What will doing it yourself cost?

The stage allowances total 70–150 internal working hours, before incident work, deep remediation, legal review or extensive recovery engineering. This is a transparent editorial estimate formed by adding the stage ranges, not a market benchmark. Stages can overlap; the complete program might be planned over roughly 8–16 weeks, with readiness and change windows determining the real duration.

Calculate:

Internal project cost = approved loaded hourly cost × recorded project hours.

Add quoted external advice, implementation, licenses, recurring operations, log storage, testing, recovery capacity and transition costs. No validated general MDR, vCISO or penetration-test price band was established in this research. Obtain fixed scopes or capped discovery proposals before treating uncertain work as budgeted.

For a concrete software arithmetic example only, 200 eligible users at Microsoft's observed $3/user/month annual-plan rate would be $7,200 annually before any applicable tax or additional requirements. This excludes staff and MDR, and must not be extrapolated beyond Defender for Business's product limits.