Microsoft provides a frontline-worker price break

Mary Jo Foley is the Editor in Chief at Directions on Microsoft. Before joining Directions, Mary Jo has worked as... more

It’s not every day — or, in fact, almost any day — that Microsoft gives customers a price break. But it looks as if that’s what Microsoft is doing with some newly announced additions to its Microsoft Defender line-up, specifically targeted at frontline workers.

As outlined in the Microsoft January 1, 2024, product terms, Microsoft added several new SKUs to its Defender and Entra (formerly Azure Active Directory) families. The newest members:

Microsoft Defender for Identity F1 (User SL)
Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps F1 (User SL)
Defender for Endpoint F1 (User SL)
Defender for Endpoint F2 (User SL)
Microsoft Defender for Office 365 F1 (User SL)
Microsoft Defender for Office 365 F2 (User SL)
Microsoft Entra ID F2 (User SL)

The move seems similar to an April 2020 announcement, when Microsoft added a more granular way for Microsoft 365 E3 users to gain access to E5-level regulatory and legal compliance features by adding new, less-pricey SKUs for F3 and F1 users. Microsoft documented and made these new SKUs available in June 2022.

There’s a key difference between the legal and regulatory SKU additions with the new security-focused Frontline ones unveiled this week.

“The weird twist is that the three individual compliance sub-SKUs for Frontline announced in 2020 required users to have M365 F1/F3. The security related pieces announced January 1, 2024, don’t,” said Directions on Microsoft analyst Rob Horwitz.

Horwitz speculated there could be some “corner-cases that Microsoft is trying to accommodate, such as retail devices protected by Microsoft Defender for Endpoint.”

“In some cases, the users might not even have a Frontline Suite,” he added. “And Microsoft is apparently trying to avoid any per device licensing.”

According to the January 2024 price list, these newly announced frontline security SKUs are approximately two-thirds the price of the P1/P2 SKUs. This is the same “discount” as Microsoft provided in June 2022 with the F5 compliance SKUs, Horwitz noted. The newly announced Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps F1 (User SL) costs about $2.40 (USD) per user per month, rather than the $3.50 per user per month Microsoft charges for Defender for Cloud Apps P1, for example.

For some odd reason, when I asked Microsoft for comment on these new SKUs — specifically about their pricing and licensing reasons for introducing them — the company said, via a spokesperson that “Microsoft doesn’t have much to share on these questions.” (Actually, the spokesperson shared nothing.)

Cleaning up AIP Premium Plan 1 residuals

In other product term news from January 1, Microsoft announced it has removed all references to Azure Information Protection (AIP) Premium Plan 1 from its documentation. Microsoft dropped AIP Premium Plan 2 in 2020, with its functionality folded into various Purview sub-suites.

When I asked Microsoft for details on what will happen to the functionality that’s in AIP Premium Plan 1, a spokesperson said he could confirm the product is “being retired” on April 11, pointing us to this Microsoft blog post from April 11, 2023, that noted the AIP Unified Labeling add-in for Office will be retired this April. The spokesperson declined to provide more about the end of AIP Premium Plan 1.

This November 2022 Microsoft blog post, however, notes that the AIP Scanner capability in AIP Premium Plan 1 will be moving to the Purview compliance portal. AIP tools on Windows will be rebranded under Purview. The AIP Viewer for IoS will continue to be supported, but specifics have yet to be announced.