Microsoft price increases – from 1 March 2022
A price increase has been announced for all “Modern Workplace” subscriptions (all O365/M365 and standalone) from their anniversary date following 1 March 2022. Different products can have different anniversary dates so you might have multiple dates i.e.. O365 E3 might be June whereas Power BI is September – New pricing for Microsoft 365 | Microsoft 365 Blog
Microsoft note this is “the first substantive pricing update since we launched Office 365 a decade ago” and have added 24 apps and 1,400 new features during this time. Price increases range from a USD $1 to $4 per user/month increase – no NZD yet.
Please let us know if you would like your anniversary dates for your subscriptions to be able to budget for this increase.
November deadline for shutting off old Outlook clients from 365 services
Commercial customers that are running older versions of Outlook have only two months to upgrade before losing access to Microsoft’s 365 and Office 365 services.
From 1 November, 2021, only Outlook 2013 Service Pack 1 (with the latest fixes) and later will be able to connect to Microsoft 365 services. See the announcement here.
New Commerce Experience (NCE) – from 1 October 2021
This is Microsoft’s new CSP model for M365 which follows on from the Azure new commerce model launched some time back (and is now the default for Azure).
There are a number of changes with NCE:
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- Three-year terms for Microsoft 365 exclusively in NCE in March 2022 – price predictability for annual or multiyear term offers.
- New offers for Microsoft 365 and D365 exclusive to NCE.
- Monthly-term offers will have a price premium for customers who need term and seat-count flexibility.
- Annual term offers without monthly premium for customers that have a stable seat-count.
- The option to blend short- and long-term offers for customers with seasonal or business-volume fluctuations.
- Cancellation policies – full year will be charged for reductions made after first 72 hours of the term.
Veeam Backup & Replication v11a
This quarter Veeam will be launching Backup & Replication v11a. Some of the capabilities of V11a include:
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- Near-zero RPOs — Minimize data loss for critical workloads with near-zero RPOs, recovering to the latest state or point in time.
- Hardened Repository — Keep data safe with immutable and malware-safe storage repositories for backups and prevent malicious encryption and deletion.
- Amazon S3 Glacier and Microsoft Azure Archive — cost savings using Amazon S3 Glacier or Azure Archive cold storage to achieve secure lifecycle management of backups with the new Scale-out Backup Repository Archive Tier.
- Ultra-low RTOs for databases and NAS — Achieve the lowest RTOs with production-ready instant recovery for SQL, Oracle and NAS.
Microsoft Defender for Endpoint
Microsoft Defender for Endpoint will soon be renamed Microsoft Defender for Endpoint Plan 2 with a subset of functionality being made available as Plan 1.
Microsoft Defender for Endpoint P1 will include the following endpoint security capabilities for Windows, macOS, Android and iOS:
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- Antimalware – cloud-based with built-in AI to help stop ransomware, known and unknown malware, and other threats in their tracks.
- Attack surface reduction capabilities that harden the device, prevent zero days, and offer granular control over access and behaviours on the endpoint.
- Device based conditional access that offers an additional layer of data protection and breach prevention and enables a Zero Trust approach.
The new Plan 1 will be available later in 2021 as either a standalone license or as part of Microsoft 365 E3/A3.