Switching between licensing modes for the Protection service

In Management Portal, you can switch the licensing modes of your tenants.

The switching process consists of the following steps in the background:

  1. Provision the new services (offering items) to a customer tenant (enabling of offering items and quota set up) to match the functionality that was available in the original offering item.
  2. Unassign unused offering items and assign the offering items to workloads according to the features used in the protection plans (usage reconciliation).

The following table illustrates the results of switching between licensing modes for all supported scenarios.

Switch from Switch to Switch results
Offering items Quotas Usage

Service-based

(Per workload or

Per gigabyte) 

Solution-based

(Per workload)

 All services that are available to the parent tenant within the Solution-based licensing mode are enabled. All available quotas are set to "unlimited".

Offering items will be reassigned to the workloads according to the features used in the protection plans assigned on these workloads.

Solution-based

(Per workload)

Service-based

(Per workload or Per gigabyte)

 All services available to the parent tenant within the Service-based licensing mode are enabled. All available quotas are set to "unlimited"

Service-based

(Per workload or Per gigabyte)

Service-based

(Per gigabyte or Per workload)

The same services that were enabled in the source mode will be enabled in the destination mode.

 Quotas are replicated "as is" from the source services to the destination services.
Regardless of the switch, all protection plans will continue to function without interruption, all registered workloads and their backups will be preserved, and the historical usage statistics will be preserved.

Example: Switching from Service-based (per workload) with additional services to Solution-based (per workload)

In this scenario, a customer tenant has Service-based (per workload) Standard Protection used on 8 workstations, and the quota is set to 10 workstations. 3 of the workstations are using software inventory and patch management in their protection plans (part of the RMM service), 2 of the workstations have URL filtering (part of the Detection and Response service) enabled in their protection plans, and one of the machines is using continuous data protection (part of the Advanced Backup service). The following table illustrates the conversion of the usage to offering items under the solution-based licensing mode.

Source offering items - usage/quota Destination offering items - usage/quota
  • Standard Protection
    • Workstations - 8/10
  • Detection and response - 2/10
  • Advanced Backup workstation - 1/10
  • RMM - 3/10
  • Ultimate protection
    • Workstations - 8/unlimited

The following steps were executed during the switch:

  1. The offering item Ultimate Protection that covers the functionality that was available in the source billing configuration was enabled automatically.

  2. The quota was set to 'unlimited'.

  3. The usage was reconciled according to the actual usage in protection plans: 8 workstations use features of the Ultimate Protection offering.

Example: Solution-based to Service-based (per workload) billing

In this example, the customer has multiple solution-based offering items assigned on workloads. Each workload can have only one licensing mode assigned: Solution-based or Service-based (per workload or per gigabyte).

Solution-based offering items - usage/quota Service-based offering items - usage/quota

  • Security and RMM

    • Microsoft 365 seats - 2/12 (security posture management in protection plans)

    • Endpoints - 4/12 (4 workstations with antimalware protection in protection plans)

  • Standard Protection

    • Workstations - 4/Unlimited

  • RMM

    • Microsoft 365 seats - 2/Unlimited

  • Backup and Disaster Recovery

    • Workstations 2/10 (with only backup in the protection plan)

    • Servers 3/10 (with backup and disaster recovery in the protection plan)

  • Standard Protection

    • Workstations - 2/Unlimited

    • Servers - 3/Unlimited

  • Disaster Recovery - 3/Unlimited

  • Ultimate Protection 2/10

    • Virtual machines 2/10 (with backup and antimalware protection in the protection plan)

  • Standard protection

    • Virtual machines - 2/Unlimited

The following steps were executed during the switch:

  1. The offering items that cover the functionality that was available in all source offering items were enabled automatically. With service-based billing modes, multiple offering items can be assigned to a workload as needed.
  2. The quotas were summarized and replicated.
  3. The usage was reconciled according to the protection plans.
  4. All offering items are enabled, and quotas are reset to Unlimited.