Where do we start? The stack is huge and we do not know which pillar comes first.

Start with a licence and posture assessment, then close the identity basics, in that order, regardless of which pillar brought you here. The assessment tells you what you already own and what is actually deployed, which frequently changes the plan on its own. The identity basics, complete MFA including administrators, legacy authentication blocked, admin accounts separated, are configuration rather than purchase, they close the routes attackers actually use against Indian tenants, and they are incomplete in most environments we assess. Everything else, endpoint EDR, DLP, SIEM, builds on an identity layer that holds. Organisations that start with sophisticated data protection before fixing sign-in are protecting documents in a tenant anyone can get into.

Is Business Premium enough, or do we need E5?

For most Indian SMB and mid-market organisations, Business Premium deployed properly is a strong posture: conditional access, Defender for Business EDR, Defender for Office 365 Plan 1, Intune, and basic data protection are all included. The honest test for E5 is operational, not financial: for each E5 capability, name the person who will operate it and the question it answers. Privileged identity management, hunting, and insider risk each need an operator, and capability without one sits idle exactly as your current unconfigured features do. E5 genuinely pays for regulated firms needing privileged access control and premium audit evidence, for organisations with a security team who will use hunting, and for cases where the bundle beats buying components separately. We model it honestly, and we have advised clients to stay on Business Premium and spend the difference on managed monitoring instead.

Do you replace our existing antivirus?

Usually yes, and deliberately. Defender for Endpoint or Defender for Business is a full EDR platform, and on an M365-centric estate it is already licensed, already integrated with conditional access, and already built into Windows. Running a third-party antivirus alongside it is the worst of both worlds: two agents competing on every machine, Defender dropping into passive mode, and two consoles neither team fully watches. The exception is a recent third-party EDR investment with years of tuning behind it; there we will integrate its signal into Sentinel rather than force a rip-and-replace, and we will tell you plainly which option we would choose in your position. The migration itself is staged, ring by ring, with the old agent removed cleanly, never a big-bang uninstall.

We already have a SOC or an MSSP. Can you co-exist with them?

Yes, and the arrangement works well when the boundary is written down before it is tested. Common splits: we deploy and harden the Microsoft stack while your SOC consumes the signal; or your MSSP keeps network and infrastructure while we take the M365 tenant, identity, and endpoints. What makes it work is agreed in advance: who watches what, who is permitted to isolate a device or disable an account, who leads an incident, and what the handoff looks like outside office hours. The failure mode with two competent security parties is not technical, it is the minutes lost while each assumes the other is acting. A named incident commander per scenario and one documented escalation tree removes that. We integrate with Sentinel and with third-party SIEMs, and we would rather define the boundary than compete for territory during an incident.

How does this relate to the DPDP Act and CERT-In requirements?

The stack provides the technical half of both. For the DPDP Act 2023: Purview classification and DLP address knowing and protecting personal data, retention policies support storage limitation, and audit logs support breach investigation and notification duties. For the CERT-In directions: Sentinel and the M365 audit pipeline address the log retention requirements, including the 180-day log mandate, and give you the incident detail the reporting obligation demands within its tight window. What no licence provides is the governance half: the consent and notice framework, the data principal request process, the incident reporting procedure with named owners, and evidence that controls operated over time. We deliver the technical controls and the evidence pack, and we are direct that a licence alone discharges no legal obligation. For BFSI clients, the same deployment maps onto the RBI and SEBI cybersecurity framework expectations.

How long does hardening take?

The identity basics land in the first 2-3 weeks and are the largest single improvement most organisations will make. Defender onboarding and tuning takes 4-8 weeks, because attack surface reduction rules need a genuine audit period before enforcement; rushing that is the most reliable way to break a line-of-business app and have protection switched off again. Purview data protection runs 3-6 months, because it is governed by user adoption rather than configuration speed. Monitoring can be live within weeks. A typical full hardening project for a mid-market tenant is 6-10 weeks to a documented baseline, with data protection continuing beyond it. We sequence so that each phase delivers standalone value; nothing waits for a distant go-live.

