Microsoft Defender for Identity vs Symantec Advanced Threat Protection comparison

Microsoft Defender for Identity integrates with Microsoft tools to monitor user activity, providing advanced threat detection and analysis using AI. It enhances proactive threat response and security visibility, making it essential for securing on-premises and cloud environments like Active Directory.

Microsoft Defender for Identity offers comprehensive monitoring and AI-driven user behavior analysis. It detects threats through real-time alerts and identifies lateral movements and entity tagging, ensuring robust security management. With excellent visibility via its dashboard, it supports customized detection rules and seamlessly integrates with SIEM platforms. While SecureScore and SecureScan provide robust environment security, there is room for improvement in cloud security, on-premises application integration, and remediation capabilities. Azure integration is limited, and the administrative interface could be more user-friendly. Users experience frequent false positives, affecting threat detection efficiency.

• Integration with Microsoft Tools: Ensures comprehensive protection across environments.
• AI-driven Behavior Analysis: Uses artificial intelligence to analyze user actions.
• Real-time Threat Detection: Provides immediate alerts to potential threats.
• Lateral Movement Identification: Detects unusual lateral access among users.
• Dashboards with Visibility: Offers insights into security issues with customization options.
• SIEM Integration: Works seamlessly with security information and event management systems.

• Enhanced Threat Prioritization: Helps in effective identification and tackling of threats.
• Improved Proactive Responses: Facilitates a prompt and efficient response mechanism.
• Security Across Environments: Protects both on-premises and cloud-based infrastructures.
• Optimized Conditional Access: Manages policies to enhance security protocol efficacy.

In specific industries such as education and finance, Microsoft Defender for Identity is crucial for securing on-premises Active Directory and Azure Active Directory environments. It effectively detects suspicious activities and manages conditional access policies, offering user and entity behavior analytics, endpoint detection and response capabilities. This helps prevent unauthorized access and strengthens overall security, making it an invaluable asset for organizations aiming to safeguard their digital infrastructure.

Symantec Advanced Threat Protection is a single unified solution that uncovers, prioritizes, and remediates advanced attacks. The product fuses intelligence from endpoint, network, and email control points, as well as Symantec’s massive global sensor network, to stop threats that evade individual security products. It leverages your existing Symantec Endpoint Protection and Symantec Email Security.cloud investments, so it does not require the deployment of any new agents. You can deploy a new installation of Symantec Advanced Threat Protection and start to discover suspicious activity in under an hour. Using the proven technology in Symantec Insight reputation based detection, Symantec SONAR behavioral analysis with the new Symantec Cynic sandbox and file analysis platform, Symantec Advanced Threat Protection provides better detection and prioritization than other vendors, allowing security analysts to “zero in” on just those specific security events of importance.