Cisco Secure Workload vs Microsoft Defender for Cloud comparison

Cisco Secure Workload vs. Microsoft Defender for Cloud

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Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Categories and Ranking

SentinelOne Singularity Clo...

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2026, in the Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) category, the mindshare of SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security is 4.4%, up from 2.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Cisco Secure Workload is 2.4%, down from 3.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Microsoft Defender for Cloud is 16.5%, up from 14.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
Microsoft Defender for Cloud	16.5%
SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security	4.4%
Cisco Secure Workload	2.4%
Other	76.7%

Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP)

Featured Reviews

Satyavijay Chavan

Information Security Engineer at DataVigilant Infotech

Enables us to prioritize and effectively address critical security issues

Evidence-based reporting helps us to prioritize and solve critical security issues. The new visualization feature demonstrates how an attacker can enter the system, highlighting the potential path that can be exploited and outlining all the steps the attacker could take. With that visibility, we can ensure the perimeter is strong and attackers cannot enter, thus reducing the risk. It has helped us prioritize issues. The visibility into how an attack could happen is valuable. For example, it highlights the system vulnerability and outlines where an attack could propagate. The visualization helps me to prioritize remediation, and if I don't know where to start, I can check to see the score that enables me to prioritize issues. I am using infrastructure-as-code scanning, and it's one of the useful features. In pre-production, it identifies embedded secrets and misconfigurations, including issues with Kubernetes or some privileged containers. This feature allows us to pass the audit and secure IaC code so that it isn't easily exploitable by attackers. We can more proactively work to identify and resolve vulnerabilities by using the dashboard and the alerting system that SentinelOne provides. It helps us with audits and compliance. We can show the compliance in percentage. We can confidently say that our company or infrastructure is very secure. It has improved our security posture by 30% to 35%. It has reduced our false positives by 30%. It has helped teams collaborate better. The security team manages SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security, and when it flags vulnerabilities, they are forwarded to DevOps for remediation. Previously, we needed to identify and report the issues, but there would be lapses in communication. Now, there is a centralized dashboard that anyone can look at and see the open issues and work on them.

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Raj Metkar

Director, Head of Networks at MUFG, EMEA

Discover internal application dependencies and create a dependency map

We actively seek improvements in integrating the Infoblox DDI platform with Cisco Secure Workload. This integration allows Cisco Secure Workload to learn about our networks and network tags, providing valuable insights into vulnerabilities related to the operating system and various applications installed on our servers. Recently, Cisco announced a new product called HyperShield, an AI-based autonomous micro-segmentation solution. While Cisco has not stated that HyperShield will replace Cisco Secure Workload, it represents a natural evolution for the company. HyperShield features dynamic policy discovery and enforcement; however, once policies are enforced, they do not change until a discovery occurs, requiring a re-enforcement process. This new platform operates autonomously, minimizing the need for user or security engineer intervention. I would have expected Cisco to incorporate more automatic discovery and enforcement features within the existing Cisco Secure Workload product. Instead of enhancing the current product, they have introduced a new solution. Cisco plans to honor existing Tetration licenses, allowing users to transition to HyperShield without additional costs, reflecting the investment enterprises have already made. From Cisco’s perspective, this represents a natural progression in their product line. While the product name changes, it seems more of a rebranding effort. The enhancements are greater autonomy, improved discovery, and automatic enforcement, which are now being introduced in HyperShield. Cisco Secure Workload offers automatic policy enforcement but cannot adjust policies dynamically as the application needs to change. Having used the platform for the past five years, the recent announcement has been reassuring. Cisco has confirmed that our investment in the platform will not go to waste. They will honor our existing licenses, providing a natural migration path to the new solution without any disruption

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RyanWalker

Head Of IT at Cirrus Response

Cloud security has cut investigation time and now reveals threats faster but needs simpler oversight