Do you monitor after deployment, or hand over and leave?

Both models exist, and we are honest about the difference. A project engagement ends with a hardened baseline and documentation your team or your existing IT provider can operate. Managed security continues from there: monitoring with a 30 minutes response SLA, alert triage by the engineers who tuned the detections, monthly reporting, quarterly posture reviews, and a continuously maintained evidence pack. The reason we recommend the managed path is decay: Microsoft changes defaults, exclusion groups grow, staff churn leaves privileged accounts behind, and a tenant hardened once and left alone is measurably weaker two years later. If you have an internal team, we also run a co-managed model where they keep day-to-day operation and we provide the escalation bench and the quarterly review.

What access do you need to our tenant?

For the assessment: read-only. Global Reader plus Security Reader covers almost everything we need to map entitlement, configuration, and posture, and we will send you the exact role list before you grant anything. For deployment: scoped administrative roles for the pillars in play, Security Administrator, Intune Administrator, Exchange Administrator as relevant, granted to named and MFA-protected accounts, never a standing Global Administrator. Where you run Entra ID P2 we prefer just-in-time elevation through privileged identity management, which has the pleasant side effect of demonstrating the control we recommend. Every change we make is logged in your tenant audit log under an identifiable account, and offboarding our access at the end of a project is a documented step, not an afterthought.

We are not in Hyderabad. Can you still deliver?

Yes. The Microsoft security stack is cloud-native, and every pillar, Entra ID, Defender, Intune, Purview, Sentinel, is deployed and operated remotely as a matter of design. Delivery is remote-first from our Gachibowli, Hyderabad HQ for clients across India, with workshops and reviews over Teams and all work performed in your tenant under audited access. On-site presence, for rollout support, incident response, or leadership workshops, is available in Hyderabad. For clients in other metros, the engagement is fully remote, which in practice is how the majority of our Microsoft security work is delivered regardless of city.

What does a Microsoft security engagement cost?

We quote after the assessment, because the honest range is wide and the drivers are specific: headcount, plan family, how many of the five pillars are in scope, how much technical debt the assessment finds, your regulatory position, and whether you want us to operate the result or hand it over. What we can promise up front: the assessment produces its findings in writing regardless of whether you proceed, the quote is fixed-scope rather than open-ended, and a fair proportion of assessments conclude that no new licence is needed this year, which tends to make the engagement smaller than the enquiry expected. Send the enquiry through the contact form and we reply within 4 business hours.

Microsoft security services, India

The Microsoft security stack, delivered as a service by one partner: assess, deploy, harden, monitor.

Defender XDR, Entra ID, Intune, Microsoft Purview, and Microsoft Sentinel are five product families that only work as a system when somebody designs, tunes, and operates them together. We are that partner for Indian businesses on Microsoft 365: we assess what your licence already includes, deploy what is missing, harden what is misconfigured, and monitor the result with a 30 minutes managed response SLA. Remote-first delivery across India from our Gachibowli, Hyderabad HQ, with on-site work in Hyderabad.

Book a Microsoft security assessment See the five pillars

5 pillarsIdentity, endpoint, email, data, SIEM
30 minManaged response SLA
Licence-firstDeploy what you already own
Pan-IndiaRemote-first from Hyderabad

The five-pillar model

Five pillars, five product families, one connected defence.

Every Microsoft security engagement we run maps to the same five pillars. Each pillar has its own product family, its own page, and its own deployment discipline. Start with the pillar that hurts most; the stack is designed so each one strengthens the others. Click through to the pillar you came for.

Identity: Microsoft Entra ID

The account is the new perimeter. MFA enforcement, conditional access, privileged identity management, identity protection, and lifecycle governance. Most tenant compromises in India start with a password that was never challenged, which makes identity the first pillar to fix.

Learn more

Endpoints: Defender for Endpoint

EDR on every laptop, desktop, and server. Behavioural detection, attack surface reduction, automated investigation, and vulnerability management. Deployed through Intune so device compliance feeds conditional access, closing the loop between the endpoint and identity pillars.

