Cisco SecureX [EOL] vs Microsoft Defender for Cloud comparison

Cisco and Microsoft are both solutions in the Vulnerability Management category. Additionally, 100% of Cisco users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 94% of Microsoft users who would recommend it.

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Apr 20, 2025

Cisco SecureX and Microsoft Defender for Cloud both serve the cloud security industry. Cisco SecureX stands out for its integration capabilities and endpoint visibility, making it more advantageous for centralized threat detection. Microsoft Defender excels in compliance and threat intelligence, which may be more suitable for those who fully utilize the Microsoft ecosystem.

Features: Cisco SecureX offers a comprehensive security dashboard that integrates with both Cisco and third-party products, enhancing centralized threat detection. It provides extensive endpoint visibility and strong threat-hunting capabilities. Microsoft Defender for Cloud integrates effectively within Microsoft environments, emphasizing compliance and offering broad threat intelligence. It supports a wide range of workloads, providing valuable security recommendations suitable for various regulatory compliance needs.

Room for Improvement:Cisco SecureX could benefit from simplified automation processes, expanded third-party integrations, and enhanced playbook libraries. Improvements in reporting capabilities and the comprehensiveness of integrations are also sought after. Microsoft Defender for Cloud faces criticism due to its complex pricing structure, challenges with managing false positives, and occasional issues with user interface and documentation. Enhancements in threat intelligence sourcing and better optimization for non-Microsoft platforms are desired.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Cisco SecureX is recognized for its seamless integration with other Cisco products, particularly for those with existing Cisco systems, with responsive technical support. Microsoft Defender for Cloud is scalable across hybrid and multi-cloud environments, supported by extensive documentation, but its customer service response times may lag due to its broader scope.

Pricing and ROI: Cisco SecureX offers cost-effectiveness when bundled with other Cisco products, yielding significant ROI through automated threat blocking and security operations efficiencies. Microsoft Defender for Cloud provides flexible pricing with free and paid tiers, competitive when bundled with Microsoft services. Pricing can be a barrier for smaller businesses, despite the reported improvements in security efficiency and operational savings.

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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

Zafran Security

Featured Reviews

Israel Cavazos Landini

Associate Director IT Security Operations at a pharma/biotech company with 10,001+ employees

Weekly insights and risk analysis facilitate informed security decisions

I appreciate the weekly insights Zafran provides, which include critical topics for networks and IT security, allowing us to evaluate which insights apply to our environment. The organization score feature is valuable to keep the leadership team updated on how our infrastructure fares security-wise. The applicable risk level versus base risk level feature is beneficial because prior to Zafran, we only used the base risk level, but now understand that risk depends on the asset itself. Zafran is an excellent tool.

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Alon K

CTO & VP of Cyber Solutions, Israel at Rockwell Automation

Gives our customers visibility and they don't have to go multiple management consoles anymore

One of the examples is related to forensics. The forensics are amazing because when you have enrichment, and the solutions talk with each other, when you need it, you have the ability to know everything in the organization: when, why, whatever. With just one click you have information from email, from the endpoint, from the web. Let's say that tomorrow morning, you have a ransom[ware] attack in your organization and you would like to know from which email it came, or where the customer saved the file, even though the incident didn't occur at the same moment. With SecureX, you have Cisco Threat Response inside. [With] one click, you get all of the flow. That's amazing value. That also releases resources for our customers. The customers don't have to connect many systems and try to register the event on each system, or to go to the SIEM and do a correlation. That's the one-stop shop for the customers, and that's amazing.

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Vibhor Goel

Senior Cloud Platform Engineer at Deutsche Börse

A single tool for complete visibility and addressing security gaps

Currently, issues are structured in Microsoft Defender for Cloud at severity levels of high, critical, or warning, but these severity levels are not always right. For example, Microsoft might consider a port being open as critical, but that might not be the case for our company. Similarly, it might suggest closing some management ports, but you might need them to be able to log in, so the severity levels for certain things can be improved. Even though Microsoft Defender for Cloud provides a way to temporarily disable certain alerts or notifications without affecting our security score, it would be better to have more granularized control over these recommendations. Currently, we cannot even disable certain alerts or notifications. There should be an automated mechanism to design Azure policies based on the recommendations, possibly with AI integration. Instead of an engineer having to write a policy to fix security gaps, which is very time-consuming, there should be an inbuilt capability to auto-remediate everything and have proper control in place. Additionally, enabling Defender for Cloud at the resource group level, rather than only at the subscription level, would be beneficial.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Overall, we have seen about eighty-seven percent reduction of the number of vulnerabilities that require urgency to remediate, specifically the number of criticals."

