

Microsoft Defender for Cloud and Microsoft Sentinel are products in the cloud security category. Sentinel seems to have the upper hand due to its advanced AI-driven threat detection and centralized management platform, providing a holistic security approach.
Features: Microsoft Defender for Cloud offers comprehensive security features with robust visibility and management capabilities. It integrates seamlessly with Microsoft products and provides detailed security alerts and recommendations. Microsoft Sentinel excels in AI-driven threat detection and response capabilities, advanced automation, and integration across diverse environments.
Room for Improvement: Microsoft Defender for Cloud faces challenges with managing false positives, complexity in configuration, and pricing concerns. There is a need for more automation and clearer remediation. Sentinel users seek better third-party integration, an improved learning curve, and cost reduction associated with data ingestion.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Microsoft Defender for Cloud is primarily deployed on the public cloud and integrates easily with Azure services, though support quality can be inconsistent. Microsoft Sentinel, favoring public cloud deployment, integrates well within the Microsoft ecosystem, though customer service experiences are mixed with noted improvements needed in support resources.
Pricing and ROI: Microsoft Defender for Cloud offers comprehensive features but can be costly for smaller organizations due to licensing plans and additional service costs. It provides strong ROI through security enhancements. Microsoft Sentinel's costs can rise with data ingestion, but it offers price efficiency via existing Microsoft products. Its competitive pricing model, though complex, provides significant returns when integrated into broader security strategies.
Defender proactively indexes and analyzes documents, identifying potential threats even when inactive, enhancing preventative security.
Identifying potential vulnerabilities has helped us avoid costly data losses.
Compared to not having Microsoft Defender for Cloud in place, we definitely saw an advantage by not having downtime due to a security threat.
If a customer is already using Microsoft’s ecosystem, the ROI can be positive due to seamless integration.
Our MTTR, mean time to response, improved by forty to fifty percent. Earlier, medium-severity incidents took two to three hours to resolve. Now, after Microsoft Sentinel, it is forty to fifty-five minutes.
We attribute our growth to Sentinel.
Since security is critical, we prefer a quicker response time.
The support team was very responsive to queries.
They understand their product, but much like us, they struggle with the finer details, especially with new features.
Their solutions' integration simplifies resolving issues compared to those caused by third-party products.
Microsoft invests significantly in support, which is crucial for companies.
Working with a Sentinel engineer helped us tune settings effectively.
As we have reduced our on-premises infrastructure, it is about how we can migrate workloads to the cloud to make it easier, and then having everything fully encompassed and secured within that area makes it much easier for us to scale as needed and grow.
We are using infrastructure as a code, so we do not have any scalability issues with Microsoft Defender for Cloud implementation because our cloud automatically does it.
It has multiple licenses and features, covering infrastructures from a hundred to five hundred virtual machines, without any issues.
Office 365 and Exchange are running on it, covering about 35,000 users efficiently.
There is no need to add hardware or redesign infrastructure because it is cloud-native.
As our organization uses Microsoft Azure and Defender, everything grows together, and we can integrate various features seamlessly.
Defender's stability has been flawless for us.
Microsoft Defender for Cloud is very stable.
Microsoft sometimes changes settings or configurations without transparency.
So far, we have not experienced any issues, and it has been stable from the beginning.
In the past two years, our team hasn't encountered any issues with the stability of Microsoft Sentinel from an operations perspective.
I need to be aware of deprecated connectors as they may disconnect, but the data continues to be sent with a need for quick adaptation.
Microsoft, in general, could significantly improve its communication and support.
It would be beneficial to streamline recommendations to avoid unnecessary alerts and to refine the severity of alerts based on specific environments or environmental attributes.
The artificial intelligence features could be expanded to allow the system to autonomously manage security issues without needing intervention from admins.
Log ingestion and retention costs can grow quickly, and understanding which data source is driving cost is not always straightforward.
We have some tools, such as our off-site Meraki firewalls, that have not fully integrated with Sentinel.
Currently, we are happy to have a way in the middle with not so much cost, but it would be nice to have the ability to enhance the automation of workflows based on learned incidents.
Security has essentially no cost when compared to the cost of a breach.
Every time we consider expanding usage, we carefully evaluate the necessity due to cost concerns.
We appreciate the licensing approach based on employee count rather than a big enterprise license.
It has been beneficial that Microsoft Sentinel is included as part of the Microsoft package, making it more cost-effective.
Microsoft Sentinel is not a low-cost SIEM.
Microsoft Sentinel offers more capabilities than Bastion, with a more intuitive experience.
The most valuable feature for me is the variety of APIs available.
This feature significantly aids in threat detection and enhances the user experience by streamlining security management.
The most valuable feature is the recommendations provided on how to improve security.
Microsoft Sentinel's ability to correlate data from multiple sources and its detection capabilities are essential.
Microsoft Sentinel has improved cost efficiency, which is one of the key areas we're able to win business against the ability to have threat intelligence.
Microsoft Sentinel's ability to correlate data from multiple sources enhances our threat detection capabilities beyond what is a simple data lake solution by filtering out the noise and consolidating the signal down to a meaningful level that is easier to investigate and see.
| Product | Market Share (%) |
|---|---|
| Microsoft Sentinel | 4.7% |
| Microsoft Defender for Cloud | 5.5% |
| Other | 89.8% |


| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 27 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 10 |
| Large Enterprise | 49 |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 38 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 22 |
| Large Enterprise | 45 |
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 Sentinel is a scalable, cloud-native, security information event management (SIEM) and security orchestration automated response (SOAR) solution that lets you see and stop threats before they cause harm. Microsoft Sentinel delivers intelligent security analytics and threat intelligence across the enterprise, providing a single solution for alert detection, threat visibility, proactive hunting, and threat response. Eliminate security infrastructure setup and maintenance, and elastically scale to meet your security needs—while reducing IT costs. With Microsoft Sentinel, you can:
- Collect data at cloud scale—across all users, devices, applications, and infrastructure, both on-premises and in multiple clouds
- Detect previously uncovered threats and minimize false positives using analytics and unparalleled threat intelligence from Microsoft
- Investigate threats with AI and hunt suspicious activities at scale, tapping into decades of cybersecurity work at Microsoft
- Respond to incidents rapidly with built-in orchestration and automation of common tasks
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