Microsoft Office 365 Enterprise E3 Monthly Subscription

"If you don't need official looking stuff all of the time and sharing documents with customers all of the time, gSuite and Google docs might work out fine. For us though, we had to have Office, and after we have that, bundling stuff started to save us money over our current providers. We switched from paying for Google email on top of Office to upgrading from ProPlus to E3. We would have saved more if we had dropped RingCentral and upgraded to include Skype for desk phones if we hadn't been grandfathered into a great deal. OneDrive included has turned out to be very useful. We changed all users' documents, pictures, favorites, etc., locations to being in OneDrive so everything is backed up. We also created an admin account that shares files that replaced the file server we had. WIth the sync on demand option, users don't need to have a full copy of the 20GB share on each computer."

Microsoft Office 365 Comparison Table

* Installation of Office apps on phones, tablets and computers:

Office 2016 (for Windows) will run on Windows 7 or later.

Office 2016 for Mac requires Mac OS X 10.10.

Tablet devices with screens larger than 10.1" require an Office 365 plan licensed for desktop use to edit files. You will find more on that at: https://products.office.com/en-gb/business/mobile-productivity/home

** Licensed for commercial use: You can use Office 365 Business, Office 365 Business Premium, Office 365 Business Essentials, Office 365 Enterprise E1, Office 365 Enterprise E3, and Office 365 Enterprise E5 for work activities. This is not true of all Microsoft software. For example, you cannot use Office 365 Home or Office 365 Personal for work activities.

*** High Definition (HD) calling: For HD calling, compatible HD hardware and broadband connection with at least 4 Mbps is required.

**** Calling plans: For more information on calling plans, please go to: https://products.office.com/en-gb/microsoft-teams/voice-calling

Office 365 Enterprise E5 advanced features For more information on the advanced features of Office 365 Enterprise E5, please go to: https://support.office.com/en-gb/article/office-365-enterprise-e5-overview-and-documentation-f7407faa-6bcb-4f23-9056-7aba50d6942f

Key to the apps in Microsoft Office 365 editions

Some Office 365 editions have more apps than others. Please see the above table for information on the apps you get in Office 365 Business, Office 365 Business Premium, Office 365 Essentials, Office 365 Enterprise E1, Office 365 Enterprise E3, and Office 365 Enterprise E5.

Access is a database program for holding and controlling information
Excel is a spreadsheet
Exchange Online gives you email and collaboration services
Microsoft Teams gives you a hub for teamwork
OneDrive gives you storage for your files
OneNote is for your notetaking
Outlook handles your emails and calendar
PowerPoint creates slide shows
Publisher creates leaflets and other promotion
SharePoint Online gives you an intranet and team sites
Skype is for your phone and video communications
Word is for your letters and other documents

Twelve important reasons why Office 365 Enterprise E3 is such a good deal

"Best software in its class."

1. It is convenient You can access and manage your work and emails anywhere on any device.

2. Install on 5 phones, 5 tablets, and 5 PCs or Macs You can fully-install Office apps on 5 phones, 5 tablets, and 5 PCs or Macs per user.

3. Keeps your work safe OneDrive provides you with enough safe and secure storage for your documents and work. And if by some chance there is not enough storage, you can increase it.

4. Continuous updates Get monthly security updates and feature releases.

5. 100 GB inbox per user Comes with a whopping 100 GB inbox per user.

6. Integration Integrates well with other third party software.

7. Reduced costs Because it is cloud-based, you don't have to pay for servers and other  on-premises equipment.

8. Helps your cash flow Instead of having to pay large sums upfront for equivalent software and hardware, you pay reasonable amounts monthly to use the software.

9. Licensed for commercial use Although Office 365 Home and Office 365 Personal  cannot be used for work activities, you can use Office 365 Enterprise E3 for work activities.

10. Better prices than Microsoft Store Remember, Microsoft Store shows prices excluding VAT. We don't. We are transparent with our prices.

11. Good for software audits Because Microsoft is providing you with Office 365 rather than some other company, no one can question the legality of the software.

12. Helps you with GDPR In addition to the plethora of features in Office 365 that help you with GDPR, Office 365 Enterprise E3 also has eDiscovery that you can use to find text and metadata in content across your Office 365 assets — SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business, Skype for Business Online and Exchange Online. For more information on how Office 365 helps you with GDPR, please see below.

