Most Microsoft 365 subscriptions in Manchester cover email, Teams, and maybe SharePoint. Everything else in the licence, the tools that manage devices, block threats, and handle compliance, sits untouched. Three of those tools are worth unpacking: Intune, Defender for Business, and Purview.
Why Microsoft 365 Manchester businesses stall at email and Teams
Deployment projects are scoped to get mailboxes moved and Teams switched on. What happens to the licence afterwards is rarely part of that scope. Microsoft ships new features into Microsoft 365 on a rolling basis. Without someone tracking those updates, they arrive, sit in the admin centre, and go unused.
Most rollouts are scoped this way on purpose. Get people working, then move on to the next job. Cloud Geeni’s managed IT support clients usually find the real value in a licence review that happens after deployment, once the subscription has had time to run well below what it includes.
Microsoft Intune manages the devices you’re already paying for
Intune is one of the Microsoft 365 features businesses don’t use, even though it ships standard with Business Premium at no extra cost. It’s a cloud-based device management tool covering company laptops, personal phones used for email, and everything in between, across Windows, macOS, iOS and Android. Microsoft describes it as managing the whole lifecycle of a device, from enrolment and configuration through to security and updates, all from one admin console.
This matters most for hybrid teams, where a lost phone with the company inbox on it has no remote wipe option, a laptop running an outdated operating system has no automatic patching, and data on personal devices can’t be separated from personal content if someone leaves the business.
Setting Intune up properly means enrolling company-owned devices for full management and applying lighter app protection policies to personal phones and tablets so business data in Outlook and Teams stays separate from everything else on the device. Device compliance also feeds into conditional access, so a device failing a security check can be blocked from reaching company email until it’s fixed. Businesses under 300 users can usually get this configured within a week or two once someone schedules the work.
Microsoft Defender for Business is the security tool hiding in your licence
Many SMEs pay for a separate antivirus product without realising Defender for Business is already included in Business Premium and, in most cases, is better specified than what they’re paying extra for elsewhere. It’s built on the same engine as Microsoft’s enterprise-grade Defender for Endpoint, scaled for organisations with up to 300 users, and covers next-generation antivirus, endpoint detection and response, automated investigation, and vulnerability management across Windows, Mac, Android and iOS.
The case for switching it on is straightforward. The Cyber Security Breaches Survey 2025 found that 43% of UK businesses experienced a breach or attack in the past year, rising to 65% among medium-sized businesses, with phishing the dominant route, accounting for around 85% of successful breaches. Traditional antivirus matches files against a database of known threats, so it misses attacks built to look legitimate. Endpoint detection and response works differently. It watches behaviour, so an encryption process starting on a laptop at 2am gets flagged even if nothing matches a known signature. Defender for Business also generates monthly summary reports, giving a paper trail of what’s been blocked and why, useful for cyber insurance renewals as much as day-to-day reassurance.
Cloud Geeni has written more on how endpoint and identity protection work together in an earlier post.
Microsoft Purview handles data governance for businesses with real compliance obligations
Purview is the least understood of the three. Compliance and data governance sound like enterprise problems, the kind a 40-person business assumes doesn’t apply to it. But any business handling client data under GDPR has a compliance obligation whether or not anyone has looked at it recently. Business Premium already includes the core tools for this. Sensitivity labels classify documents by how sensitive they are. Data loss prevention covers email and files. Compliance Manager scores your organisation’s posture against frameworks including GDPR and generates the documentation an auditor would ask for. Retention policies work on the same principle. Emails and documents past a set age get archived or deleted automatically instead of piling up indefinitely in every mailbox.
Cloud Geeni’s legal sector clients and financial services firms feel this most, since client confidentiality obligations sit on top of standard GDPR requirements. Microsoft’s own guidance on GDPR compliance for smaller organisations points to Purview’s classification and retention tools as the practical starting point, no bespoke system required. Business owners unsure whether their current setup covers this are usually right to wonder. The tools are there. Nobody has switched them on.
Finding out what your Microsoft 365 setup is missing
The quickest way to see how much of your licence is switched on and how much isn’t is the Adoption Score report in the Microsoft 365 admin centre. Microsoft retired the Technology Experiences score in February 2026, so the Adoption Score now reflects only how people are using the tools – the maximum score dropped from 900 to 600 as a result. It won’t tell you specifically whether Intune or Defender is switched on, but it’s a useful starting point for spotting where adoption is lagging.
A more direct approach is comparing your licence tier against what it includes. Business Basic, Standard, Premium, E3 and E5 all bundle different combinations of these tools, and it’s common to find a business paying for Premium while running it like Basic. A short audit, checking what you’re licensed for against what’s configured, usually answers the question faster than digging through admin centre reports alone. Either approach can be done in an afternoon.
Already paying for Microsoft 365 but not sure you’re getting full value from it? Through Cloud Geeni’s Microsoft Business Suite service, our Microsoft 365 managed services team can run an audit and show you exactly what you have, what’s sitting unused, and what it would take to put that right, whether that’s switching on Intune or a broader look at your cloud managed services setup.
FAQs
Is Microsoft Intune free with Microsoft 365? Intune is included at no extra cost with Microsoft 365 Business Premium and several Enterprise plans. There’s no separate subscription to buy if you’re already on Business Premium.
Do I still need antivirus software if I have Microsoft 365? Not a separate product. Microsoft Defender for Business, included in Business Premium, provides antivirus alongside endpoint detection and response, which covers more ground than antivirus does on its own.
What does Microsoft Purview do? It classifies and protects data across your Microsoft 365 environment, applies retention rules for how long information is kept, and scores your compliance posture against frameworks like GDPR.
How do I check my Microsoft 365 Adoption Score? In the Microsoft 365 admin centre, go to Reports, then Adoption Score. It can take up to 24 hours after enabling for insights to appear.
