Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps Reviews

We have several use cases including file monitoring, unusual travel activities, user investigation, and activity. It pretty much covers every activity based on the cloud.

It helps prioritize insider threats. You can take the necessary actions once you get the logs. And when it comes to malware, if a file is uploaded that potentially has malware, the solution is also very useful. It gives you an alarm on the basis of the hash value of that file.

It is very useful for investigating file exfiltration threats. When it comes to data that is stored in the cloud, you really need to know what is stored there—the contents. You can create many protocols or rules in the tool to know the contents and who the owner is of a file. If we are investigating a threat or alert, it has a really good scope. You get really good details from it.

Overall, the solution has saved us time. For malware, it has an automated investigation feature integrated with Microsoft Defender for Endpoint. If there is suspicious behavior or a malicious file in your computer, it will give you a complete timeline showing how it behaved, how it was executed, and how the file has interacted with the other entities on your machine. You don't need to hunt for the logs. You can just look at the storyline of execution and that saves a lot of time.

It provides real-time detection, most of the time, for malware and other threats. Sometimes, the automated investigation takes some time, although not too long. It provides a smooth flow of investigation, giving you precise data. It saves time compared to manual investigation and the precision is good. On average, it will save one or two hours compared to a manual investigation, depending on the experience and proficiency of the analyst who would do the manual investigation.

In Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps, there is an option to enable files. Once you enable that, it will give you all the files in your organization and where they are located in the cloud. If you are investigating a data breach and you want to get ahead of the investigation, the first thing you can do is a filename search: Where was it located? What was the file movement? What activity happened with the file? You get all the logs. That feature is very useful for investigation purposes.

It also shows user activity. If we are investigating a user for possible data breaches, we can enter the user's name and see the activities that the user has done. Based on that, you can take the necessary action. It gives you all the logs for that particular user. That feature is also very interesting and useful.

I use more than one Microsoft security product, including Defender for Endpoint as well as the Microsoft compliance portal, which is called Microsoft Purview now. It is integrated with Microsoft Data Loss Prevention. I also use Microsoft Defender for Identity. It is used to see if there is any suspicious traffic coming through your domain controller. In total, I use four Microsoft tools and all of these products are integrated. Internal integration of Microsoft products is quite simple. You just need to create one instance and that's it.

They are like the same product. Whatever information you'll get from one tool is the same information you are going to get from another tool. There will be no inconsistency in the data. They are getting logs from one place, not from different sources, so they are coordinated. If they did not work together, there would be a lot of confusion. If one tool is sent an alert and another sent an alert for the same file, that would be a complete ruckus. It has to be well coordinated.

These solutions are quite comprehensive. Most of the time, they provide alerts in a very detailed manner and it is very easy to investigate. While there is some scope for improvement, it is a very good tool for investigating the security threats we are getting. It's quite comprehensive and really good.

The visibility it provides is quite good. You get all the logs for investigation purposes. But there should be more clarity on what is happening with a file. Sometimes, we'll get false positive alarms. For example, when a SharePoint path has no file sharing, but there is an external user, it will trigger an alarm that the file has been shared with an external user. It happens because an external user has access to it but, in reality, he doesn't access it. But you need to check whether anyone has accessed the file and that takes some time. While giving the alert, if it could be more precise in terms of what happened with that file—why it is giving the alert—it would be more convenient for the investigation and save a lot of time.

The alerting mechanism should be more precise when giving you an alert about what activity has been done with the file, whether it was shared or whether it was in a path where an external user had access to it.

Also, Microsoft should provide more automation features. At this time, they are limited.

We have been using Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps for about one and a half years.

There is no downtime. The tool is always available.

It's scalable. You need to purchase more licenses if you want to deploy more.

Microsoft technical support depends on the individual who responds. Some Microsoft SMEs have the knowledge and some don't, to be very frank. They'll just go according to a template but they don't have really good investigation skills.

Microsoft could offer much more proficiency in terms of support. They need more individuals with the ability to resolve issues. At the moment, I would rate it as average.