"Zafran has become an indispensable tool in our cybersecurity arsenal."

"Zafran is an excellent tool."

"We are able to see the real risk of a vulnerability on our environment with our security tools."

"It has evolved a lot, just that monitoring piece to the current Orchestrator piece. The additional analytics are there. They now have something called Insight, which can basically take data from Microsoft Azure AD and Intune to give us information about our endpoints. This is detailed information about the endpoints, from Secure Endpoint and all these different products. So, it is just constantly evolving. Every time that it evolves, we have more information with more visibility. There are more features that we have that just make everything so much easier, and it is in one place. I don't have to keep going back and forth. I don't have to go to Secure Endpoint and ISE to get the data. I don't have to go to Intune on Microsoft to get the information. It is all in one place."

"Integrates well with our existing security infrastructure."

"The forensics are amazing because when you have enrichment, and the solutions talk with each other, when you need it, you have the ability to know everything in the organization: when, why, whatever."

"The ability to create firewalls online has been most valuable including the ability to create rules."

"Using SecureX, a tool provided by Cisco, we can easily integrate it with many of our other Cisco products such as Cisco ISE and many networking devices."

"SecureX enables us to have all the threat intelligence and threat event data in one place."

"SecureX takes all the separate pieces of security within your company, adds in intelligence from different sites and services on the internet, and makes them work together."

"The most valuable feature is its ability to manage all the applications and visibility. For example, if there is malware, spam, or another component that wants to attack the company in my servers, network, or applications, then SecureX will react to the problem."

More Cisco SecureX [EOL] pros

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

"The most valuable feature is the hunting feature, which integrates well into the entire Microsoft ecosystem."

"Defender for Cloud provides a prioritized list of remediations for security issues, reducing risk and improving security operations."

"The most valuable feature is the regulatory compliance aspect, where we utilize predefined initiatives like NIST. Alert management is another useful feature. Alerts are directly integrated with our email or DevOps board for easy viewing, allowing us to identify problem areas efficiently."

"I would rate Microsoft Defender for Cloud a ten."

"Scalability is great, and I would rate it a ten out of ten."

"The most valuable features of the solution are the insights, meaning the remediation suggestions, as well as the incident alerts."

"The most valuable features of this solution are the vulnerability assessments and the glossary of compliance."

More Microsoft Defender for Cloud pros

Cons

"The dashboarding and reporting functionality of Zafran Security is an area that definitely could use some improvements."

"Initially, we were somewhat concerned about the scalability of Zafran due to our large asset count and the substantial amount of information we needed to process."

"I'm not sure that I would call it a bug, but sometimes the solution is a little slow."

"The documentation can be improved and the on-prem integration. The set of applications that it was integrated with wasn't comprehensive."

"One of the improvements the product needs is more integration with collaboration platforms."

"They could put in more third-party [integrations]... also more playbooks, out-of-the-box, for automation [would be helpful]."

"Remediation stuff could be integrated into the product's automation."

"For us, the biggest sticking point is that the product is not being designed for multi-tenancy use at present, from an MSP perspective."

"They could expand into more areas. The more third-parties that we have tied into it, the better. The capabilities are there. As they just continue to involve the product, the more things that you can look into, then the more analytics that you can get. Also, the more data that we can get, then the better off we will be."

"I would like it to integrate with another solution, e.g., DNA. I would like it to connect to that solution, but not the security aspect."

More Cisco SecureX [EOL] cons

"There are challenges with the licensing policies, which are quite complicated."

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

"For Kubernetes, I was using Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). To see that whatever is getting deployed into AKS goes through the correct checks and balances in terms of affinities and other similar aspects and follows all the policies, we had to use a product called Stackrox. At a granular level, the built-in policies were good for Kubernetes, but to protect our containers from a coding point of view, we had to use a few other products. For example, from a programming point of view, we were using Checkmarx for static code analysis. For CIS compliance, there are no CIS benchmarks for AKS. So, we had to use other plugins to see that the CIS benchmarks are compliant. There are CIS benchmarks for Kubernetes on AWS and GCP, but there are no CIS benchmarks for AKS. So, Azure Security Center fell short from the regulatory compliance point of view, and we had to use one more product. We ended up with two different dashboards. We had Azure Security Center, and we had Stackrox that had its own dashboard. The operations team and the security team had to look at two dashboards, and they couldn't get an integrated piece. That's a drawback of Azure Security Center. Azure Security Center should provide APIs so that we can integrate its dashboard within other enterprise dashboards, such as the PowerBI dashboard. We couldn't get through these aspects, and we ended up giving Reader security permission to too many people, which was okay to some extent, but when we had to administer the users for the Stackrox portal and Azure Security Center, it became painful."

