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Office 365 Enterprise vs Office 365 Business Plans

Compare Office 365 Enterprise

Microsoft’s Office 365 offers tons of options for businesses of all sizes. For your business through, how do your choose between Office 365 Business packages and the Office 365 Enterprise options?

Office 365 has more subscription plans than you can shake a stick at. We’re comparing two of the most popular subscriptions that we come across, Office 365 Business Premium and Office 365 Enterprise E3.

Comparing Office 365 Business and Enterprise

Here’s why we would recommend Office 365 Enterprise over Office 365 Business.

  • Unlimited number of seats
  • Advanced Email (Unlimited storage, DLP, message encryption)
  • Information Protection (Data loss Prevention, Litigation Hold, eDiscovery)
  • Unlimited OneDrive storage
  • Intelligent Search and Discovery, plus eDiscovery
  • Audio Conferencing

Unlimited Number of Users

Depending on the size of your business and your plans for growth, Office 365 Business plans have a limit of 300 users. For Office 365 Enterprise plans, there is no limit to the number of users you can have.

Advanced Email and Information Protection in Office 365 Enterprise

The advanced features around email and data storage in Office 365 Enterprise plans can be pretty compelling. When you’re comparing Office 365 Business to the enterprise plans, unlimited email storage for your business is a good thing.

When there’s a stronger focus on information security and privacy, the features available in the Enterprise plans can’t be overlooked.

Litigation hold is only included in the Office 365 Enterprise plans. When you put a mailbox on Litigation Hold allows you to preserve all the email in a mailbox. This includes Deleted Items and the original versions of any modified items. Putting mailboxes on Litigation Hold can be needed for compliance or regulatory reasons. Mostly, Litigation Hold is used for HR events and other legal or eDiscovery requests.

Data Loss Prevention has a focus in all Office 365 Enterprise plans. Again with security in mind, managing the data within email, OneDrive and SharePoint is critical. DLP is only available in the Enterprise plans and isn’t available in Office 365 Business. DLP can re-enforce your policies and either warn you or prevent certain types of data from leaving your Office 365 tenancy.

Unlimited OneDrive Storage

With the Business plans, each subscription is allocated 1TB of storage. With the Enterprise plans, and you have more than 5 users in your tenancy, you qualify for unlimited OneDrive storage. With unlimited storage in Office 365 Enterprise there’s good opportunities to reduce the on-premise requirements for home drives or personal storage. Syncing data from OneDrive can also ensure that no data is solely stored on any end user devices.

Audio Conferencing in Office 365 Enterprise

Skype for Business and Microsoft Teams is a great enabler for business communication. With the Enterprise plans you have the option to add Audio Conferencing to your subscription on a per user, per month basis. Audio conferencing allows selected staff to host dial-in meetings which can easily replace your on-premise meeting room facilities.

Which Office 365 subscription is the right one for your business?

Sure, there is a price difference for Office 365 Enterprise compared to the Business plans. And once you start moving up the user count, the price difference can be a factor in any budget or decision making process. We believe that the additional features in the Enterprise plans vs the Business plans makes good sense.

With Australian privacy laws and notifiable data breach legislation, the Advanced Email, Information Protection and Rights Management features should be an influencing factor on your decision making. You need to include information security criteria when you are sizing up your Office 365 tenancy.

Investing in Office 365 is a long term process. The security and management of your data is important to your business.

     


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