When deploying AI applications, my key security concerns with Microsoft Defender for Cloud are data loss, leakage of data, and guardrails around the actual AI, and I am hoping that this is going to help me put those guardrails in place and identify data exfiltration. Microsoft Defender for Cloud has not helped me manage and secure multi-cloud environments, as we are 100 percent Microsoft and have not really got it in any other environment at all. I am not yet using the unified AI-powered security feature offered by Microsoft Defender for Cloud, but that is coming. I am not yet using the integrated XDR feature of Microsoft Defender for Cloud, but that is coming. I am not yet utilizing the GenAI threat protection features of Microsoft Defender for Cloud. That is also coming and a lot of that will come from learning it here. I have enabled the agentless scanning in my cloud environment with Microsoft Defender for Cloud. Assessing the impact on my workload protection without needing to install agents with Microsoft Defender for Cloud makes it a lot easier, but it also identifies a lot more, which puts more load on me sometimes. I would advise another organization considering Microsoft Defender for Cloud that it is the most logical route to follow if their whole ecosystem is Microsoft. It is easy to implement and it is very self-explanatory when doing it, making sense to just follow the steps as it is too simple, really. I would rate this review a 7.5 out of 10.

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Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

"SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security provides email alerts and ranks issues based on severity, such as high, critical, etc., that help us prioritize issues."

"With SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security, it's easy to onboard new accounts."

"Singularity Cloud Security offers autonomous response capabilities, automatically remediating threats and restoring affected files without manual intervention."

"SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security offers an intuitive user interface that lets us navigate quickly and easily."

"SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security is excellent, and I highly recommend it."

"Singularity Cloud Security's most valuable features are its ease of scalability and comprehensive security measures."

"It is advantageous in terms of time-saving and cost reduction."

"Singularity Cloud's ability to create custom correlation searches and reduce noise is highly valuable."

More SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security pros

"It's stable."

"A complete and powerful micro-segmentation solution."

"The most valuable feature of this solution is security."

"Instead of proving that all the access control lists are in place and all the EPGs are correct, we can just point the auditor to a dashboard and point out that there aren't any escaped conversations. It saves an enormous, enormous amount of time."

"The most valuable feature of the solution is that we don't have to do packet captures on the network."

"The only use case I can see that makes sense is micro-segmentation. I think there are other use cases for it. The main purpose of the product is to do micro-segmentation by collecting IP. That could be done by installing an agent, and then you have all the communication coming in and out. You could also use some flow sensors installed in the network that receive a copy of the traffic and then report that back to the system."

"The product offers great visibility into the network so we can enforce security measures."

"Scalability is its most valuable feature."

More Cisco Secure Workload pros

"The entire Defender Suite is tightly coupled, integrated, and collaborative."

"Microsoft Defender has a lot of features including regulatory compliance and attaching workbooks but the most valuable is the recommendations it provides for each and every resource when we open Microsoft Defender."

"Defender lets you orchestrate the roll-out from a single pane. Using the Azure portal, you can roll it out over all the servers covered by the entire subscription."

"Microsoft Defender for Cloud can find potential phishing links and malicious code in data at rest."

"The most valuable feature is the recommendations provided on how to improve security."

"The most valuable features offer the latest threat detection and response capabilities."

"The valuable features include the ability to manage devices and the fact that Defender can replace other security tools like SCCM."

"We can create alerts that trigger if there is any malicious activity happening in the workflow and these alerts can be retrieved using the query language."

More Microsoft Defender for Cloud pros

Cons

"SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security is an excellent CSPM tool, but its CWPP features need improvement, and there is scope for more application security posture management features."

"The could improve their mean time to detect."

"The areas with room for improvement include the cost, which is higher compared to other security platforms. The dashboard can also be laggy."

"Crafting customized policies can be tricky."

"SentinelOne currently lacks a break glass account feature, which is critical for implementing Single Sign-On."

"The recommended actions aren't always specific, so it might suggest recommendations that don't apply to the particular infrastructure code I'm reviewing."

"We wanted it to provide us with something like Claroty Hub in AWS for lateral movement. For example, if an EC2 instance or a virtual machine is compromised in a public subnet based on a particular vulnerability, such as Log4j, we want it to not be able to reach some of our databases. This kind of feature is not supported in SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security."

"The cloud-based operations might pose challenges in areas with limited or unavailable internet connectivity. Desktop features might be useful for smaller organizations with less complex security needs."

More SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security cons

"They should scale down the hardware a bit. The initial hardware investment is two million dollars so it's a price point problem. The issue with the price comes from the fact that you have to have it with enormous storage and enormous computes."

"There was a controversy when Cisco reduced the amount of data they kept, and the solution became quite cost-intensive, which made its adoption challenging….Although they have modified it now, I preferred the previous version, and I wish all the functionality were back under the same product."

