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Microsoft Defender for Cloud vs SecureWorks Taegis VDR comparison

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 25, 2026

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

Qualys TotalCloud
Sponsored
Ranking in Vulnerability Management
5th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
54
Ranking in other categories
Container Security (8th), Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) (7th), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (6th), SaaS Security Posture Management (SSPM) (2nd), Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPP) (6th)
Microsoft Defender for Cloud
Ranking in Vulnerability Management
11th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
89
Ranking in other categories
Container Management (8th), Container Security (4th), Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (3rd), Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPP) (5th), Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) (7th), Microsoft Security Suite (7th), Compliance Management (4th), Cloud Detection and Response (CDR) (3rd)
SecureWorks Taegis VDR
Ranking in Vulnerability Management
47th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
4
Ranking in other categories
Risk-Based Vulnerability Management (15th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2026, in the Vulnerability Management category, the mindshare of Qualys TotalCloud is 1.2%, up from 1.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Microsoft Defender for Cloud is 2.4%, down from 4.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SecureWorks Taegis VDR is 0.5%, up from 0.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Vulnerability Management Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Qualys TotalCloud1.2%
Microsoft Defender for Cloud2.4%
SecureWorks Taegis VDR0.5%
Other95.9%
Vulnerability Management
 

Featured Reviews

reviewer2859021 - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr Security Engineer at a tech vendor with 5,001-10,000 employees
Risk-based triage has transformed container security and now prioritizes high-impact threats
The best features Qualys TotalCloud offers currently include managing cloud infrastructure and container security while facing major challenges such as alert fatigue. Traditional vulnerability scanners flag hundreds of CVEs on short-lived Kubernetes containers, some of which have no internet exposure or are gone before we can even triage them. I leverage Qualys TotalCloud to move beyond static CVSS. I use it to implement runtime exposure, correlation risk reprioritization, and shift-left integration. This notifies developers to fix a base image upstream rather than patching live ephemeral instances. In my work with cloud and container security, the biggest operational hurdle was alert fatigue. I use Qualys to shift left from static CVSS severity to context-aware risk prioritization. I correlated raw vulnerability data with real-time risk factors such as public network exposure, active runtime execution, or overly permissive IAM roles. This allows us to immediately drop the priority of isolated containers and escalate lower-severity CVEs that sit on an exposed, high-risk path. We can map these findings directly back to our CI/CD pipelines so developers can patch the root base images upstream. We have drastically cut down the signal-to-noise ratio, saved a lot of manual hours doing triage work, and ensured engineering effort goes directly towards high-impact risk reduction.
RW
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.
Jayaprakash Bojanapu - PeerSpot reviewer
Head of IT at Gokaldas Images (USA), Inc.
Automated risk assessment has improved data security but still needs finer file-level controls
