Forum Discussion
Defender for Endpoint Server standalone license
As of September 1, Microsoft has removed the Defender for Endpoint on Servers P1 and P2 licenses, forcing on-premises customers to use Azure ARC / Defender for Cloud! Onboarding to Azure ARC is no...
Unfortunately, there is only the option of licensing Defender for Cloud. For example, via Azure Arc onboarding. Microsoft has ignored customer and partner feedback that there is continued high demand for the Defender for Endpoint Server P2 stand alone license for on premises environments. According to my information, it was also removed from new signed Enterprise Agreements.
Our / Costumer solution was to switch EDR for Servers to a different product away from Microsoft.
small update that i worked with MS azure support recently and can confirm doing the onboarding with Azure Arc is what makes this possible now days. It does mean an extra agent installed for Arc/Log management, but things did go smoothly once I did that onboarding and then configured defender for cloud to leverage P1 server licensing. It adds additional complexity if all you want is Defender EDR on your servers, but I can see the benefits to leveraging more Azure features now that they are available via Arc.