Neutral

I did not work with a previous solution for cloud apps. For antivirus, I worked with McAfee.

I didn't deploy it, but in my experience, it takes time to learn how the features work because most things are not covered in the Knowledge Base that Microsoft has provided. They don't mention what these things are and how they work in the background. It takes an appreciable amount of time to understand how these tools work.

Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps is only deployed through the cloud. You need to integrate your Azure AD with Cloud Apps. Once you have done that, you don't require a separate deployment model.

In terms of Microsoft Defender for Endpoint, you need to onboard it to your devices through a script. To do that, you can use Intune, SCCM, or many other tools. Intune is native to Microsoft, but SCCM is a third-party tool. You can even deploy it manually.

There is some maintenance involved. The onboarding package can have communication issues and sometimes the antivirus services stop due to malfunction. There are many things that require maintenance. The number of people needed to handle the maintenance depends on the volume of devices you are maintaining.

The E5 license offers everything bundled. People are moving to Microsoft because you buy one license and it gives you everything. That's the reason many companies are attracted to these tools. That is much more beneficial than buying all the suites separately. It's quite economical.

If you are keen on keeping your enterprise safe from external users, so that your files are confidential and external users don't have access to them, you can create a rule in Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps. If it detects an external user has been added to that file or is collaborating on it, an automated governance action can remove that access in near real-time. We are not using the automation feature at the moment because it can create unwanted results. The scope of the exclusion is very limited in the policy.

In terms of a single dashboard, you need a SIEM tool like Microsoft Sentinel to integrate everything into a single dashboard. But at the moment, without that suite, we need to look at our four tools separately.

Potential threats are mainly detected in terms of hash values, malicious IP addresses, and malicious domain names. If you are looking to protect your environment, you can enter these details into Microsoft Defender for Endpoint. Microsoft Defender for Endpoint enables you to add indicators of compromise and it will protect against those entities.

Regarding going with a best-of-breed strategy rather than a single vendor security suite, both have pros and cons. It's not a black-and-white area. If you are going with one vendor, it will collect the logs in a single way. Everyone who looks at them will say, "This is the issue." It won't give you a different point of view. But if you are using another security product, it will have another methodology to collect and integrate the logs and present the information to you. One security tool can miss something that another security tool will catch. Having more than one will give you diversity in terms of alerts and analysis. But on the negative side, when you have more than one solution, you need to purchase separate licenses and spend some more money.

It depends on the budget of your organization for the security team. If you have a big budget, of course, you can diversify. You will benefit more from having different tools as they will, obviously, decrease the chances of getting hit by malware. But it will cost you more. If you have a limited budget, then you should go with a single tool. If you take the financial considerations out of the discussion, Microsoft pretty much covers everything and you should go for a single solution.

Overall, Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps is very convenient for investigation, in terms of security breaches, or if there is file exfiltration. It's a handy tool.

We use it to protect our users' devices against attacks. 

We see stories about attacks in the news, including phishing and spam, Defender helps protect us.

It also gives us an ecosystem. We have one portal where we can manage everything. We don't need to log in to another portal to manage the devices, the antivirus, Defender, or Office. It's a single place to manage everything and that's very good.

It's very easy to install and it includes the Intune portal from Microsoft where I can control all the devices from one place. And because it's a Microsoft product, it integrates with Windows 10 and Windows 11. We don't need to buy anything else.

We have an M365 license and we have an Office admin portal. I manage all the users and licenses through the portal, making it very easy to manage. We have a lot of users coming in and going out of the company, and this makes it simple to provide licenses to people.

I would like to see them include more features in the older licenses. There are some features that are not available, such as preventing or analyzing cloud attacks. We have Defender P2 licenses and Microsoft proposed P3. If it included what was in the old package, such as the M365 license and Office, that would be very good.

I have been using Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps (MDA) for two years.

The stability is very good. We haven't had downtime. When we receive a message that the service is down, it's only for a few minutes and then all is good. That's true for the whole Microsoft universe, since we use Outlook and Teams.

We haven't had any problems with scalability. We moved all devices from Windows 10 to 11 and it was very easy. We didn't need to test the machines. It worked very well.

