What Is Microsoft 365, and Are You Using It to Its Full Potential?

Most businesses across London and the South East consider Microsoft 365 to be an email inbox and a folder of Office documents. While that description accurately reflects the subscription’s usage, it fails to capture the full range of features the plan includes. Running on only a slice of it means paying full price for protections such as multi-factor authentication and Conditional Access, tools that often sit switched off from day one. Below is what’s in the box, from the security settings sitting idle to the collaboration tools quietly duplicating software you already pay for elsewhere. 

Business Premium bundles far more than most teams use 

Microsoft’s own product overview lists Exchange for business email, Teams for calls and chat, SharePoint and OneDrive for file storage, and Power Automate for building simple workflows without writing code. On the protection side, it bundles Intune for managing company devices, Microsoft Defender for Business for antivirus and threat detection, Entra ID P1 for sign-in security, and Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention for stopping sensitive files leaving the business by accident. Add Planner, Forms, Loop, and Bookings, and it’s a rare business using even half of what’s there. In practice, that data loss prevention policy is what stops a spreadsheet of National Insurance numbers from being emailed to a personal address by mistake, rather than relying on staff remembering not to do it. 

Every seat on Business Premium is already priced to include Intune, Defender for Business, and Entra ID P1, so a business that only uses email and Word is paying for protection it never switches on. Professional services firms handling client data under regulatory pressure often have exactly this half of the subscription sitting unopened, at no extra cost. 

MFA and Conditional Access sit unused in most tenants 

Research from Microsoft shows that enabling MFA stops upwards of 99.2% of attempts to compromise an account, yet the government’s Cyber Security Breaches Survey 2025/2026 found only 47% of UK businesses have any form of two-factor authentication on their networks or applications, despite phishing remaining the most common breach type, experienced by 38% of businesses in the past year. 

Business Premium adds Conditional Access, built on Entra ID P1. One of the simplest policies blocks legacy authentication protocols such as POP and IMAP, which don’t support MFA at all and remain a common route into a compromised mailbox. Beyond that, sign-in can be set to ask for MFA only when something looks unusual, such as a login from an unrecognised device or a location outside the UK. Paired with Purview’s sensitivity labels and message encryption, client contracts and financial documents can be locked so they can’t be forwarded or opened outside the business, even if a mailbox is compromised. These are the settings that come up most often when Redinet’s cyber security team reviews a new client’s environment, and in most cases, they’re already paid for. 

Teams and SharePoint already replace tools you pay for 

Video calling, cloud storage, and task boards are commonly bought as separate subscriptions, even though Teams, SharePoint, OneDrive, and Planner already cover the same ground inside Business Premium. Teams handles video calls, group chat, and document co-authoring in one place, replacing the Zoom or Google Meet licence a business might have running alongside it. SharePoint gives departments their own site with permission controls suited to regulated data, so an HR folder or a finance drive can be restricted to the people who genuinely need access. OneDrive adds version history, so an overwritten or corrupted file can be rolled back without a support call. Planner covers the task boards a team might otherwise buy separately from Trello or Asana. 

It’s not unusual to review a client’s software spend and find £200-£300 a month going to tools that already exist inside a licence the same business is paying for. Nobody has migrated files across, retrained staff on where things now live, or broken the habit of emailing documents as attachments. That’s a rollout project, not a licensing decision, and it’s where a lot of the value already sitting in the subscription tends to get left behind. 

Checking your Microsoft 365 plan takes ten minutes 

Under Billing, then Licenses, an admin can see every app and security feature attached to each user and which of those are switched on versus sitting dormant. The Entra admin centre shows whether any Conditional Access policies exist, and for most small and mid-sized businesses, they don’t. Microsoft Secure Score, visible in the same admin area, goes further, benchmarking a tenant’s configuration against Microsoft’s own recommendations and ranking what’s missing by how much risk it carries. 

Knowing what’s included is the easy part. Setting these policies up properly, configuring Purview encryption without breaking how staff share files, and migrating storage across to SharePoint without disturbing existing permissions is where most in-house teams run out of time, even once they know exactly what needs doing. 

That’s usually the point where outside help earns its keep by configuring what’s already being paid for so it delivers the protection the licence was bought to provide. Redinet works with finance, real estate, and professional services firms across London and the South East who are in exactly this position, paying for Business Premium and using less than half of what’s included. If that sounds familiar, Redinet’s cloud services team can review what’s already sitting in your tenant and show you what’s worth switching on first. That review usually covers the same ground: licensing, identity, data protection, and collaboration, followed by an agreed order for what gets switched on and what needs a proper rollout plan.