Learn more

Email and collaboration: Defender for Office 365

Anti-phishing, safe links, safe attachments, and impersonation protection across Exchange Online, Teams, SharePoint, and OneDrive. Business email compromise remains the most expensive attack on Indian SMBs, and this pillar is where it is stopped.

Learn more

Data: Microsoft Purview

Sensitivity labels, data loss prevention, retention, and insider risk. This is the pillar the DPDP Act 2023 points at: you cannot protect personal data you have not classified, and you cannot answer a data principal request without knowing where the data lives.

Learn more

SIEM and response: Microsoft Sentinel

Cloud-native SIEM that collects signal from the other four pillars plus firewalls, servers, and SaaS. Detection rules, automation playbooks, and the log retention CERT-In expects. Detection without a person watching is an expensive log file; this pillar supplies both.

Learn more

The glue: Microsoft Intune

Not a pillar by itself, but the enforcement layer every pillar leans on. Device enrolment, compliance policies, patching, and app protection for personal phones. Conditional access can require a compliant device only if Intune is there to define compliance.

Learn more

What we deliver per pillar

The concrete work behind each pillar.

A pillar is not "licensed" or "enabled", it is deployed, tuned, and evidenced. This is what our engineers actually do in each one, whether as a one-time hardening project or under ongoing managed security.

Identity hardening

The highest-value security work available to any Microsoft 365 tenant in India, and almost all of it is configuration rather than purchase.

MFA enforced on every account including administrators, with phishing-resistant methods for privileged users
Legacy authentication blocked so stolen passwords cannot skip the MFA challenge
Conditional access designed as a small, deliberate policy set with no permanent exclusion groups
Admin role cleanup, break-glass accounts, and privileged identity management where licensed
Dormant account and guest access review with a documented offboarding path

Endpoint protection

Defender for Endpoint onboarded everywhere, not just on the machines that were easy, then tuned until the alert queue is worth reading.

Every Windows, macOS, and server endpoint onboarded and reporting
Attack surface reduction rules taken from audit mode to enforcement after a real tuning period
Automated investigation and remediation configured, false positives suppressed
Vulnerability management feeding the patch cycle through Intune
Existing antivirus decommissioned cleanly, no two overlapping agents degrading both

Email and collaboration security

The pillar that pays back fastest, because phishing and payment fraud are where Indian businesses actually lose money.

SPF, DKIM, and DMARC moved to enforcement so lookalike domains are rejected
Anti-phishing policies with impersonation protection for executives and finance staff
Safe Links and Safe Attachments across mail, Teams, and Office documents
Priority account protection for the mailboxes attackers target
Attack simulation so you can measure click rates instead of guessing

Data protection and DPDP readiness

Classification first, then protection built on the labels that matter. Ambitious label taxonomies designed in a workshop reliably stall; small ones ship.

A deliberately small sensitivity label scheme with auto-labelling doing the heavy lifting
DLP policies run in simulation before enforcement so they survive contact with users
Retention policies matched to your legal and DPDP Act obligations
Insider risk and eDiscovery configured where the licence and the need both exist
Data mapping that supports data principal requests under the DPDP Act 2023

SIEM, monitoring, and response

Signal from all four pillars in one place, with detection rules tuned to your environment and a human on the other end.

Sentinel workspace design with ingestion cost controls, not every log at any price
Data connectors for Defender XDR, Entra ID, firewalls, and servers
Analytics rules and automation playbooks tuned to reduce noise, not add to it
Log retention aligned to CERT-In direction requirements, including the 180-day log mandate
Managed monitoring with a 30 minutes response SLA for managed clients

Device management with Intune

The enforcement layer. Every pillar above assumes managed devices, and Intune is how devices become managed.

Enrolment for corporate Windows, macOS, iOS, and Android devices
Compliance policies that feed conditional access decisions
Windows Autopilot so new laptops arrive configured, not blank
App protection policies for personal phones without full device control
Patch rings and update compliance reporting

Why GR IT Services for this

Four things that shape how we work on the Microsoft stack.

