Microsoft Defender Deployment

Defender for Endpoint provides threat detection, automated investigation, and response capabilities across Windows, macOS, iOS, and Android devices. It goes well beyond traditional antivirus by analysing behaviour, detecting attack techniques in progress, and giving your team the forensic detail needed to understand and contain incidents.

Plan 1 covers core endpoint protection including attack surface reduction and next-generation antivirus. Plan 2 adds full endpoint detection and response, automated investigation, advanced threat hunting, and extended data retention. Which plan your business has access to depends on your current Microsoft licensing, which we confirm before any deployment work begins. Without proper onboarding, devices are not enrolled, attack surface reduction rules are not configured, and the threat intelligence Microsoft generates has no way to act on your environment.

We onboard all devices via Intune or your preferred MDM solution, configure attack surface reduction rules appropriate for your environment, set endpoint detection and response to active mode, and establish automated investigation and remediation so that common threats are contained without manual intervention.

Defender for Servers extends threat detection and response capabilities to your server infrastructure, covering Azure-hosted servers and on-premises servers connected via Azure Arc. It integrates with Microsoft Defender for Endpoint to bring endpoint detection and response to your server workloads, managed through Microsoft Defender for Cloud.

Defender for Servers comes in two plans. Plan 1 focuses on endpoint detection and response through the Defender for Endpoint integration, software inventory discovery, and agent-based vulnerability scanning. Plan 2 adds agentless scanning, agentless malware detection, file integrity monitoring, premium Defender Vulnerability Management features, and extended log ingestion. Without proper onboarding, servers sit outside your security perimeter entirely. Threats that land on a domain controller, file server, or line-of-business application server go undetected, lateral movement across your environment is invisible, and you have no way to investigate or respond to an incident on the infrastructure your business depends on most.

We assess your server environment, confirm which plan is appropriate, onboard your servers through Defender for Cloud, and integrate server alerts into your Defender XDR console alongside your endpoint and identity signals so everything is visible in one place.

Email remains the primary entry point for attacks on small and mid-sized businesses.Defender for Office 365 provides protection against phishing, business email compromise, malicious attachments, and weaponised links that bypass standard email filtering.

Plan 1 covers Safe Links, Safe Attachments, and anti-phishing policies. Plan 2 adds attack simulation training, automated investigation and response for email threats, and advanced hunting capabilities.

Which plan applies to your business depends on your current Microsoft licensing, which we review as part of our initial assessment.Regardless of which plan you are on, the default configuration Microsoft ships does not enable these capabilities at a level that blocks sophisticated attacks.

We configure Defender for Office 365 properly across every mailbox, tune anti-phishing policies to detect impersonation of your executives and suppliers, and enable zero-hour auto purge to remove malicious emails already sitting in inboxes.

Defender for Identity monitors your Active Directory and Entra ID environment for indicators of identity-based attacks.It detects techniques like pass-the-hash, lateral movement, privilege escalation, and reconnaissance activity that endpoint protection alone will not catch. Defender for Identity is not included in all Microsoft 365 plans and requires specific licensing to deploy.

For businesses running on-premises Active Directory or a hybrid environment, it is one of the most valuable security investments available.Without it, attacks moving through your identity infrastructure are completely invisible to every other security tool in your stack.

We confirm whether your current licensing includes Defender for Identity, advise on the most practical path forward if it does not, and deploy sensors on your domain controllers once licensing is in place.