Important
The improved Microsoft 365 Defender portal is now available. This new experience brings Defender for Endpoint, Defender for Office 365, Microsoft 365 Defender, and more into the Microsoft 365 Defender portal. Learn what’s new.
Applies to:
- Microsoft 365 Defender
Microsoft 365 Defender unifies your incident response process by integrating key capabilities across Microsoft Defender for Endpoint, Microsoft Defender for Office 365, Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps, and Microsoft Defender for Identity. This unified experience adds powerful features you can access in the Microsoft 365 Defender portal.
Microsoft 365 Defender automatically turns on when eligible customers with the required permissions visit Microsoft 365 Defender portal. Read this article to understand various prerequisites and how Microsoft 365 Defender is provisioned.
Check license eligibility and required permissions
A license to a Microsoft 365 security product generally entitles you to use Microsoft 365 Defender without additional licensing cost. We do recommend getting a Microsoft 365 E5, E5 Security, A5, or A5 Security license or a valid combination of licenses that provides access to all supported services.
For detailed licensing information, read the licensing requirements.
Check your role
You must be one of the following roles to turn on Microsoft 365 Defender:
- Global Administrator
- Security Administrator
- Security Operator
- Global Reader
- Security Reader
- Compliance Administrator
- Compliance Data Administrator
- Application Administrator
- Cloud Application Administrator
Supported services
Microsoft 365 Defender aggregates data from the various supported services that you’ve already deployed. It will process and store data centrally to identify new insights and make centralized response workflows possible. It does this without affecting existing deployments, settings, or data associated with the integrated services.
To get the best protection and optimize Microsoft 365 Defender, we recommend deploying all applicable supported services on your network. For more information, read about deploying supported services.
Onboard to the service
Onboarding to Microsoft 365 Defender is simple. From the navigation menu, select any item, such as Incidents & alerts, Hunting, Action center, or Threat analytics to initiate the onboarding process.
Data center location
Microsoft 365 Defender will store and process data in the same location used by Microsoft Defender for Endpoint. If you don’t have Microsoft Defender for Endpoint, a new data center location is automatically selected based on the location of active Microsoft 365 security services. The selected data center location is shown in the screen.
Select Need help? in the Microsoft 365 Defender portal to contact Microsoft support about provisioning Microsoft 365 Defender in a different data center location.
Note
In the past, Microsoft Defender for Endpoint automatically provisioned in European Union (EU) data centers when turned on through Microsoft Defender for Cloud. Microsoft 365 Defender will automatically provision in the same EU data center for customers who have provisioned Defender for Endpoint in this manner in the past.
Confirm that the service is on
Once the service is provisioned, it adds:
- Incidents management
- Alerts queue
- An action center for managing automated investigation and response
- Advanced hunting capabilities
- Threat analytics
Microsoft 365 Defender portal with incidents management and other capabilities
Getting Microsoft Defender for Identity data
To enable the integration with Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps, you’ll need to login to the Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps at least once.
Get assistance
To get answers to the most commonly asked questions about turning on Microsoft 365 Defender, read the FAQ.
Microsoft support staff can help provision or deprovision the service and related resources on your tenant. For assistance, select Need help? in the Microsoft 365 Defender portal. When contacting support, mention Microsoft 365 Defender.