Can I partially license my organization with P1 licenses to make use of conditional access?

Question

Scenario: We have an SMB of 300 people where we only want to implement Conditional Access policies for 150 of them.

Question: Does it go against Microsoft's terms to license ONLY that portion of users to benefit from Conditional access?

We do not want to license the other half of the users in the organization, as they do not need conditional access policies applied to them.

I see a lot of conflicting information on this topic on the web; from Microsoft's articles, I've read that it might be within our bounds to license only the users that would benefit from P1. BUT, P1 is a 'tenant-wide' enabled feature. So this confliction I find confusing.

Here is the article I have been reading: Microsoft 365 guidance for security & compliance

Thanks in advance.

Michael

Answer 1

Of course, your only responsibility here is to make sure no unlicensed user will benefit from CA policies, or any other functionality they don't have the matching license for. Yes, having even one P1 license will enable a set of other features, but this doesn't necessarily mean that unlicensed users are taking advantage of such features. Usually, additional configuration is required for such, so as long as you don't scope them to include unlicensed users, you will be fine.