In my opinion, SecureWorks Taegis VDR can be improved by adding some other important data security features. Since we are using a couple of backup devices through EDR only, my suggestion would be that additional security features are required so that we can smoothen the data flow. Data protection is a very significant concern for us, and we need security features that work at each file or directory level. I would like to see security features such as user level security, end user level security, group-wise security, and super user-wise security in the future. Time stamping is also very important for us. In the future, I would like to see additional features such as time stamping and file level stamping, as these are more important for us.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"TotalCloud has been excellent in providing us with immediate access to all the products and features we need, such as CSPM, TruRisk Insights, and compliance reports, including CIS and HIPAA."
"I would definitely recommend Qualys TotalCloud to other users."
"Qualys TotalCloud is an excellent platform, and the beauty of the platform is that we can get all the vulnerabilities, see all the reports in a single dashboard, view them segregated, and easily learn about critical, high, and medium findings with appropriately provided remediation steps."
"I like the web API security and IoT scanning features the most. The user-friendly design of TotalCloud's interface enables customers to navigate it and use its full potential easily"
"One of the features I appreciate is the ability to generate daily reports without relying on anyone else."
"By integrating TotalCloud, we have significantly reduced vulnerabilities in our deployment pipeline."
"I would definitely recommend it because it is easy to handle any cloud resources."
"The vulnerability management feature is the one I like the most because it provides a clear picture of all vulnerabilities."
"Using Security Center, you have a full view, at any given time, of what's deployed, and that is something that is very useful."
"In summary, if you would like to work with a product that addresses security in the cloud, or in a multi-cloud environment then this is exactly the product."
"No doubt it is useful as per the log analysis and threat protection analysis."
"One important security feature is the incident alerts. Now, with all these cyberattacks, there are a lot of incident alerts that get triggered. It is very difficult to keep monitoring everything automatically, instead our organization is utilizing the automated use case that we get from Microsoft. That has helped bring down the manual work for a lot of things."
"We are using this solution to implement our CAS policy and it monitors compliance with the Security Center, and we also use it for threat protection as it detects any threats and provides threat recommendations."
"Microsoft Defender for Cloud monitors our entire cloud environment. It enables conditional access and incorporates features like number matching and single sign-on for all our cloud apps. It is great for protecting against ransomware and various security threats."
"It helps you to identify the gaps in your solution and remediate them, and it produces a compliance checklist against known standards such as ISO 27001, HIPAA, iTrust, etc."
"Defender is a robust platform for dealing with many kinds of threats; we're protected from various threats, like viruses, and attacks can be easily minimized with this solution defending our infrastructure."
"SecureWorks Taegis VDR's best features include unified detection and response, as it pulls in alerts and logs from all my different tools such as EDR, SIEM, firewall, cloud services, and Windows machines, collecting everything into one clean dashboard where I can view all these items and eliminate the need to hunt through ten dashboards to piece a threat together."
"I chose SecureWorks Taegis VDR because I trust SecureWorks, having worked with McAfee, Symantec, Trend Micro, Kaspersky, Carbon Black, Cylance, CrowdStrike, Palo Alto Cortex XDR, and more, and I would say SecureWorks Taegis VDR is outstanding among all the other vendors in terms of functionality, ease of access, and UI friendliness."
"It is a one-stop solution for different needs with separate APIs. The product offers different solutions for different companies."
"I would assess the impact of SecureWorks Taegis VDR on my organization's threat detection efficiency as very positive because we have a couple of devices."
 