We have 50 users of the solution.

The support from Microsoft is very good. Their chat system is very good because it's an alternative to phoning and it's very quick. Through the chat we quickly have someone to respond to our questions.

Positive

At first we used Panda, and after that we had McAfee. We replaced McAfee with Defender. Panda's client was very heavy on the device and, with McAfee, the benefit versus the cost was not so good.

Also, I spoke to colleagues at other companies that have implemented the solution and they said it's very simple to install.

We have seen ROI because there have been some attacks, but they have always been contained.

It's expensive because we have to pay for an M365 license and it is included in the package.

We tested Cisco Umbrella but the price was a little higher than Defender's price, and it would have been another product to install. Defender was almost "included," meaning it was easy to install.

One thing our clients want to know is what cloud applications their users are using. When you enable Cloud App Security, you can sweep up all the applications that the endpoint is using, such as Dropbox, Box, or OneDrive. 

At Microsoft they use OneDrive and would probably want to restrict it to just that, unless there was a compelling reason to use a third-party application. With Cloud App Security, you can find all the users who are using Dropbox, for example, and then you can sanction those applications and prevent users from using them.

We also use that for alerting and creating policies for notifications and alerts.

The ability to prevent users from using certain applications is one of the most valuable features. It doesn't require any configuration for implementation from the client perspective. It just works right away and gives you the information you need. There are other features that you do need to configure. For example, the capability of the solution to discover the apps.

Another helpful feature is that you can add some connectors, not only from Office 365 and Azure, but external connectors. If you have logs from Palo Alto or Cisco, from  Barracuda, Checkpoint, or SonicWall, you can ingest them into Cloud App Security. It integrates well with third-party vendors.

There were things that were lacking but they are available in the newer version, such as an integration with the threat protection that Microsoft has with Microsoft Defender. However, I believe it's only set to be integrated with Microsoft Defender for identity and identity protection. I would like to see it available for use with something like Office 365 Defender. I don't think it's integrated with that yet.

I have been working with Microsoft Cloud App Security for three or four years.

We're a Microsoft partner, so we do pretty much anything Microsoft, including security, endpoints, and cloud. We don't do website or application development. We focus on architecture, infrastructure, security, and delivery.

It is stable. I haven't seen it go down.

You don't have to worry about the scalability because it's a SaaS application. As you add logs and data sources, it builds up. But you don't have to worry about the scalability because it's in the backend.

It's a little bit hard to deal with Microsoft tech support, especially on Cloud App Security. It's hit and miss. It depends on your type of support. If you have premier support, you get an okay type of response. They definitely need to up their tech support. There should be some improvement in that regard.

The initial setup is simple because it's software as a service. You don't build a server and you don't do upgrades. There is no OS. It's built into the cloud. All you have to do is purchase the license.

In terms of maintenance, it's all Microsoft. All you need it to do is configure it so that it will work for your unique environment, according to your organization's requirements. There is nothing else to worry about.

It comes as part of a bundle. If you have the Microsoft 365 license called E5, it comes with that. Otherwise, if you're going to buy it a la carte, the pricing can vary. Because we're a Microsoft partner, we get discounted pricing.

It doesn't require a long configuration process. There's no testing. You just need to tailor it to suit your organization's needs in terms of the data and the information that you want to get. In terms of discovering apps, it works pretty much out-of-the-box. It presents you with the data. The only decision that you need to make is whether to sanction an application. And then you have to sanction it and set up an alert if users are using a sanctioned application.

We use it in our company for threat detection. My company is into manufacturing, and our IT support is within premises. We don't do client services.

It is a SaaS solution. It is not supported on-premises. The deployment that we have is purely cloud-based.