Licence audit before any purchase

The first deliverable of every engagement is a written map of what your subscription already includes against what is actually deployed. That regularly shrinks the project we could have sold, and it is why clients believe the recommendations that follow. An adviser whose every assessment ends in an upgrade is selling, not assessing.

One partner across all five pillars

Identity, endpoint, email, data, and SIEM are usually bought from one vendor and operated by nobody in particular. We deploy and run the whole stack, so a compromised endpoint triggers identity containment and the SIEM sees both, because the same team configured all three ends of that chain.

Remote-first from Hyderabad, built for India

Delivery is remote-first from our Gachibowli, Hyderabad HQ, which is how the Microsoft cloud stack is best operated anyway. On-site work is available in Hyderabad for workshops, rollouts, and incident response. Clients across Indian metros get the same engineers and the same 30 minutes managed SLA.

Evidence for the audits India actually faces

ISO 27001 controls, CERT-In direction compliance including log retention, DPDP Act 2023 data protection duties, and RBI or SEBI cybersecurity frameworks for BFSI clients. Every deployment produces its evidence continuously as a by-product, not as a scramble the fortnight before the audit.

Licensing reality

Which security features come with which plan family.

The single most useful thing to know before buying anything: what your current plan family already includes. This is the honest map, simplified to the decisions that matter. We verify your exact entitlement during the assessment, because Microsoft adjusts bundling regularly and add-ons change the picture.

	Capability	Business Premium	Enterprise E3
Entra ID conditional access	Included (P1)	Included (P1)	Included (P2, adds risk-based policies)
Privileged identity management	Not included	Not included	Included (Entra ID P2)
Endpoint EDR	Defender for Business	Add-on required	Defender for Endpoint Plan 2 with hunting
Email protection	Defender for Office 365 Plan 1	Exchange Online Protection only	Defender for Office 365 Plan 2 with attack simulation
Intune device management	Included	Included	Included
Sensitivity labels and DLP	Basic	Standard	Full Purview including insider risk
Audit log retention	Standard	Standard	Extended, with premium audit events
Sentinel SIEM	Separate Azure service	Separate Azure service	Separate Azure service, with data grant benefits

Who this is for

SMB on Business Premium, enterprise on E5: the honest split.

Most of the Microsoft security enquiries we receive from India open with a plan to upgrade licences. Sometimes that is right. More often the organisation has configured perhaps half of what its current plan family already includes, and the fastest security improvement available is deployment work, not procurement. Here is how we advise the two ends of the market.

If you are an SMB or mid-market company on Business Premium: deployed properly, it is a genuinely strong posture. Conditional access, Defender for Business EDR, Defender for Office 365 Plan 1, Intune, basic labels and DLP. Most holders have switched on a fraction of it. Our default advice is to harden what you hold before adding anything.
If you are an enterprise on E3: the notable gap is endpoint EDR and advanced identity protection, which is where targeted add-ons or a step to E5 earn their keep. We model the add-on route against the bundle honestly, because the right answer depends on which capabilities you will actually operate.
If you are on E5: you own the sophisticated end of the stack, and the question is no longer licensing, it is operation. Privileged identity management, hunting, insider risk, and premium audit each need a named operator. Capability without an operator is shelfware, and E5 is the tier where the gap between entitlement and deployment is widest.
The test we apply before recommending any upgrade: for each capability, name the person who will operate it and the question it answers. If you cannot, spend the budget on deployment, tuning, and monitoring of what you already hold.

Ask for a licence and posture assessment

Who we do this for

Six India profiles and what drives their Microsoft security scope.

The stack is the same five pillars everywhere. What changes by sector is which pillar leads and which regulator is asking the questions.

BFSI and fintech

RBI and SEBI cybersecurity frameworks drive privileged access control, audit retention, and incident reporting discipline. Usually the clients with a genuine case for Entra ID P2, premium audit, and a formally operated SIEM.