Cons

"One thing that could be improved is the user experience and navigation."
"Qualys TotalCloud's increasing complexity, due to the development and deployment of multiple solutions, is making the GUI difficult to navigate."
"We encountered challenges identifying the correct resource category for certain items, such as those in containers or storage."
"The cloud licensing unit system is unclear, especially since "units" aren't well-defined."
"In TotalCloud, I would suggest improvements in policy checks to cater to various inventory types like VPCs, subnets, S3 buckets, or IAMs. There is a lack of data segregation according to criticality or inventory."
"Qualys TotalCloud needs to improve its accuracy for non-Windows operating systems."
"There is room for improvement in the support."
"TotalCloud could improve its scanning of niche devices like Wi-Fi dongles and USB modems because they are often untested. It covers everything else, like laptops, mobile devices, and Bluetooth IoT devices. They can improve on the small IoT devices because hackers and testers use these."
"It's hard to reach someone who understands my problems. I haven't had many issues, so I haven't called them."
"Agent features need to be improved. Sometimes, we are not able to get correct signals from the machines on which we have installed these agents."
"The solution could improve by being more intuitive and easier to use requiring less technical knowledge."
"Support needs to be highly responsive, especially in large enterprise environments."
"I would like to see better automation when it comes to pushing out security features to the recommendations, and better documentation on the step-by-step procedures for enabling certain features."
"Microsoft Defender for Cloud is pricey, especially for Kubernetes clusters. It could be cheaper."
"From a compliance standpoint, they can include some more metrics and some specific compliances such as GDPR."
"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."
"I would like to improve SecureWorks Taegis VDR by enhancing the dashboard to provide a holistic view with granular data."
"Regarding technical support, I would say it is not that much up to the mark. That is one of the biggest concerns for us."
"SecureWorks Taegis VDR is very stable, though there is scope for improvement."
"There is always room for improvement in SecureWorks Taegis VDR, especially regarding user interface and navigation, as the platform is powerful but the UI can feel complex for new users."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Qualys TotalCloud is expensive."
"Although Qualys TotalCloud is relatively expensive due to its unique automation features, its cost-effectiveness is rated an eight out of ten, with ten being the most costly."
"Qualys TotalCloud offers competitive pricing given its comprehensive suite of features, including integration, assessment, remediation, and detection capabilities, all within a single platform."
"The pricing for TotalCloud is attractive and competitive in the market. Given the features, especially the dashboard, I have no concerns regarding pricing."
"TotalCloud's price is about right where I would expect it to be."
"While Qualys TotalCloud's pricing is currently acceptable, it is becoming increasingly expensive and may soon be considered overpriced."
"I am not sure about the pricing. From what I understand, it is a bit on the higher side, but I do not have the exact numbers."
"Qualys TotalCloud is cost-efficient and was selected for its value compared to other products."
"While we pay for any additional features, the pricing seems competitive, though I am not involved in the specific cost details."
"We are using the free version of the Azure Security Center."
"I am not involved in this area. However, I believe its price is okay because even small customers are using Azure Security Center. I don't think it is very expensive."
"It has global licensing. It comes with multiple licenses since there are around 50,000 people (in our organization) who look at it."
"Although I am outside of the discussion on budget and costing, I can say that the importance of security provided by this solution is of such importance that whatever the cost is, it is not a factor."
"I rate Microsoft Defender a three out of ten for affordability. The price could be a little lower."
"Microsoft Defender for Cloud is pricey, especially for Kubernetes clusters."
"This solution is more cost-effective than some competing products. My understanding is that it is based on the number of integrations that you have, so if you have fewer subscriptions then you pay less for the service."
Information not available
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Comms Service Provider
18%
Outsourcing Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Computer Software Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Outsourcing Company
7%
Comms Service Provider
18%
Construction Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Wholesaler/Distributor
5%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business16
Midsize Enterprise11
Large Enterprise38
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business31
Midsize Enterprise12
Large Enterprise49
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Qualys TotalCloud?
We purchased Qualys TotalCloud for GCP and Azure as well. It is comparatively better than others regarding pricing. T...
What needs improvement with Qualys TotalCloud?
I am unsure about how Qualys TotalCloud can be improved. I do not have anything else to add about the needed improvem...
What is your primary use case for Qualys TotalCloud?
My main use case for Qualys TotalCloud is telemetry, although I am unsure about the specifics. A quick specific examp...
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 costs, and licensing was that the license cost was the only consideration. Setup an...
What needs improvement with Microsoft Defender for Cloud?
To improve Microsoft Defender for Cloud, I think pricing-wise, the license price is a little bit higher from an inges...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for SecureWorks Taegis VDR?
I think the pricing of SecureWorks Taegis VDR is also higher compared to other options. The pricing is also more.
What is your primary use case for SecureWorks Taegis VDR?
The features I find most valuable in SecureWorks Taegis VDR include data security, which is the main concern for us. ...
What advice do you have for others considering SecureWorks Taegis VDR?
I have used SecureWorks Taegis VDR's automated risk assessment. The metrics I use to measure the impact of SecureWork...
 

Also Known As

Qualys TotalCloud with FlexScan
Microsoft Azure Security Center, Azure Security Center, Microsoft ASC, Azure Defender
No data available
 

Interactive Demo

Demo not available
Demo not available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
Microsoft Defender for Cloud is trusted by companies such as ASOS, Vatenfall, SWC Technology Partners, and more.
Information Not Available
Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft Defender for Cloud vs. SecureWorks Taegis VDR and other solutions. Updated: September 2026.
920,769 professionals have used our research since 2012.