Cloud App Security is an ever-evolving technology. It is based on artificial intelligence. It uses some data sets that capture all the tools within Office 365 package. It collects all the data majorly in the Office 365 space, and it understands the usage. Across the globe, there might be millions of Microsoft users, and it tries to capture all the data cumulatively and see any anomalies. That is how Microsoft gives you the data. They study different types of organizations in terms of how they behave, what kind of security loopholes can be found in them, and then they give you recommendations. You just implement these recommendations to secure the environment. So, what you get is a tailor-made solution where you can find all recommendations because it is based on artificial intelligence. They give you a tailor-made recommendation to improve your environment. They might recommend multifactor authentication, role-based access, etc. They provide you the classical representation on which users we can target and safeguard more.  All these things are very useful. That's how this tool is helping Microsoft customers, and this is how we have also been using it.

My company relies upon this technology. For us, it is very critical to know any attack beforehand and be prepared for it. In our environment, there are many endpoints, and many devices interact. We have an email system, a storage system, and other systems. The beauty of Cloud App Security is that it can learn data from different applications. For example, Adobe is an application that I'm integrating with Office 365. So, I can expand my horizon of search to that tool and see how that interacts with us. I will get more real-time data, and I will know more use cases about it.

Threat detection is its key feature, and that's why we use this tool. It gives an alert if a PC is attacked or there is any kind of anomaly, such as there is a spike in sending emails or we see an unauthorized website being accessed. So, it keeps us on our toes. We get to know that there is something wrong, and we can isolate the user and find any issues with it. So, threat detection is very robust in this tool.

We can integrate any SaaS-based application with it. It can scan your network and physical devices and the software that you're using. It tries to fetch cumulative data when there are any authentication-related attacks or any network-related attacks and gives us some kind of intimation. We get real-time graphical data, and then we need to do our work to solve the problems.

The product is great. The major benefit is that it is a Microsoft tool. So, if you're in a Microsoft ecosystem, this is the best tool that you can get in the market. In terms of experience, it is unlike any other tool. It is good enough to do all the jobs that other tools are doing. So, you don't need any other tool if you are using it in a Microsoft ecosystem. 

The response time could be better. It will be helpful if the alerts are even more proactive and we can see more data. Currently, the data is a little bit weak. It is not complete. I can't just see it and completely know which user or which device it is. It takes some effort and time on my part to investigate and isolate a user. It would be great if it is more user-friendly or easy for people to understand.

If it is an Office 365 product, I expect it to be in the admin center. That way I would know that this is a part of Office 365. It feels like there is a mismatch, or they are trying to separate the product or do something like that. They should have streamlined the product.

It is not always accurate. Sometimes, there could be some hiccups, and you see false positives, but security is not always reliable, and you cannot depend on one tool to give you all accurate results. It gives me a report that I can see, and if needed, I can act proactively on something. If it is a false positive, it is fine. If it is not, we know that we have done something about it.

We implemented it probably in 2019.

It is a new thing for Microsoft, and it still has a lot of room to improve.

It is completely scalable out-of-the-box. It is completely in interaction with Office 365 services. It can go up to as many users as you have. So, if you have 100,000 users, it is capable of supporting them. I have some 50,000 users, and I'm happy that it is capable of doing that. We have implemented it 100%, and we are happy with what we have got.

It is good for an enterprise company. It is not for a small-scale business. 

We don't require support frequently. I would rate them a seven out of 10. If you have a critical situation, you cannot expect them to give you a call immediately. My experience has not been so great with their paid support in terms of time. Sometimes, they don't even call you back, but when you do get support from them, they are excellent. So, you can't rely on them, and their response time can be improved, but their documentation is good enough. We can read the documentation and help ourselves.

Before this, my company had some tools, but I'm not sure about them. They probably heavily relied upon Splunk and other APM tools. They have had this tool from the time I have been here. Personally, I haven't worked on technologies outside of Microsoft.

It is very easy if you know what you're doing. You just click on the Next button multiple times, and it is complete. It is well-documented in the sense that we know what we can expect from the tool. The documentation is great, and the support is also excellent. So, my experience was very smooth, and it was done in a day.

It does not work on every license. You have to be an Enterprise customer, and you have to have a specific license to have the full benefits of it. So, you require the correct license, and you also need a certain amount of time for it to propagate. It is not immediate. Based on what we were told by Microsoft a few years ago, it takes 24 to 48 hours. They might have improved upon that. It tries to capture the complete environment details, and then it gives you a cumulative experience.

