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Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps vs Microsoft Purview Information Protection comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

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

ROI

Sentiment score
7.6
Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps enhances security, reduces costs by 35-45%, and improves uptime with efficient cloud application management.
Sentiment score
7.4
Microsoft Purview enhances protection, automates compliance, reduces response time, and supports growth, though exact savings are hard to quantify.
The biggest return on investment so far has been visibility, knowing what we have in our environment.
As a small team, Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps allowed us to manage systems with just one or two people.
We have at least saved the costs we had from the Netskope solution this year.
Purview can do a quick scan, and it doesn't use human resources, so it gets time to do things that we need humans to focus on.
The E5 license comes with different solutions like data discovery classification, CASB, DLP solutions, and Defender for Cloud.
The cost of data loss and your data going to a competitor is potentially massive.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
7.3
Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps support is generally good, but users suggest faster responses and improved communication.
Sentiment score
4.4
Users experience inconsistent Microsoft Purview support, citing slow responses and unresolved issues, despite some improvements in visibility and engagement.
Their customer service is pretty good, but it's frustrating to go through three or four channels before reaching the right person.
The support is excellent, and the speed of response is commendable.
There were instances where the engineers were knowledgeable and helpful, but at other times it felt like a ping pong game, with unnecessary transfers until the right person was found.
Sometimes, I get a fast and knowledgeable response, while other times, I've experienced delays and received no resolution.
It's hard to be an ambassador for a product when you know it will be hard to get support.
After our issues are reported, it takes a long time to find a resolution.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.9
Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps offers scalable security, efficiently managing large user bases and app integrations with centralized management.
Sentiment score
7.4
Microsoft Purview Information Protection is praised for scalability despite some concerns with data analytics speed and policy update intervals.
For what I know about the log collector and how much data it can take in, it is super scalable and capable of handling high workloads.
Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps is very scalable, provided you have the right subscription.
In my experience, Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps is good enough for small to medium businesses.
It can be scaled across different departments organization-wide very quickly and easily.
It can handle large collections of data without issues.
Scalability can be improved by reducing these intervals.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
8.1
Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps is praised for high reliability, minimal downtime, consistent performance, and swift issue resolution.
Sentiment score
7.4
Microsoft Purview is stable and reliable, with minor delays and occasional drawbacks, fostering user trust and wide deployment.
I would rate it a ten because I have not experienced any stability issues so far with Defender for Cloud Apps.
I would assess the stability and reliability of Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps as stable
My impression on the stability and reliability of Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps is that it is very stable.
Once implemented, I haven't had issues with its consistency.
The product is stable, and whatever it does, it does better than any other thing.
The solution is stable overall.
 

Room For Improvement

Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps could improve integration, pricing, support, reporting, automation, alerts, and overall user experience across multi-cloud environments.
Microsoft Purview requires better integration, pricing, navigation, and feature enhancements to address user concerns about functionality and support.
For data loss prevention, it would be useful to be able to drill down into the kind of data being transferred over CloudApp.
Defender typically connects to Entra ID, but we have local users on the cloud for database access, SSH, or RDS, and there is nothing produced by Defender regarding those local IAM users.
A significant improvement I would like to see is the integration into a single pane of glass.
Effectiveness in Microsoft Purview Information Protection means enforcing the policy and making sure it works consistently across non-Microsoft products as well.
Having a roadmap or updates about new releases would be helpful for demonstrating to clients.
Clarifying product features and use cases would help avoid such confusion.
 

Setup Cost

Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps is cost-effective within Microsoft 365 bundles, especially for large organizations with discounts available.
Microsoft Purview offers competitive pricing, flexible enterprise licenses, and cost-effective bundled solutions, despite some complexity in licensing options.
The pricing for Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps is acceptable.
My organization is currently revisiting pricing, but previously, the cost was a bit expensive, yet comparable to other solutions with similar functionalities and features.
It's not the cheapest, but also not the most expensive, placing it in the mid-level range.
I talked to people who had compared it to other products on the market, and they're spending five figures to get started.
The E5 license covers most of the solutions for different technologies, so that way, it is good and more affordable compared to any other solution.
Our focus is on helping customers maximize their software investment.
 

