Overview
The three tiers side by side across nine decision dimensions
| Dimension | E3Productivity with baseline protectionGenerally available | E5Consolidated security, compliance and analyticsGenerally available | E7Security and identity extended to agentsGA May 2026 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Security posture What can the platform actually do when something goes wrong? | Prevent and block. No investigation surface. | Detect, correlate and respond across mail, identity, endpoint and SaaS. | Same detection surface, extended to agent identities and their actions. |
| Identity model Who or what can reach a resource, and how is that proven? | Static conditions. Entra ID P1, Conditional Access without risk signal. | Risk aware and time bound. Identity Protection, PIM, access reviews. | Identity becomes the network edge. Entra Suite plus identity for agents. |
| Network access Where does remote and internet access get enforced? | Legacy VPN and third party web filtering. | Same, unless Global Secure Access is bought separately. | Global Secure Access included: private access plus internet access. |
| Data protection Can sensitive information be found, classified and held in place? | User applied labels, DLP for cloud services only. | Service applied classification, endpoint DLP, insider risk. | The same controls applied to prompts, agent inputs and agent outputs. |
| Records and discovery Can statutory retention and disposal be evidenced? | Retention policies only. No records declaration or disposition proof. | Records management, full eDiscovery review sets, one year audit retention. | Same, with agent activity inside the same audit and retention scope. |
| Non human identity How are AI agents and service workloads governed? | No construct. Agents borrow a human identity. | No construct. Agents borrow a human identity. | Agent 365 and Entra Agent ID: registry, owner, scope, review, shutdown. |
| AI productivity What does the end user see? | Copilot Chat with enterprise data protection. | Copilot Chat with enterprise data protection. | Full in app Copilot bundled across Word, Excel, Outlook, Teams and PowerPoint. |
| Third party spend What can be retired from the surrounding stack? | Little. Most adjacent tooling exists to cover E3 gaps. | EDR, CASB, eDiscovery, records, endpoint DLP, per user BI. | VPN and secure web gateway, standalone IGA, standalone Copilot add on. |