"The documentation and implementation guides could be improved."

"We would like to have better transparency as to how the security score is calculated because as it is now, it is difficult to understand."

"Agent features need to be improved. They support agents through Azure Arc or Workbench. Sometimes, we are not able to get correct signals from the machines on which we have installed these agents. We are not able to see how many are currently reporting to Azure Security Center, and how many are currently not reporting. For example, we have 1,000 machines, and we have enrolled 1,000 OMS agents on these machines to collect the log. When I look at the status, even though at some places, it shows that it is connected, but when I actually go and check, I'm not getting any alerts from those. There are some discrepancies on the agent, and the agent features are not up to the mark."

"The overview provides you with good information, but if you want more details, there is a lot more customization to do, which requires knowledge of the other supporting solutions."

"The pricing could be improved, as it is somewhat high for smaller companies."

More Microsoft Defender for Cloud cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available

"The pricing is competitive, especially for education institutions. Licensing can be a little bit difficult to navigate, especially with resellers with Cisco, but for us it has been pretty easy."

"The product is absolutely free to any customer. As such, the only thing one must keep in mind is that as long as he already has one Cisco security product, irregardless of what that product is, SecureX is available for free."

"It would be nice if they had a different pricing model. Most of our budget for projects goes towards Cisco."

"It comes free with all Cisco products. So, it is a good price."

"The pricing is the best part of this solution. It is free if you buy Umbrella or Duo Security. It is also a good solution."

"Cisco SecureX is more expensive than Trend Micro. However, considering the integration capabilities with other solutions and the quality of technical support, I believe there's justification for the price difference."

"It is free. It can't get any better than that."

"For the value you get, the pricing of the solution is excellent."

More Cisco SecureX [EOL] pricing and cost advice

"We are using the free version of the Azure Security Center."

"Azure Defender is definitely pricey, but their competitors cost about the same. For example, a Palo Alto solution is the same price per endpoint, but the ground strikes cost a bit more than Azure Defender. Still, it's pricey for a company like ours. Maybe well-established organizations can afford it, but it might be too costly for a startup."

"The pricing model for most plans is generally good, but the cost of the new Defender for Storage plan is high and should be revisited, as it could lead to disabling desirable security features due to cost."

"Currently, Microsoft offers only one plan at the enterprise level which is $15 per machine."

"It is bundled with our enterprise subscription, which makes it easy to go for it. It is available by default, and there is no extra cost for using the standard features."

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

"They have a free version, but the license for this one isn't too high. It's free to start with, and you're charged for using it beyond 30 days. Some other pieces of Defender are charged based on usage, so you will be charged more for a high volume of transactions. I believe Defender for Cloud is a daily charge based on Azure's App Service Pricing."

"We only use the free tier, so we haven't faced any pricing, setup costs, or licensing challenges."

More Microsoft Defender for Cloud pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

13%

Financial Services Firm

13%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Computer Software Company

37%

Financial Services Firm

Manufacturing Company

Government

Computer Software Company

14%

Financial Services Firm

13%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Zafran Security?

I find that the pricing for Zafran aligns well with the comprehensive features it offers. The asset and user-based li...

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What needs improvement with Zafran Security?

Zafran is a new startup. Features are continuously being added or improved. 1) Continued integrations with existing (...

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We connect this to our vulnerability scanner as input, our security tools to better determine risk, and our change ma...

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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...

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

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

The cost is generally reasonable. Microsoft Defender for Cloud Plan 2 costs $15 per server, per month. For a normal c...

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM)

May 2025

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Buyer's Guide

Cisco SecureX [EOL]

May 2025

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Buyer's Guide

Microsoft Defender for Cloud

May 2025

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Also Known As

No data available

Kenna.AppSec, Kenna.VI

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

Interactive Demo

Demo not available

Zafran Security

Demo not available

Cisco

Microsoft

Overview

Zafran Security integrates with existing security tools to identify and mitigate vulnerabilities effectively, proving that most critical vulnerabilities are not exploitable, optimizing threat management.