We work around the clock. We have six admins at different time zones who work with this solution.

Its pricing is on the higher side. Its price is definitely very high for a small-scale company.

As an enterprise client, we do get benefits from Microsoft. We get a discounted price because of the number of users we have in our company. We have a premier package, and with that, we do get a lot of discounts. There are no additional costs. It only comes in the top-tier packages. Generally, the top-tier license is the best license that you can get for your organization. If you want, you can buy it separately, but that's not a good idea.

This tool alone is not a great investment, but when you get it as a part of the package from Microsoft, it is good. Along with Microsoft Teams, Office, Exchange, SharePoint, and other solutions, this added feature of an extra layer of security makes a lot of sense. If you are only using this tool, and it is not in a Microsoft ecosystem, then it is not worth it.

For Office 365 environments, there is a great add-on benefit that comes with the Microsoft licensing package. If you have a Microsoft ecosystem, you can get it, and there is no need for any other tool. If you're not in a Microsoft ecosystem, don't bother buying it. It is a good competitor to other products such as Splunk. 

It has not affected our end-user experience in any way. The reason being this is an admin-oriented program, and it does not involve any end user. It just collects data from end-users and gives it to us. After that, it is up to us to act upon it. It does not do anything on its own. It is a threat detection tool, and it doesn't do anything on its own. We have to act to resolve a problem. For example, it will only say, "There is a user who is doing this. Do you want to act upon it? Yes or no?" Based on that, as an admin, we can do certain tasks remotely. The end-user will not know about it. We will see if there is a real threat, and we'll act upon it.

I would rate it a 10 out of 10. It is improving, but it still needs more improvements.

I am not sure if the product has improved our organization yet. However, it certainly gives another level of confidence that the assets are secure. We are aware of the activity in the tenant.

The product’s most valuable feature is SQL database. It notifies us even in case of false positives when people log in after a long time and when we're out of compliance with the security baseline.

Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps’s technical support services needs improvement.

We have been using Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps for three years.

The product has good stability.

The product has good scalability.

The technical support services need improvement. They take a while to get responses. Their first-level engineers are generally not skilled. It takes time to get an engineer who can help us. Usually, whenever we come up with a problem, it is something that we can’t figure out on our own. We have to go through the process of submitting a ticket, waiting for a callback, and then finally getting help.

Neutral

I have used other products while working at other places. They all are more expensive than Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps.

The initial setup process was simple. We had to merge the landing zone and part of a template. Later, we started the portal and selected resources we wanted to protect along with the level of protection. The implementation strategy is to just start using it.

We did the product implementation ourselves.

I haven't tracked an ROI for the product. It was set by default while setting up Azure Tenant. It has been successful in monitoring activities and keeping the network safe. It is less expensive than buying a separate license. It provides ease and convenience of use. We just turn the product on by default.

The product has helped save a medium amount of money. It has pretty good pricing.

I don’t know if the product provides a single pane for managing immune access. We connect it with the Active Directory and other similar tools. It helps save a low amount of time.

I advise others to try using Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps. I rate it an eight out of ten.

We use it for security alerts for any possible trouble for users. 

In terms of deployment, we have on-prem servers for now for one of the customers. We also have several customers on the Azure cloud.

I like the web GUI/the management interface. I also like the security of Microsoft. As compared to other manufacturers, it's less complex and easy to understand and work with.

There are some features, such as user navigation content filtering, that are disabled by default, and it probably makes sense to enable them by default.

I have been using this solution for about six months. 

It is stable.

It is scalable. We have 100 licenses for one company, and we probably have 1,000 licenses for another company.

I haven't used it yet.

The customer with 100 licenses used Sophos EDR. Microsoft Defender is more manageable. Sophos EDR is not a bad product. It is a complete product, but the Microsoft Defender is better.

It was more or less straightforward. 

It was implemented in-house.

It is a little bit expensive. When you want to have the complete package with Office 365, Defender, and everything else, it is expensive.

My advice would be to try it first and compare it with other solutions.