"The product must be integrated with the cloud."

"The integration could be better, especially with different types of solutions."

"The interface is really helpful for technical people, but it is not user-friendly."

"There is some overlap between Cisco Tetration and AppDynamics and I need to have a single pane of glass, rather than have to jump between different tools."

"There's room for improvement when it comes to Cisco Secure Workload. A couple of internal areas could be refined a little bit. They are trying to solve it, depending on where you suppose the agent is. Suppose you have the agent on both the server and the client, which could be the front-end server or web server connecting to the. In that case, if those two are communicating on RPC, the server can look into its configuration. It could go down and find the configuration file on the FTP server and then set the policies to it. But there are a lot of different FTP servers out there. It's also a complex case for the tool to support all FTP servers."

"I'd like to see better documentation for advanced features. The documentation is fairly basic. I would also like to see better integration with other applications."

More Cisco Secure Workload cons

"The remediation process could be improved."

"The solution could improve by being more intuitive and easier to use requiring less technical knowledge."

"You cannot create custom use cases."

"Early on, the lack of transparency is a challenge. Microsoft does not tell you the cost when they launch something."

"Microsoft can improve the pricing by offering a plan that is more cost-effective for small and medium organizations."

"Defender could improve how data is represented. It can be unstructured or slow to load."

"Microsoft has much room for improvement regarding the support for Microsoft Defender for Cloud. Their competitors are much better regarding support."

"From my own perspective, they just need a product that is tailored to micro-segmentation so I can configure rules for multiple systems at once and manage it."

More Microsoft Defender for Cloud cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We have an enterprise license. It is affordable. I'm not sure, but I think we pay 150,000 rupees per month."

"I wasn't sure what to expect from the pricing, but I was pleasantly surprised to find that it was a little less than I thought."

"The pricing is somewhat high compared to other market tools."

"Pricing is based on modules, which was ideal for us."

"For pricing, it currently seems to be in line with market rates."

"SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security is costly."

"Singularity Cloud Workload Security's pricing is good."

"PingSafe falls within the typical price range for cloud security platforms."

More SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security pricing and cost advice

"The cost for the hardware is around 300k."

"It is not cheap and pricing may limit scalability."

"The price is outrageous. If you have money to throw at the product, then do it."

"Pricing depends on the scope of the application and the features. Larger installations save more."

"The pricing is a bit higher than we anticipated."

"Regarding price, Cisco Secure Workload can be expensive if you don't have a budget. If you're not doing micro-segmentation, every extra security measure or enforcement you're putting on top of your existing environment will be an extra cost. It's not a cheap solution at all. But from my point of view, if you need to do micro-segmentation, this is one of the best tools I've seen for it. I can't compare that to Microsoft's solution because I haven't looked into it. I've looked into VMware and Cisco. Those are the only two that I know of. I didn't know that Microsoft could do micro-segmentation at all. Maybe they can, but I haven't heard anything about it."

"The price is based on how many computers you're going to install it on."

"I'm not privy to that information, but I know it's probably close to a million dollars a year."

"Microsoft Defender for Cloud is pricey, especially for Kubernetes clusters."

"The pricing and licensing of Microsoft Defender for Cloud have been good for us. We appreciate the licensing approach based on employee count rather than a big enterprise license."

"Security Center charges $15 per resource for any workload that you onboard into it. They charge per VM or per data-base server or per application. It's not like Microsoft 365 licensing, where there are levels like E3 and E5. Security Center is pretty straightforward."

"There is a helpful cost-reducing option that allows you to integrate production subscriptions with non-production subscriptions."

"Microsoft's licensing and pricing are sometimes complicated. If someone is new to Microsoft's licensing, they might have difficulty with it."

"I am not involved much with the pricing but the bundle offering is good."

"Pricing depends on your workload size, but it is very cheap. If you're talking about virtual machines, it is $5 or something for each machine, which is minimal. If you go for some agent-based solution for every virtual machine, then you need to pay the same thing or more than that. For an on-premises solution like this, we were paying around $30 to $50 based on size. With Defender, Microsoft doesn't bother about the size. You pay based on the number of machines. So, if you have 10 virtual machines, and 10 virtual machines are being monitored, you are paying based on that rather than the size of the virtual machine. Thus, you are paying for the number of units rather than paying for the size of your units."