How Office 365 can help you with GDPR

This is the link to the full 88-page General Data Protection Regulation. It is quite well-written.
http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=CELEX:32016R0679&from=EN

Discover: Identify all of your personal data and where it resides

There are five several specific Office 365 solutions that can help you identify or manage access to personal data:

1. Data Loss Prevention (DLP) in Office and Office 365 can identify over 80 common sensitive data types including financial, medical, and personally identifiable information.

2. Office 365 Security & Compliance Center content search in the  can search across mailboxes, public folders, Office 365 Groups, Microsoft Teams, SharePoint Online sites, One Drive for Business locations and Skype for Business conversations.

3. Office 365 eDiscovery search can be used to find text and metadata in content across your Office 365 assets — SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business, Skype for Business Online and Exchange Online.

4. Office 365 Advanced eDiscovery, powered by machine learning technologies, can help you identify documents that are relevant to a particular subject (for example, a compliance investigation) quickly and with better precision than traditional keyword searches or manual reviews of vast quantities of documents. Advanced eDiscovery can significantly reduce cost and effort to identify relevant documents and data relationships by using machine learning to train the system to intelligently explore large datasets and quickly zero in on what’s relevant — reducing the data prior to review.

5. Advanced Data Governance uses intelligence and machine-assisted insights to help you find, classify, set policies on, and take action to manage the lifecycle of the data that is most important to your organisation.

Manage: Govern how personal data is used and accessed

Office 365 solutions have several features that can help you manage personal data:

1. Office 365 Security & Compliance Center has data governance features that help you archive and preserve content in Exchange Online mailboxes, SharePoint Online sites and OneDrive for Business locations, and import data into your Office 365 organisation.

2. The Retention feature in Office 365 can help you manage the lifecycle of email and documents by keeping the content you need and removing content after it’s no longer required.

3. Advanced Data Governance uses intelligence and machine-assisted insights to help you find, classify, set policies on and take action to manage the lifecycle of the data that is most important to your organisation.

4. SharePoint Online's information management policies enable you to control how long to retain content, to audit what people do with content and to add barcodes or labels to documents.

5. Exchange Online's journaling can help you respond to legal, regulatory and organisational compliance requirements by recording inbound and outbound email communications.

Data classification

Data classification is an important part of any data governance plan. Adopting a classification scheme that applies throughout your organisation can be particularly helpful for responding to data subject requests, because it enables you to identify more readily and process personal data requests.

6. Data Loss Prevention (DLP) in Office and Office 365 can identify over 80 common sensitive data types including financial, medical, and personally identifiable information. In addition, DLP allows organisations to configure actions to be taken upon identification to protect sensitive information and prevent its accidental disclosure.

7. Advanced Data Governance uses intelligence and machine-assisted insights to help you find, classify, set policies on and take action to manage the lifecycle of the data that is most important to your organisation. Classify data based on automatic analysis and policy recommendations, then apply actions to preserve data in-place or purge what’s necessary. In-place data as well as third-party data sources can be ingested into Office 365 and classified by message type. Message type classification allows for the search, sort and export of the various data sources, which eases the process of performing eDiscovery reviews.

Protect: Establish controls to detect and respond to breaches

Data security is a complex area. There are many types of risk to identify and consider — ranging from physical intrusion or rogue employees to accidental loss or hackers. Building risk management plans and taking risk mitigation steps, such as password protection, audit logs and encryption, can help you ensure compliance.

The Microsoft cloud is specifically built to help you understand risks and to defend against them, and is more secure than on-premises computing environments in many ways. For example, Microsoft's data centres are certified to internationally recognised security standards; protected by 24-hour physical surveillance; and have strict access controls.

The Office 365 platform incorporates security at every level, from application development to physical data centres to end-user access. Office 365 applications include both built-in security features that simplify the process of protecting data and the flexibility for you to configure, manage and integrate security in ways that make sense for your unique business needs. The Office 365 compliance framework has over 1,000 controls that enables Microsoft to keep Office 365 up to date with evolving industry standards, including over 50 certifications or attestations.

Many security controls are available by default. SharePoint and OneDrive for Business, for instance, both use encryption for data in transit and at rest. In addition, you may configure and deploy digital certificates to obfuscate personal data and you can use Office Access controls to grant and restrict access to personal data.

