database will negotiate an E3 or E5 agreement. Many corporations see the value in the E5 agreement if they plan to standardize on Microsoft key features across the entire organization. Some clients may adopt the E3 model if they plan to use fewer Microsoft solutions while continuing to deploy other third-party products that contain additional features.
Companies enabling several digital transformation strategies recognize the need for protection for cloud platforms gain several economic-of-scale when adopting Microsoft as their primary platform:
- Universal training across the entire organization on Microsoft solutions allows for easier lateral redeployment of internal resources to other projects.
- By standardizing on Microsoft as the preferred platform, organizations can phase out standalone products and solutions from other vendors, including applications, databases, and cybersecurity tools.
- Access to global talent. Despite a worldwide talent shortage across several domains, access to Microsoft-certified experts is more common than on other vendor-specific platforms.
- Tighter integration- Microsoft invests extensive capital in ensuring the integration between their various solutions integrates with industry-standard API integration and several connectors. By having stricter integration with a proven architecture, clients can enable Microsoft faster to meet their digital transformation timelines.
Challenges with adopting 100% of any vendors solution
Microsoft, Salesforce.com, Oracle, and Cisco Systems all advocate for clients to invest in their “end-to-end” single vendor strategy by adopting their reference architectures instead of a ‘best-of-breed” culture.
Security experts following the NIST-800-53 model tend to lean on the “defense-in-depth” strategy by enabling cyber security solutions from various vendors to reduce the risk to the organization.
If, for a moment, a vendor has a security vulnerability in one or more of their solutions, the organization could be at a higher risk. If the organization leverages the “defense-in-depth” layer of security strategy, the risk is reduced and compartmentalized if they choose to enable different solutions from other vendors.
Many vendors do support open industry standards for interoperating between solutions. APIs are valuable assets commonly used between vendors to help share intercommunications and data access. Several email deployment options for advanced protection leverage APIs.
Cost and license consumption issues with Microsoft E3 and E5
Security vulnerability and risk exposure are factors behind organizations using various solutions to protect their data. Cost and license consumption also impact the organization’s decision.
The cost of a Microsoft E5 license package is expensive, with a high price per user per month. Most large and global enterprises have an E3 with additional modules, including the Azure cloud and m365. Many enterprises will invest in E5 licenses; however, the client may never consume a large portion of the product portfolio. When organizations evaluate their E5 license cost and consumption every three years or less, many will look for other competitive pricing options to help drive down costs. Competing products in the email security space tend to bring more specialized capabilities than what Microsoft offers in its essential solutions.
Why the need for augmentation of email security?
No email security products are 100% proven to stop every email attack. Gartner recently observed how much spam and phishing emails still penetrate the end users even with solutions like Microsoft deployed.
The email threat level changes every day. New attack variances against sensitive email content including whaling phishing emails and ransomware malware, impact global organizations daily.
Updating the email security layer and the entire email infrastructure to combat these attacks is challenging for every vendor.
Traditionally, malicious emails might contain viruses, trojans, harmful attachments, etc. Microsoft is okay for handling these, which currently only constitute about 5 or 10% of the new types of malicious emails landing in your email boxes. Microsoft cannot offer advanced protection against phishing without using an AI engine and advanced text analysis for spam.
Leveraging Trustifi email security platform with a Microsoft E3 license.
Trustifi’s email protection solutions feature a comprehensive suite of email tools for advanced threat protection, easily configurable Data Loss Prevention, and enterprise email encryption. Trustifi’s easy-to-use software is unmatched in its user-friendliness, flexibility, and cost-effectiveness. Trustifi’s time to value, ease of deployment, and lower cost of ownership for SecOps make the company culture secure and a financial match for any client seeking email security, data exfiltration, and message encryption.
Trustifi provides Office 365 clients adequate email protection against inbound threats by leveraging our unique threat intelligence platform. We highly recommend Trustifi as a simple, easy-to-use tool for any size business looking to secure their Office 365 client against threats.
For the client’s considering investing in the Microsoft E3 license in place of an E5 agreement, Trustifi’s holistic email security platform delivers more comprehensive protection at a fraction of the cost.
By reviewing the cost difference between an E5 and E3 license, clients could save $21.00 per month. By enabling Trustifi’s full suite cloud-based solution ($7.00 per client per month) for email security, including the following protection layers:
- Inbound threat protection, spam filter, and anti-phishing/anti-malware threat detection
- Outbound data loss prevention(DLP) with automatic email encryption
- Additional protection for account takeover
- Prevent business email compromise and impersonation attempts
- Enhanced security for social and reverse social engineering
- One-click-compliance tools (GLBA, PCI, NIST, CCPA, GDPR, and POPA)
- One-click end-user message encryption
- Email archiving and e-discovery
- Single console and detailed reporting
Proven security architecture with ease-of-use management
Trustifi’s powerful protection solution provides additional email security protection by sitting behind Microsoft 0365 and Google G-suite. Trustifi’s advanced AI and ML capabilities help catch other spam and malware not caught by Microsoft email security at a considerably lower cost per user.
Combined with Microsoft E3plus and Trustifi, clients will be able to deploy a collaboration of email security capabilities from both companies are a cost-effective price point.
Culture
As a global cybersecurity provider of both inbound and outbound email protection, Trustifi currently supports customers from countries including the USA, Canada, Brazil, the Dominican Republic, the UK, the Netherlands, India, the UAE, China, Japan, Cyprus, the Philippines, and more. The company has also developed “One-Click Compliance” capabilities that cater to world security regulations, including PDPO for Hong Kong, POPI for South Africa, GDPR for Europe, and LGPD for Brazil.