More Microsoft Defender for Cloud pricing and cost advice

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884,873 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

14%

Computer Software Company

12%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Government

Manufacturing Company

13%

Computer Software Company

10%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Government

Financial Services Firm

13%

Computer Software Company

11%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	49
Midsize Enterprise	22
Large Enterprise	55

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	5
Midsize Enterprise	3
Large Enterprise	8

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	29
Midsize Enterprise	10
Large Enterprise	49

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about PingSafe?

The dashboard gives me an overview of all the things happening in the product, making it one of the tool's best featu...

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for PingSafe?

Regarding the pricing for SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security, I do not think it is something I can compare.

What needs improvement with PingSafe?

I do not see room for improvement in SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security. In the future, I would like to see the i...

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cisco Secure Workload?

CloudStrike offers antivirus capabilities and firewall features for servers and VDI but lacks automatic policy discov...

What needs improvement with Cisco Secure Workload?

We actively seek improvements in integrating the Infoblox DDI platform with Cisco Secure Workload. This integration a...

What is your primary use case for Cisco Secure Workload?

When we onboarded Cisco Secure Workload, the usual use case was to discover internal application dependencies and cre...

How is Prisma Cloud vs Azure Security Center for security?

Azure Security Center is very easy to use, integrates well, and gives very good visibility on what is happening acros...

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Microsoft Defender for Cloud?

My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing for Microsoft Defender for Cloud was pretty straightforward. We...

What needs improvement with Microsoft Defender for Cloud?

Microsoft Defender for Cloud can be improved. An additional feature that should be included in the next release is Ze...

Wiz vs SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security

Comparisons

Compared 10% of the time

Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks vs SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security

Compared 9% of the time

CrowdStrike Falcon Cloud Security vs SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security

Compared 5% of the time

AWS GuardDuty vs SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security

Compared 4% of the time

FortiCNAPP vs SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security

Compared 4% of the time

More SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security Competitors

Illumio vs Cisco Secure Workload

Compared 17% of the time

Akamai Guardicore Segmentation vs Cisco Secure Workload

Compared 15% of the time

VMware NSX vs Cisco Secure Workload

Compared 11% of the time

Cisco Hypershield vs Cisco Secure Workload

Compared 9% of the time

Cisco Secure Endpoint vs Cisco Secure Workload

Compared 2% of the time

More Cisco Secure Workload Competitors

AWS GuardDuty vs Microsoft Defender for Cloud

Compared 34% of the time

Wiz vs Microsoft Defender for Cloud

Compared 6% of the time

Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks vs Microsoft Defender for Cloud

Compared 4% of the time

Microsoft Defender XDR vs Microsoft Defender for Cloud

Compared 2% of the time

Orca Security vs Microsoft Defender for Cloud

Compared 1% of the time

More Microsoft Defender for Cloud Competitors

Product Reports

SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security

February 2026

SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security report

Download SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security product report

Cisco Secure Workload

Download Cisco Secure Workload product report

Microsoft Defender for Cloud

Download Microsoft Defender for Cloud product report

Also Known As

PingSafe

Cisco Tetration

Microsoft Azure Security Center, Azure Security Center, Microsoft ASC, Azure Defender

Interactive Demo

Demo not available

SentinelOne

Demo not available

Cisco

Microsoft

Overview

SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security offers a streamlined approach to cloud security with intuitive operation and strong integration capabilities for heightened threat detection and remediation efficiency.

Singularity Cloud Security stands out for its real-time detection and response, effectively minimizing detection and remediation timelines. Its automated remediation integrates smoothly with third-party tools enhancing operational efficiency. The comprehensive console ensures visibility and support for forensic investigations. Seamless platform integration and robust support for innovation are notable advantages. Areas for development include improved search functionality, affordability, better firewall capabilities for remote users, stable agents, comprehensive reporting, and efficient third-party integrations. Clarity in the interface, responsive support, and real-time alerting need enhancement, with a call for more automation and customization. Better scalability and cost-effective integration without compromising capabilities are desired.

What are SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security's standout features?