Office 365 offers other features that help you safeguard data and identify when a data breach occurs:

1. Secure Score gives you insights into your security position and what features are available to reduce risk while balancing productivity and security. 

2. Exchange Online's Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) helps protect your email against new, sophisticated malware attacks in real time. It also allows you to create policies that help prevent your users from accessing malicious attachments or malicious websites linked through email. ATP for Exchange Online includes protection against unknown malware and viruses, time-of-click protection against malicious URLs, and rich reporting and URL trace capabilities.

3. Information Rights Management (IRM) helps you and your users prevent sensitive information from being printed, forwarded, saved, edited or copied by unauthorised individuals. With IRM in SharePoint Online, you can limit the actions that users can take on files that have been downloaded from lists or libraries, such as printing copies of the files or copying text from them. With IRM in Exchange Online, you can help prevent sensitive information in email messages and attachments from leaking via email, online and offline.

4. Mobile Device Management (MDM) for Office 365 lets you set up policies and rules to help secure and manage your users’ enrolled iPhones, iPads, Android devices and Windows phones. For example, you can remotely wipe a device and view detailed device reports. Office 365 also uses multi-factor authentication to help provide extra security.

Protect: Establish controls to detect and respond to breaches

Office 365 features several capabilities that help you identify and respond when a data breach occurs:

1. Threat Intelligence helps you proactively uncover and protect against advanced threats in Office 365. Deep insights into threats — available in part because of Microsoft’s global presence, the Intelligent Security Graph, and input from cyber threat hunters — help you quickly and effectively enable alerts, dynamic policies and security solutions.

2. Advanced Security Management enables you to identify high-risk and abnormal usage, alerting you to potential breaches. In addition, it allows you to set up activity policies to track and respond to high-risk actions and suspicious activity. And you can also get productivity app discovery, which lets you use the information from your organisation’s log files to understand and act on your users’ app usage in Office 365 and other cloud apps.

3. Advanced Threat Protection for Exchange Online helps protect your email against new, sophisticated malware attacks in real time. It also allows you to create policies that help prevent your users from accessing malicious attachments or malicious websites linked through email.

Report: Execute data requests and keep required documentation

Record-keeping

Organisations processing personal data will need to keep records about the purposes of processing; the categories of personal data processed; the identity of third parties with whom data is shared; whether (and which) third countries receive personal data and the legal basis of such transfers; organisational and technical security measures; and data retention times applicable to various datasets. One way to achieve this is using auditing tools, which can help to ensure that any processing of data — whether it be collection, use, sharing, or otherwise — is tracked and recorded.

Microsoft cloud services offer embedded auditing services that can help you meet this standard.

In the Service Trust Portal, you can find comprehensive information about the various Azure, Office 365 and Dynamics 365 compliance, security, privacy and trust offerings, including reports and attestations. Third-party independent audit and GRC (governance, risk management, and compliance) assessment reports help you to stay up-to-date on how Microsoft cloud services comply with global standards that matter to your organisation. Trust documents can help you understand how Microsoft cloud services protect your data and how you can manage data security and compliance for your cloud services.

Additionally:

1. Office 365 Security & Compliance Center's Service Assurance gives you deep insights for conducting risk assessments, with details on Microsoft Compliance reports and transparent status of audited controls, including:

•         Microsoft security practices for customer data that is stored in Office 365.
•         Independent third-party audit reports of Office 365.
•         Implementation and testing details for security, privacy, and compliance controls that help customers comply with standards, laws, and regulations across industries, such as ISO 27001 and ISO 27018, as well as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).   

2. Office 365 audit logs allow you to monitor and track user and administrator activities across workloads in Office 365, which help with early detection and investigation of security and compliance issues. Use the Office 365 Audit log search page to start recording user and admin activity in your organisation. After Office 365 prepares the audit log, you can search it for a broad range of activities, including uploads to OneDrive or SharePoint Online or user password resets. Exchange Online can be set up to track changes that are made by administrators, and track whenever a mailbox is accessed by someone other than the person who owns the mailbox.   

3. Customer Lockbox gives you authority over how a Microsoft support engineer may access your data during a help session. In cases where the engineer requires access to your data to troubleshoot and fix an issue, Customer Lockbox allows you to approve or reject the access request. If you approve it, the engineer is able to access the data. Each request has an expiration time, and once the issue is resolved, the request is closed and access is revoked.