IT services and SaaS

Customer security questionnaires and SOC 2 or ISO 27001 audits are the forcing function. Endpoint EDR, access governance, and evidence production matter because enterprise deals stall without them.

Healthcare and pharma

Patient and trial data under the DPDP Act, plus ransomware exposure on clinical and lab systems. Data classification, endpoint protection, and tested recovery lead the scope.

Manufacturing and logistics

Plant floor separated from office IT, shift operations needing monitoring beyond office hours, and downtime measured in production. Endpoint and monitoring pillars lead, email fraud protection close behind.

GCCs and multinational subsidiaries

A parent security standard written abroad, applied to an Indian entity. The work is mapping the parent baseline onto the local tenant with documented exceptions and compensating controls, not quiet workarounds.

Professional services and SMBs

Client confidentiality, payment fraud risk, and a small or absent IT function. The organisations that benefit most from configuring what Business Premium already includes before buying anything new.

Microsoft-native vs point products

Why the native stack usually wins for Microsoft 365-centric companies.

If your business runs on Microsoft 365, the integrated stack has a structural advantage no collection of separate best-of-breed products can match: the components share signal. This is the honest comparison for an M365-centric organisation; a genuinely mixed estate changes the calculus and we will say so when it does.

Feature	Point products Separate vendors per layer	Microsoft-native stack Defender XDR + Entra + Purview + Sentinel
Signal sharing between identity and endpoint	Manual integration, if the APIs allow	Native: risky sign-in can trigger device containment
Consoles your team must learn	One per vendor	One portal for XDR, one for SIEM
Incident correlation	Stitched together in the SIEM, or by a human	Cross-signal incidents out of the box
Licensing	Separate contracts and renewals per vendor	Largely inside the M365 plan you already pay for
Conditional access integration	Limited or none	Device compliance and sign-in risk feed access decisions natively
Agent count on each endpoint	One per product, overlapping and conflicting	One, built into Windows
Where point products still win	Specialist OT, niche compliance tooling, non-Microsoft-centric estates	Honest gap: acknowledged, and we integrate rather than rip out when a tuned investment exists

How an engagement runs

Four steps, and the first one often shrinks the project.

The same sequence whether you arrive worried about phishing, an audit, or a specific incident. It is ordered by security value per rupee of effort, which is why identity comes before anything sophisticated.

1
Assess
Week 1
Licence entitlement mapped against actual deployment, plus the basics check: MFA coverage, legacy authentication, privileged and dormant accounts, mail authentication, audit retention, secure score. Findings in writing whether or not you engage us further.
2
Deploy and harden
Weeks 2-6
Close the configuration wins first: enforce MFA, block legacy auth, separate admin accounts, onboard Defender, enforce mail authentication. Then the designed work: conditional access, Intune compliance, attack surface reduction through audit to enforcement, DLP in simulation.
3
Validate
1 week
Prove the controls actually operate: simulated phishing, attack surface reduction verification, conditional access test matrix, alert-path test from detection to a human. Gaps closed before anything is called done.
4
Monitor and operate
Ongoing
Managed security for clients who want the stack run for them: monitoring with a 30 minutes response SLA, monthly reporting, quarterly posture reviews, and the evidence pack maintained continuously as Microsoft changes defaults and your organisation changes shape.

Engagement models

Project hardening or ongoing managed security. Or the first, then the second.

Every engagement fits one of two shapes, and the most common path is a hardening project that converts into managed security once the estate is clean. Both are delivered remote-first across India from Hyderabad, with on-site work available in Hyderabad.

Project: assess and harden

A fixed-scope engagement that takes your tenant from its current state to a hardened, documented baseline. Typical duration is 2-6 weeks for identity and email, 4-8 weeks when endpoint rollout is included, longer where Purview data protection is in scope.

Licence and posture assessment with findings in writing
Identity basics closed: MFA, legacy auth, admin separation, break-glass
Defender onboarded and tuned, attack surface reduction enforced
Conditional access and Intune compliance designed and deployed
Handover documentation your team or your existing IT provider can run with

Managed: monitor and operate

Ongoing operation of the stack after hardening. Posture decays without this: Microsoft changes defaults, exclusion groups grow, staff turnover leaves privileged accounts behind, and a tenant hardened once is measurably weaker two years later.

