Everything else in this series is machinery you own outright. Two things are not: an artificial intelligence capacity that is metered and currently uncapped by any bill, and five human services that carry no public price at all.

The question is no longer whether to buy a second product. New workspaces are born inside the Defender portal, the old experience retires on 31 March 2027, and a tenant with E5 already has an ingestion grant it is probably not using.

A saved query is a note to yourself. This takes one through the whole lifecycle to a governed detector with mapped entities, a defensible schedule, a name that survives you, and a benign end-to-end test you can actually run in a production tenant.

Consoles get redesigned and features get withdrawn. The thing Microsoft has built here that will outlast both is a normalised event schema across every workload, and the detections your own team writes against it are the only part of this platform you own outright.

Attack disruption acts without asking, so everything you get to say about it is said in advance and across six workloads. This proves each prerequisite is actually true, builds an exclusion register you can defend, and validates with the only evidence Microsoft gives you.

One half of the platform's automation asks permission before it acts. The other half acts and lets you undo it afterwards. On 1 September 2026 the half that asks permission stops running for endpoint, and Microsoft has published almost nothing about what that means.

Import the legacy roles, build the ones you actually want, activate one workload at a time in an order you can defend, and configure the three tenant-level settings that belong to no pillar and that most tenants have never touched.