The rename to watch for
Microsoft has retired the 'Microsoft 365 E5 Security' name on its public pages. Microsoft Learn's Entra licensing page now lists Entra ID P2 as included in 'Microsoft Defender Suite (formerly Microsoft 365 E5 Security)', and the old E5 Security product pages on microsoft.com return not-found in both the Australian and US catalogues (checked September 2026). The offer itself is unchanged in shape: an add-on for E3 customers that lifts the security stack to E5 level without the rest of E5. Older quotes, renewal paperwork and licence reports may still carry the old name, so treat 'E5 Security' and 'Defender Suite' as the same line item when reconciling.
What's inside
Microsoft's Australian Defender Suite page lists five products: Microsoft Defender for Endpoint Plan 2, Microsoft Defender for Identity, Microsoft Defender for Office 365 Plan 2, Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps and Microsoft Defender for IoT for enterprise devices. Microsoft Learn adds Microsoft Entra ID P2, which brings Privileged Identity Management, risk-based Conditional Access and access reviews. Because the Suite carries both Endpoint P2 and Office 365 P2, it also unlocks Defender XDR's cross-workload correlation and automatic attack disruption, and Microsoft's Defender XDR prerequisites page names 'Microsoft 365 E3 with the Microsoft Defender Suite add-on' as a licence that gives full access to the Defender portal. It is the security half of E5, minus Purview.
Price and prerequisite
The Australian list is AU$18.00 per user per month on an annual subscription, shown before GST (checked September 2026 on microsoft.com/en-au). Microsoft states it requires Microsoft 365 E3, or Office 365 E3 together with Enterprise Mobility + Security E3 — it cannot be bolted onto Business plans, which get their own capped variants: Defender Suite for Microsoft 365 Business Premium at AU$15.00 and the combined Defender and Purview Suites at AU$22.40 per user per month, both limited to 300 seats and requiring Business Premium underneath. Microsoft notes prices may vary with your agreement, so enterprise-agreement customers should expect a different number from their reseller.
When E3 plus the Suite beats full E5
Microsoft 365 E3 lists at AU$58.40 and E5 at AU$89.80 per user per month with Teams, or AU$77.00 without (all checked September 2026 on microsoft.com/en-au). E3 plus Defender Suite therefore lands at AU$76.40 — AU$13.40 a month under E5 per user, or about AU$80,000 a year across 500 seats. E5 bundles the same Defender stack and Entra ID P2 plus what Microsoft describes as data security and compliance, the Teams Phone cloud phone system and Power BI for analytics. So if the only reason you are looking at E5 is security, E3 plus the Suite delivers the same protection for less. E5 wins when you would separately buy Purview's premium compliance features, Teams Phone or Power BI Pro anyway, or when a Copilot rollout makes the Purview side matter as much as Defender.
Australian buying notes
Two developments make the Suite more strategic than a plain security top-up. Microsoft Learn now lists 'Microsoft Defender Suite plus Microsoft Purview Suite' as an accepted foundation for buying Agent 365, so an E3 tenant can reach the agent-governance tier without moving to E5. And the Suite is the point where Defender XDR becomes a single console rather than four products, which is what turns licences into detections. The same caution Frontrow applies to E5 holds here: Defender for Identity needs sensors on domain controllers, Cloud Apps needs log connectors and Endpoint P2 needs onboarding — buy the Suite when there is a plan and an owner to deploy all five, not before.