What’s Changing
No one enjoys a price rise, but nothing will stop the July 1st price increases, which will see many Microsoft 365 SKU’s being affected, including the ever-popular Microsoft 365 Business Standard moving from $12.50 USD to $14 USD. Importantly, Business Premium will be remaining static on $22 USD. I will try to only use NZD for this blog, where possible - though we don't have NZD pricing from Microsoft in their API's yet.
I encourage every one of our partners to ensure they are familiar with this news post from Microsoft communicating the details. Your customers commitment period will be important for how you communicate this change to them as it takes effect at renewal.
For example, if you have a customer on an M365 E5 3-year commitment, this will be a non-event for them. If all your customers are on monthly commitments though, this may be a busy period for your communications teams.
It’s important not to lose sight that the increases to the Business Suites do come with some important extra features. URL time-of-click protection being added to Standard and Basic will provide a welcome improvement in a threat environment that is becoming harder by the day for our users to navigate without innocently finding themselves at login(.)rnicrosoft(.)com. Mailbox and enhanced Copilot Chat capabilities are also on their way. The most important security features though are still sitting behind Entra Plan 1. So, if we really want better security outcomes, a little extra phishing protection and a larger mailbox isn’t quite going to cut that mustard.
The Challenge for SMB’s adopting Business Premium
Small Businesses in New Zealand are finally starting to take Cyber Security seriously; less are they seeing it as simply a cost centre and more as an enabler. But it will always be an expense, and businesses are once again facing tough headwinds. In this environment, customers are having to make tough compromises, weighing every marginal expense against its marginal benefit. These small business owners and decision makers are doing their best, but they aren’t cyber security engineers, they must make these decisions with limited, often anecdotal advice with limited time to properly research every data point. So, let’s do some back of the envelope maths based on easily available stats to see what their decision-making process might look like.
Current Envelope Maths
We’ll use a small 5-person business, with a ~60% chance of a breach annually, currently running Microsoft 365 Business Standard. Our example incident will be a single Microsoft 365 user breach from a phishing attack. One side of the equation is our marginal costs of which there are two components, direct costs to resolve the incident, mostly labour, and indirect costs such as downtime and reputational damage, much harder to measure. We’ll base our direct costs on 2 hours of emergency response labour @ $250/hr, so $500. Indirect costs we can measure as a lost day of work for 1 user between actual downtime and lost work from reputational loss, so 7 @ $150/hr, 1050. This is back of the envelope maths, so we’ll round that to $1000 for a total breach cost of $1500. Applying our 60% breach per year cost, that gives us a marginal annual cost of $900. As Cyber Security Professionals, we may look at this estimate and think it’s too low but let’s remember we are role playing a busy small business owner in this exercise.
Marginal breach cost = $900 or $180/staff annually
Now defending against these breaches. During my time as an incident responder, a properly configured Entra Conditional Access implementation will almost completely eliminate the risk of this type of breach. The most cost-effective way for a 5-person business to get this protection is Microsoft Business Premium. Let’s look at the current annual marginal cost for Business Standard to Business Premium uplift.
Microsoft 365 Business Standard is $242.40
Microsoft 365 Business Premium is $427.20
Marginal uplift cost = $184.80/staff annually
So, you can see that this is a line call for our customers, and marginally the “correct” answer is to simply accept breaches as a cost of doing business. The balance gets worse for the uplift case as you calculate probabilities over a longer period. This means the uplift conversation sits heavily on the ability of our partners to communicate the total value of Business Premium in a sales conversation. Ultimately, the business owner or decision maker is going to sit down with an envelope and do some math, and they’ll see a line call. This is reflected in the adoption numbers we see across Dicker Data’s partners, we see ~3:2 premium to standard ratio – roughly 40% of our customers still choose Microsoft 365 Business Standard.
After July 1st
REMINDER: WE DO NOT HAVE THE NEW NZ DOLLAR PRICES YET.
Do I need to say that again? Microsoft haven’t yet sent us the price changes for July, we will get these soon, but not yet. So, we will do the new math assuming the same 12% uplift in price for Business Standard.
Microsoft 365 Business Standard is $242.40 * 1.12 = $271.49
Microsoft 365 Business Premium is $427.20
Marginal uplift cost = $155.71/staff annually
So now there is a reasonably clear saving. We can prevent a cost of $180 per year by spending $155 a year. Just using one feature from Business Premium we can save our 5-person small business $125 a year. And there’s still a lot of room for our partners to highlight the rest of the value Microsoft 365 Business Premium brings to the table.
- Defender for Business for EDR
- Defender for Office 365 for email protection
- Intune for endpoint management
- Autopilot for endpoint deployment
Conversation Framing
No one likes it when prices go up, so being able to present a plan to our customers to not just minimise the cost of the license but reduce the total cost of cyber security is what will move us forward and keep you as the customers trusted IT partner.
For partners, this pricing change may open the door to a different type of customer conversation. For some, it could be a good time to look at upcoming renewals and where Business Premium now stacks up more cleanly against Business Standard. For others, it may be more about reframing the discussion around overall security value, with less reliance on third-party tools and a clearer story across identity, devices, email and collaboration. There is always an opportunity to wrap in services such as assessments, configuration management, and/or managed security where that suits the customer.
That is also where Dicker Data can lend a hand. Through Voyager, OnPoint, our Microsoft specialists, and the Insights portal, partners have access to support that can help surface the right opportunities, shape the Business Premium conversation and map out an approach that makes sense for each customer. In a market like ours, where commercial pressure is still very real, having that extra layer of local channel support can make a real difference.
If this is a conversation you are starting to have with customers, your Dicker Data representative can help workshop the opportunity with you. Whether that is identifying where the pricing shift may create a better fit for Business Premium, or simply helping shape the broader security story, there is plenty of value in taking a look now.
Alternatively, you can reach out to our team, or email us directly, and we would be happy to help.
Supporting Resources:
Link 1: Microsoft 365 Pricing and Packaging Updates | Microsoft Licensing Resources
Link 2: Business Outlook survey
Link 3: Kordia NZ Business Cyber Report 2025_2.pdf
Link 4: Microsoft 365 Business Premium resources | Microsoft Learn
