SecOps Explained: People, Processes, Licences
Microsoft Security Licenses Explained
The level of security provided in your Microsoft 365 environment depends on your licence. Basic/Standard provide minimal email filtering, Business Premium delivers comprehensive Defender coverage across endpoints and Microsoft 365 apps, and Enterprise plans vary with E3 missing key protections while E5 includes the full security suite.
What is Microsoft Defender?
Find out how Microsoft Defender has evolved from a basic antivirus into a comprehensive, licence-driven security suite—commonly included within Microsoft 365 Business Premium—that provides protection across endpoints, email, Teams, OneDrive and SharePoint under a single licence.
What is Microsoft Sentinel?
Understand the difference between Microsoft Defender and Microsoft Sentinel, showing how Defender focuses on threat detection and response while Sentinel acts as a central SIEM platform that aggregates and analyses telemetry from across your entire environment to provide full visibility for security analysts.
How does Sentinel work with Defender?
See how Microsoft Defender and Microsoft Sentinel work together across prevention, detection, and visibility, using secure configuration and Secure Score to reduce risk, Defender to identify active threats, and Sentinel to unify all telemetry into a single, actionable view of your environment.
How does visibility reduce attack surface?
Security visibility from Defender XDR and Microsoft Sentinel helps reduce your attack surface by identifying over-privileged accounts and misconfigurations, so users only have the access they need and potential breaches cause far less damage.
Azure, M365 and Entra explained
Entra is your cloud identity directory, Microsoft 365 is your day-to-day productivity suite, and Azure is the cloud platform for building and hosting services—where Business Premium covers Entra and M365 security, but Azure workloads often need additional Defender licences for full protection.
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Protecting data in 365
Keeping data secure in Microsoft 365 comes down to controlling who can access it and using built-in Data Loss Prevention and sensitivity labels (often included with Business Premium) to classify documents so they can’t be opened or shared outside your organisation.
How is a Security Operations Centre structured?
Marc explains how the Aspire SOC operates, combining analysts, security engineers, and DevOps teams to detect, investigate, and rapidly respond to threats—including zero-day attacks—across endpoints, email, and collaboration tools.
What is the difference between SOC and Incident Response?
Discover the difference between a Security Operations Centre, which proactively monitors behaviour to detect potential threats early, and incident response, which focuses on containing and recovering from attacks after they have already occurred.