The first quarter of 2025 brought several significant updates to Microsoft 365 Business Premium — from Defender improvements to Entra ID passkey support. Here's what MSPs need to know.
Microsoft's pace of feature release for Microsoft 365 Business Premium has accelerated significantly. Q1 2025 brought several notable updates across Defender, Entra ID, and Intune. Here's a digest of the most significant changes for MSPs managing Business Premium environments.
Entra ID: Passkey (FIDO2) support improvements
Microsoft significantly improved the passkey enrollment experience in Q1 2025. Users can now register a passkey (including device-bound passkeys on Windows 11 via Windows Hello) directly from the My Security Info portal without requiring admin intervention. The registration flow is cleaner, and the sign-in experience now natively prompts for passkey on devices that have one registered — reducing password usage further.
Defender for Business: improved Microsoft 365 Copilot integration
Security Copilot capabilities have been progressively embedded into the Defender portal. In Q1 2025, the Incident Summary feature became available to Defender for Business clients (previously only available in Defender for Endpoint). Analysts now receive an AI-generated incident summary when opening any new incident — significantly reducing the time to understand and respond to alerts.
Intune: improved application management
The Intune app catalogue has expanded significantly, with more Microsoft Store apps available for zero-touch deployment without wrapping or packaging. App installation status reporting has improved, providing clearer visibility of deployment success and failure rates across the device fleet.
Microsoft Purview: simplified compliance for SMBs
Purview's compliance portal received a simplified navigation update oriented to SMB use cases. The new "Compliance Manager" view provides a step-by-step improvement roadmap aligned to common frameworks (NZ Privacy Act, ISO 27001) — making compliance posture improvement more accessible without a dedicated compliance officer.