Ease of Use: Intuitive operation simplifies navigation across platforms.
Real-Time Detection: Quick identification and response to threats.
Automated Remediation: Streamlines recovery processes with integration capabilities.
Forensic Visibility: Aids in thorough threat analysis and prevention strategies.
Comprehensive Console: Offers full visibility and historical data tracking.
Platform Integration: Supports seamless operation across cloud and hybrid environments.

What benefits should users expect from SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security?

Enhanced Efficiency: Automation and third-party integration improve threat response.
Improved Detection: Reduces mean time to detect and respond to threats.
Operational Support: Comprehensive visibility and forensic tools aid operational decisions.
Cost Efficiency: Affordable integration with scaling capabilities without high overhead.

SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security is deployed in industries needing robust cloud security posture management, endpoint protection, and threat hunting. Utilized frequently across AWS and Azure, it assists in monitoring, threat detection, and maintaining compliance in diverse environments while providing real-time alerts and recommendations for proactive threat management.

SentinelOne

Cisco Secure Workload is a cloud and data security solution that offers a zero-trust policy of keeping an organization’s application workloads safe and secure throughout the entire on-premise and cloud data center ecosystems.

Cisco Secure Workload will consistently provide protection by discovering workload process anomalies, stopping threats immediately, minimizing the risk threat surface, and aborting any lateral movement.

Today’s ecosystems are very elastic, and in the application-focused dynamic of today’s aggressive marketplace, Cisco Secure Workload delivers a robust security solution that works effectively with today’s most popular applications. The solution uniquely surrounds each and every workload to ensure organizations are able to keep their data, network, and applications safe and secure at all times. Cisco Secure Workload ensures that enterprise organizations can maintain secure applications by consistently building firewalls around every workload level throughout the entire ecosystem. The solution can manage applications that are deployed on containers, virtual machines, or bare-metal servers.

Cisco Secure workload is able to meet an organization's busy needs and offers flexible options such as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and on-premises options. Using the Secure Workload SaaS options, users receive all the benefits of Cisco Secure Workload protection without the hassle of having to deploy and maintain the platform on premises. Users are responsible for acquiring the necessary software licensing and deploying software agents. Using SaaS, Secure Workload runs in the cloud and is operated and maintained by Cisco. This option offers the ability to scale easily and is a popular choice for SaaS-first and SaaS-only clients. Many organizations find they get the best TCO and achieve the best productivity and profitability using the SaaS options.

When choosing on-premises options, organizations choose between hardware-based appliance models (large or small form factors). Platform selection is dependent on scalability goals, the desired fidelity level of flow telemetry, and the actual number of workloads. When a user chooses to configure Cisco Secure Workload for a conversation-only flow telemetry for all workloads, each platform has the capability to scale up vertically twice the default platform scale. Additionally, with Secure Workload, it is possible for the platform to be scaled horizontally in order to satisfy the demands of extra large widely distributed enterprise environments using federation capabilities.

Cisco Secure Workload also provides a robust disaster recovery (DR) tool, which helps to make it a complete, comprehensive solution. The DR allows for continuous restore and backup capabilities that enable users to quickly remediate operations and data to a standby cluster in the event of a drastic failure or disaster.

Reviews from Real Users

“The solution offers 100% telemetry coverage. The telemetry you collect is not sampled, it's not intermittent. It's complete. You see everything in it, including full visibility of all activities on your endpoints and in your network. Other valuable features include vast support for annotations, flexible user applications, machine learning, automatic classification, and hierarchical policies.” - CTO at a tech vendor

Cisco

Microsoft Defender for Cloud is a comprehensive security solution that provides advanced threat protection for cloud workloads. It offers real-time visibility into the security posture of cloud environments, enabling organizations to quickly identify and respond to potential threats. With its advanced machine learning capabilities, Microsoft Defender for Cloud can detect and block sophisticated attacks, including zero-day exploits and fileless malware.

The solution also provides automated remediation capabilities, allowing security teams to quickly and easily respond to security incidents. With Microsoft Defender for Cloud, organizations can ensure the security and compliance of their cloud workloads, while reducing the burden on their security teams.

Microsoft

Sample Customers

Information Not Available

ADP, University of North Carolina Charlotte (UNCC)

Microsoft Defender for Cloud is trusted by companies such as ASOS, Vatenfall, SWC Technology Partners, and more.

Cisco Secure Workload vs. Microsoft Defender for Cloud