Microsoft has now expanded its offering making Copilot for Microsoft 365 available for all businesses, regardless of size. Customers with Microsoft 365 Business Premium and Business Standard plans can add Copilot and benefit from all its features from today. Microsoft has also removed the previous 300-seat minimum requirement for adding Copilot to a Microsoft 365 business subscription. This means even a single-person business can add Copilot with just one seat required.
You need to be ready to implement AI tools and educate your customers about how to best use them for their needs using these three steps:
- Get Licensing Ready: It’s recommended to opt for a Business Premium licence over Business Standard.
- Implement a Secure Data Strategy: This strategy should ensure the integrity, availability, and confidentiality of your data.
- Secure Identities and Access: The final step is to secure identities and access. As your customers integrate AI into their business operations, it’s likely they will be handling sensitive data.
For more details read our previous blog post.
Why is a Business Premium licence recommended?
Business Standard is a comprehensive suite of productivity tools at a cost-effective price. It includes both web and mobile versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook, along with business-class email, customer appointment management, and standard security. On the other hand, Business Premium includes everything in Business Standard, plus advanced security features and premium capabilities. These additional features include:
- Advanced Threat Protection: Microsoft Defender XDR is activated to help guard against viruses, spam, unsafe attachments, suspicious links, and phishing attacks.
- Data Protection: Business Premium includes Azure Information Protection (AIP) to encrypt sensitive emails and restrict copying and forwarding of confidential business information.
- Device Security: It helps keep iOS, Android, Windows, and MacOS devices safe and up to date.
- Identity Protection: It enables secure remote access and protects identity with conditional access and advanced multifactor authentication.
- Compliance and Privacy: Business Premium includes information protection capabilities for compliance and privacy, such as sensitivity labels, data loss prevention (DLP), and encryption.
How can Business Premium help with data security and management?
The integration of AI is rapidly changing the world of work, freeing up time and helping to eliminate digital debt. However, there are certain things that AI can’t do, such as prepare yours and your customers’ IT infrastructure, which can be a time-consuming process. It’s essential to understand how data is separated to ensure confidentiality between employees to ensure that Copilot will not share sensitive information with others. So, while the advantages of Copilot are clear, preparing your infrastructure for it may not be so obvious.
Azure Information Protection (AIP) is a cloud-based solution that enables organisations to classify and protect documents and emails by applying labels. These labels can classify, and optionally protect your documents, enabling you to track and control how your content is used, analyse data flows to gain insight into your business, detect risky behaviours, and take corrective measures.
Azure Information Protection (AIP) is included in Microsoft 365 Business Premium. The version of AIP included with a Microsoft 365 Business Premium subscription offers an excellent balance of cybersecurity protection for even the most sensitive of business files. These capabilities include sensitivity labels, data loss prevention (DLP), and encryption. You can use your information protection capabilities to help protect your company’s data and keep your and your customers’ sensitive information more secure.
The key components of AIP labels include:
- Classification: This can be detected regardless of where the data is stored or with whom it’s shared.
- Visual markings: Such as headers, footers, or watermarks.
- Metadata: Added to files and email headers in clear text.
In the context of Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft 365, AIP plays a crucial role in data security and compliance. When the data has sensitivity labels applied, there’s an extra layer of protection. For example, if a user has access to a document and can copy and paste the data into a new document themselves, then Copilot will be able to do it. This ensures that data stored in your tenant is never returned to the user or used by an AI model if the user doesn’t have access to that data. What’s great about AIP as well is that the rules follow the document no matter where it goes, so even if it’s shared outside of your organisation those rules are still there, securing that information.
Moreover, when a file is open in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, or similarly an email or calendar event is open in Outlook, the sensitivity of the data is displayed to users in the app with the label name and content markings (such as header or footer text) that have been configured for the label. This helps in maintaining the privacy and security of sensitive information.
Therefore, preparing for Copilot involves ensuring that organisational data is correctly classified and protected using Azure Information Protection labels. This not only helps in maintaining data security but also enables Copilot to function effectively by accessing the necessary data while respecting the set permissions.
What does Business Premium offer to secure identities and access?
Microsoft 365 Business Premium offers a range of features that can help secure identities and access, which is crucial when preparing for services like Copilot. Here are some key features:
- Advanced Multifactor Authentication: This feature helps safeguard against password loss or theft.
- Conditional Access: It uses rule bases policies to enable employees to securely access business apps wherever they work, whilst helping to secure against any malicious actors.
- Device Management: Microsoft Intune allows users to apply security policies to protect work data on company-owned and employee devices.
- Data Encryption: Sensitive emails can be encrypted, and restrictions can be applied to prevent the copying and forwarding of confidential business information.
- Microsoft Defender XDR: This feature helps guard against viruses, spam, unsafe attachments, suspicious links, and phishing attacks.
Copilot uses your existing permissions and policies to deliver the most relevant information. Tenants with the most abundant data in Microsoft 365 (Exchange, OneDrive, SharePoint, Teams) will get the best results from Copilot. This is where M365’s cloud storage and communication tools come into play, providing a rich source of data for Copilot to work with.
Copilot also adheres to existing privacy and compliance obligations, ensures data residency and compliance boundaries, and protects sensitive business data. The advanced security features of M365 Business Premium, such as Advanced Multifactor Authentication, Conditional Access, and Microsoft Defender, ensure that your data is secure while being accessible to Copilot.
Furthermore, Microsoft Intune, a feature of M365 Business Premium, allows you to apply security policies to protect work data on company-owned and employee devices. This ensures that your data is secure across all devices that might access Copilot.
How can Infinigate Cloud help you?
As an Infinigate Cloud Partner, you will gain access to PRO, the pillar of support which packages up our technical expertise and provides our partners with the technical help they need, when they need it including complimentary technical pre-sales and professional services such as an Intune Configuration Service. The team can support with deployment to free up your engineers and internal IT teams to fill a capability or capacity gap.
Infinigate Cloud provide Microsoft-certified training courses through EDGE and regular webinars on topics such as Getting ready for Copilot.
GROW, our Go-To-Market partner programme is designed to enhance your marketing & sales capabilities, so you can acquire new business, drive customer retention and deliver lifetime value, providing a number of out-of-the-box Copilot campaigns.
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As a born in the cloud distributor with a deep technical heritage, Infinigate Cloud continually invest in our teams and evolve our value-add services to ensure we deliver the very best in technical expertise and 24*7 support for our partners.
If you are interested in finding out about how we can help you add value to your business or you would like to know more about Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft 365, please contact us and we’ll be happy to chat through any of your questions.
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