Valuable Features

Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps offers integration, threat detection, and management, enhancing security with comprehensive visibility and proactive assessment.
Microsoft Purview enhances data protection with encryption, automated labeling, and compliance, excelling in Microsoft ecosystem integration and management.
The ability to sanction unsanctioned apps using Secure Score benchmarking, included in Cloud, is also beneficial.
Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps is very comprehensive, providing a complete 360-degree view of applications within an organization.
The most valuable features of Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps include live, up-to-date information, which provided real-time alerts.
Microsoft Copilot is an advantage because it's enterprise-grade AI.
It's paramount to have a single solution for information protection.
Regardless of the education, the employee might share the information anyway, so the AI shouldn't be the first point of failure. It should be a human making good decisions.
 

Categories and Ranking

Microsoft Defender for Clou...
Ranking in Microsoft Security Suite
12th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
39
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Access Security Brokers (CASB) (4th), Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) (14th)
Microsoft Purview Informati...
Ranking in Microsoft Security Suite
13th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
14
Ranking in other categories
Data Governance (5th), Data Privacy Management Software (2nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the Microsoft Security Suite category, the mindshare of Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps is 3.0%, up from 1.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Microsoft Purview Information Protection is 1.2%, down from 1.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Microsoft Security Suite
 

Featured Reviews

Jagadeesh Gunasekaran - PeerSpot reviewer
Saves us time, has good visibility, and a single dashboard
The solution is user-friendly and provides great visibility into threats. There are easy options available for specific workflow inspections. We can also get support by going through the Microsoft documentation, which is straightforward. Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps helps us prioritize threats across our enterprise. It covers us from a compliance perspective and protects our organization's data. Data protection is a very important aspect of any new organization, as we need to protect our data from both external attacks and insider threats. Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps helps us monitor for abnormal activity by insiders, which is one of the most important access points for attackers today. Additionally, the different cloud apps that Defender for Cloud Apps supports provide us with much more visibility into potential threats and activities on the internet. We have integrated Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps alerts with Sentinel. The integration is straightforward. We can find the configuration details on Microsoft's official documentation website. If we are familiar with how Microsoft products work, we will be able to follow the instructions clearly. Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps and Sentinel work natively together to deliver coordinated detection and response across our environment. Our integrated Microsoft solutions provide comprehensive threat protection, covering most of the tactics and techniques relevant to the MITRE ATT&CK framework. Sentinel allows us to ingest data from our entire ecosystem. When implementing an SIEM solution, there are always prerequisites such as Active Directory logs, security logs, firewall logs, and DNS logs. These are important logs that need to be ingested into the environment. Sentinel has many third-party connectors available that make integrations straightforward. Microsoft provides the configuration details in the Sentinel platform. It is important to integrate all relevant log sources into the SIEM solution so that we can detect and be alerted to any type of threat factor, whether it is from an internal or external source. Integrating third-party solutions into the platform requires a separate configuration, but Microsoft provides the necessary information. However, we need to have the appropriate permissions to execute these setups. Sentinel provides a centralized dashboard that covers threat management and configuration. It gives us complete insight into what entities are accessing, as well as full details for investigation. We can see how the alerts and threats are relevant to suspicious activities, whether they are related to malicious IP addresses, suspicious ASHAs, or any other indicators of compromise. All of this relevant data can be seen in a single pane. Recently, Microsoft introduced a new investigation experience in a single pane. This means that we can now get a lot of details in a single pane, without having to go there and execute a query. There are a lot of new insights being developed in the Sentinel platform these days. It has software intelligence. They recently introduced Microsoft Defender Threat Intelligence, which covers almost all IOCs. This protects organizational assets from threats and suspicious traffic associated with IOCs. If a match is found, alerts are generated. This is a very interesting feature. Another great feature is automation and logic apps. We can create a number of operations, such as posting in a team's channel if a severe incident occurs or sending an email notification. There are many operations available, so we can automate a lot of tasks. Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps helps us stay compliant. It has predefined mechanisms in place to prevent attacks. For example, if an external user tries to access our SharePoint folders or files, an attack will be blocked. This is why it is important to give appropriate access to guest users. Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps has many features and benefits. It provides a number of policies that can be configured to meet the specific needs of our security team. These policies can be used to customize cloud applications so that only authorized users can access them and perform operations that benefit the organization. In terms of safety and security, Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps is top-notch. Using the solution's automation features, we can suppress false positive alerts. We can also close alerts, lower their severity from "high" to "low" or "informational," or close them immediately with the appropriate commands. This will depend on the configuration automation rule and the perspective from which we are testing. Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps provides a single console. We are also provided with Microsoft templates to enable workbooks instantly. Alternatively, we can build our own customized workbooks to provide better insights and improve our SOC efficiency and overall performance. Consolidating all of our security data into one dashboard has saved our security operations team a significant amount of time. From an analyst's perspective, it is now much easier to correlate events, investigate alerts, and visualize specific entities. For example, an analyst can quickly see all of the alerts associated with a particular IP address, or they can view all of the activity for a specific entity over the past 24 hours or 7 days. This level of detail and insight would not be possible if our data were siloed in multiple dashboards. The single dashboard saves our operations approximately 20 hours per week by eliminating the need to access multiple consoles and tabs. Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps threat intelligence can help us prepare for potential threats before they happen. However, it depends on how we develop the policies for the database to block or ignore things in our environment.
Abhi T - PeerSpot reviewer
Achieve comprehensive data protection with reliable performance and room for enhanced discovery accuracy
The product is still in a growing phase. I could see that many use cases in their product are not capable enough in terms of detecting or protecting. Compared to other products, they are in the middle of bringing their solution up to the mark, so it is not a full-grown solution. They have to get more accurate results in terms of data discovery and classification. The second thing is their support; support from Microsoft takes a lot of time to get a response from their support team. The third thing is their OCR capability is not that great in terms of identifying the documents. We would love to see response times of less than 24 hours. Additionally, there is no way to check the policy's current status in terms of whether it got synced or not. You have to wait and test the use cases after 24 hours or after 48 hours, and once it starts working, then it appears the policy got implemented.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
7%
Financial Services Firm
19%
Computer Software Company
12%
Retailer
7%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

Which is the better security solution - Cisco Umbrella or Microsoft Cloud App Security?
Cisco Umbrella is an integral component of the Cisco SASE architecture. It integrates security in a single, cloud-native solution, unifying multiple features like DNS-layer security, threat intelli...
What do you like most about Microsoft Cloud App Security?
It does a great job of monitoring and maintaining a security baseline. For us, that is a key element. The notifications are pretty good.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Microsoft Cloud App Security?
My impression on the pricing, setup costs, and licensing of Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps is that it's fair. I don't know by heart the exact pricing, but it's part of the E5 license which we al...
What do you like most about Microsoft Purview Information Protection?
It ensures that sensitive data is automatically safeguarded, even for email attachments, regardless of the user or device.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Microsoft Purview Information Protection?
The pricing is not very high and is considered fine. Microsoft offers different licensing options. AIP Plan 2 is used for critical users. The AIP is included in the business standard license for cl...
What needs improvement with Microsoft Purview Information Protection?
I am concerned about its accuracy levels. Sometimes it throws a lot of false positives. Microsoft Purview Information Protection needs to increase effectiveness and ensure compatibility. Effectiven...
 

Also Known As

MS Cloud App Security, Microsoft Cloud App Security
Microsoft Information Protection
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Customers for Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps include Accenture, St. Luke’s University Health Network, Ansell, and Nakilat.
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Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps vs. Microsoft Purview Information Protection and other solutions. Updated: June 2025.
860,168 professionals have used our research since 2012.