Monitoring with a 30 minutes response SLA for managed clients
Alert triage and incident response by the same engineers who tuned the detections
Monthly security reporting and quarterly posture reviews
Continuous evidence pack for ISO 27001, CERT-In, and insurer questionnaires
Secure score tracking with a worked improvement queue, not a screenshot

“We came in convinced we needed a licence upgrade and a new endpoint product. The assessment showed most of what we wanted was already in our Business Premium subscription, unconfigured. GR IT deployed conditional access and Defender for Business, moved our mail authentication to enforcement, and put the tenant under their managed monitoring. Our customer security questionnaires went from a week of scrambling to an afternoon.”

Head of IT

IT leadership · Pune-based SaaS company

Upgrade deferred, existing licence deployed, monitoring funded instead

Microsoft security FAQ

The questions Indian buyers ask before engaging.

Start here

The three spokes most readers open next.

The hub gives you the map. These three pages carry the depth: the assessment that starts every engagement, and the two controls that move posture fastest.

Microsoft 365 Security Audit

The written assessment that starts every engagement: licence entitlement, posture gaps, identity basics, and a prioritised remediation plan.

Learn more

Defender for Endpoint

EDR deployment done properly: onboarding every device, attack surface reduction through audit to enforcement, and tuning until alerts are worth reading.

Learn more

Conditional Access

The control that turns identity from a password check into a policy engine: design, rollout without lockouts, and the policy set that actually holds.

Learn more

Microsoft security assessment

Find out what you already licence and are not using.

We map your entitlement against what is actually deployed, check MFA coverage, legacy authentication, privileged accounts, mail authentication, and audit retention, and give you the findings in writing. Enquiries get a reply within 4 business hours.

Book a security assessment See the security audit

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Explore more solutions that work great with this service

The Microsoft security stack, delivered as a service by one partner: assess, deploy, harden, monitor.

Five pillars, five product families, one connected defence.

Identity: Microsoft Entra ID

Endpoints: Defender for Endpoint

Email and collaboration: Defender for Office 365

Data: Microsoft Purview

SIEM and response: Microsoft Sentinel

The glue: Microsoft Intune

The concrete work behind each pillar.

Identity hardening

Endpoint protection

Email and collaboration security

Data protection and DPDP readiness

SIEM, monitoring, and response

Device management with Intune

Four things that shape how we work on the Microsoft stack.

Licence audit before any purchase

One partner across all five pillars

Remote-first from Hyderabad, built for India

Evidence for the audits India actually faces

Which security features come with which plan family.

SMB on Business Premium, enterprise on E5: the honest split.

Six India profiles and what drives their Microsoft security scope.

BFSI and fintech

IT services and SaaS

Healthcare and pharma

Manufacturing and logistics

GCCs and multinational subsidiaries

Professional services and SMBs

Why the native stack usually wins for Microsoft 365-centric companies.

Four steps, and the first one often shrinks the project.

Assess

Deploy and harden

Validate

Monitor and operate

Project hardening or ongoing managed security. Or the first, then the second.

Project: assess and harden

Managed: monitor and operate

The questions Indian buyers ask before engaging.

Where do we start? The stack is huge and we do not know which pillar comes first.

Is Business Premium enough, or do we need E5?

Do you replace our existing antivirus?

We already have a SOC or an MSSP. Can you co-exist with them?

How does this relate to the DPDP Act and CERT-In requirements?

How long does hardening take?

Do you monitor after deployment, or hand over and leave?

What access do you need to our tenant?

We are not in Hyderabad. Can you still deliver?

What does a Microsoft security engagement cost?

The three spokes most readers open next.

Microsoft 365 Security Audit

Defender for Endpoint

Conditional Access

Find out what you already licence and are not using.

Related Services

Defender for Endpoint

Conditional Access

Endpoint DLP

Microsoft 365 Security Audit