Zafran Security introduces an innovative operating model for managing security threats and vulnerabilities. By leveraging the threat exposure management platform, it pinpoints and prioritizes exploitable vulnerabilities, reducing risk through immediate remediation. This platform enhances your hybrid cloud security by normalizing vulnerability signals and integrating specific IT context data, such as CVE runtime presence and internet asset reachability, into its analysis. No longer reliant on patch windows, Zafran Security allows you to manage risks actively.

What are the key features of Zafran Security?

Threat Exposure Management: Utilizes existing tools to prioritize vulnerabilities and manage threats.
Integrative Analysis: Combines security data with IT context for precise vulnerability management.
Real-time Risk Reduction: Enables immediate risk management without waiting for patches.
Hybrid Cloud Compatibility: Functions across diverse cloud environments for comprehensive security.

What benefits can users expect from Zafran Security?

Improved Security: Enhances protection by efficiently identifying and mitigating risks.
Cost Efficiency: Reduces unnecessary patching expenses by confirming non-exploitable vulnerabilities.
Time Savings: Frees developers to focus on root causes by handling immediate threats.
Comprehensive Insight: Offers a holistic view of security threats and vulnerabilities.

In industries where security is paramount, such as finance and healthcare, Zafran Security provides invaluable protection by ensuring that only exploitable vulnerabilities are addressed. It allows entities to maintain robust security measures while allocating resources efficiently, fitting seamlessly into existing security strategies.

Zafran Security

Cisco SecureX is an integrated security platform that connects the breadth of Cisco's integrated security portfolio and the customer's infrastructure to create a consistent experience. The solution unifies visibility, enables automation, and strengthens your security across network, endpoints, cloud, and applications. Cisco SecureX is embedded within every Cisco Security product and supports integrations with SIEM and SOAR, so customers will not need to replace any solution or worry about layering on new technology.

Cisco SecureX Features

Cisco SecureX has many valuable key features. Some of the most useful ones include:

Unified overview: Cisco SecureX offers key metrics on transactions and threats for network, endpoints, cloud and applications. In addition, the SecureX interface is integrated into all Cisco Security technologies.

Automation and an increase in operational efficiency: With Cisco SecureX, you gain better automation of workflows for products of the Cisco Security portfolio and third parties, allowing you to focus on other more important tasks. By eliminating manual work (through automatic identification of threats using analytical data of Cisco Talos and other sources), the solution helps your organization save a significant amount of time.

Security strengthening: Cisco SecureX makes it easy to compare analytical data from a set of various sources with the telemetry received from network, endpoints, e-mail, cloud, and third-party products.

Cisco SecureX Benefits

Some of the benefits of using Cisco SecureX include:

Secure every business endeavor with an open, integrated platform that has out-of-the-box interoperability and scales to meet security needs.

Advance your security maturity level using existing resources.

Turn security from a blocker into an enabler. Cisco SecureX allows you to add new security capabilities for the threat landscape.

Maximize your operational efficiency, helping you get the most from your security investments.

Reviews from Real Users

Below are some reviews and helpful feedback written by Cisco SecureX users.

PeerSpot user Wouter H., Technical Team Lead Network & Security at Missing Piece BV, shares several reasons why he thinks the solution is fantastic. In his opinion, “SecureX takes all the separate pieces of security within your company, adds in intelligence from different sites and services on the internet, and makes them work together. If an email is received on a machine and malware is being executed, it can be put into lockdown mode. The fact that you can have a single solution that combines endpoint intelligence with email intelligence, firewalls, and publicly available intelligence is really helpful. Also, SecureX provides us with contextual awareness throughout our security ecosystem. Before SecureX, things that were not possible, or that would take days, now literally take seconds to find out.

Michal S., Infrastructure Engineer at a media company, says, “SecureX provides many measurements and has a really good dashboard. Working with it you are able to see things very clearly and you have every detail on a single display. That saves us money and time.” He also adds, “It brings all our data into a central point. It also shows us many data connections between many of our environments. SecureX gives you really good information about potential risks. You are able to find the source of a risk, a potential risk from a user or a machine.”

Blair A., Technology Director at Shawnee Heights USD #450, explains, "One of the most valuable features is the simplicity of deploying SecureX. It's very easy to do that and then you gain very detailed visibility into everything that's going on in your network and, obviously, at the device level. There's just a wealth of information that you can pull from all of these products that are part of SecureX. You know exactly if you have an issue or not."

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

NHS, Rackspace, UNC Pembroke, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Missing Piece

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

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May 2025

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