Windows Defender P2 Purchase

[petben]

Hello we currently use Sophos with Intercept X for AV/Ransomware (£2.60\device\year!) and nearly buying 550 x Action1 licenses for vulnerability identification and remediation.

 

We were just wondering whether Windows Defender P2 may fit all these roles, provide a single place for management, not be too 'Microsoft crazy' to navigate and understand the results from, and be realistically priced for education. Does anyone use the Defender like this?

[DrCheese]

Like yourselves, we use Sophos.

 

I've looked into swapping to Defender, but it's too expensive for us.

 

If you license your staff with A3 + A5 security (or straight A5) you get X amount of Defender P2 licenses.

UNLIKE normal A3/A5 licensing tho, you don't also get student use licenses.

 

So you buy 150 staff licenses, you can only use Defender on 150 computers.

 

To then get the rest of your shared devices, you need to buy a separate SKU at around £11 a year.

So if you have 150 staff, 550 devices you'd need to license the 400 devices left over - £4400 per year.

P1 is cheaper at around £3 a license, but you miss most of the features that actually make it worthwhile (& I don't know if you can mix P2 and P1 licensing)

 

Sophos for us via the SWGFL deal is still much cheaper - My last renewal was just shy of £2k in total for 3 years.

Edited May 1, 2025 by DrCheese

[Steve21]

We are looking at P2 for the same purpose currently. 

On it's own it seems quite badly priced for Edu purposes because of the way it licenses via Users, but if you're going via EES/JISC etc it becomes better as you get 45%~ discount on it and access to device licenses rather than user based

If you're comparing it straight to Sophos it won't work out pricing wise, but if you're looking at Vuln management etc on top of it (for example compared to Tenable/Nessus at £4k~ extra on top) it works out well

Steve