I would rate it an eight out of ten.

I used to deploy it in the customer's environment and set the requirements. It's used for blocking downloads, for example, and is a security feature for data centers.

The solution is helping a lot. We get a lot of very detailed reporting on security that really shows what users are doing, including what they've opened, what else they're sharing, downloading, viewing, et cetera, as well as when they are logging in. It's a very detailed activity and reporting of my units.

The file policy and activity policy are very useful aspects of the solution.

I can get information, for example, data location, IP address, et cetera. I use it for getting information about what's happening in my environment with certain files. I can see, for example, which user is sharing files externally, and if they're downloading or might be downloading, the documents on their personal device, a corporate device, or if they are sharing any folders with the outside world.

The initial setup is straightforward.

The general usability of the solution is very straightforward.

We've had an issue where an in-session policy was not working. I want them to enhance the in-session policy. It's something I came across while adding the application into MCAS as I wanted to apply some MCAS policies on those applications.

I've been using the solution for about five years now. 

The solution is 99.99% stable.

The solution is extremely scalable. 

I've handled technical support for my customers. 

I've only really worked with this solution. 

The initial setup is straightforward. I already have experience putting the solution into place and therefore I'm pretty adept at setting it up. The implementation simply requires understanding how the customer wants to use it and what they want to monitor. 

It's an ongoing deployment and I've been deploying the solution for almost six years now. 

I basically use authority to integrate all users and exchanges together. We have basically a Microsoft-oriented system.

When I deployed it, I applied it to around 4,000 users. I indirectly did it myself and it took around one month for me to integrate everything and to meet those policies to ensure they were in line and working as to my expectations and that I was getting the expected results that I wanted.

You only need one person to handle the deployment. Maybe two people.

We do not need the assistance of an integrator or consultant. 

I'm not acquainted with the licensing and pricing of the solution. 

I did not evaluate other options previously. 

I don't have a business relationship with Microsoft. I deploy the solution and I am managing MCAS for customers.

If a person has an Office-specific environment and they are looking for a solution, this is a good option. It's a good native application. Even if they were in a different cloud, I'd advise migration to a Microsoft environment. 

I'd rate the solution an eight out of ten.

They were testing Microsoft Defender and performing some checks with Microsoft Defender. On the Microsoft side of the same security cloud app, I believe.

We have a complete portfolio of election solutions. These election solutions, in general, require a high level of security. There are preparations to have within them, such as cloud apps or websites, or even an off-premise or on-premise type of solution. As a result, we must have both types of services and products in order to secure them. For example, we used the Microsoft denial-of-service attack. It's a software subscription service from Asia that you get for a set period of time.

If you are running a live elections operation, you should seriously consider using such a service from them because it is extremely reliable. It essentially protects your entire environment. So you wouldn't be too concerned about someone hacking into your environment or anything because you need to have results that you should be publishing. That is when having a security system becomes extremely important for you. That's on the app side of things, then, on the web, we publish these results. You must also have a system that will never fail due to an attack. That's also one of the things we usually think about when we have an election operation going on.

The most valuable feature of this solution is its monitoring. The monitoring of the application. 

Integration is simple, and you can monitor your applications at the enterprise level. As a result, you can have a holistic view of all applications and their statuses. 

It's very robust and it's very good.

The capabilities are very good. It has a lot of features in it, which is why many people recommend it.

It's not the cheapest. I believe it can be more reasonably priced. 

Sometimes the support is actually lacking. But we are talking about Microsoft.

I have been doing the testing for the past six or eight months.

Because it is a cloud-based solution, I believe that versioning is not a critical factor to consider.

Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps is a stable product.

Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps is scalable.

Sometimes you don't get to the appropriate support channel from the start. When you open a ticket, you don't always get what you're looking for right away. We tend to get stuck in loops or go from one support guy to the next until we escalate. That happens quite frequently. I believe that this is one of the areas that should be looked into.

We have an in-house ABAP development team that works on ABT software. I have heard the technical team conducting this evaluation, but I'm not sure which SAP application they're testing.

The price could be better and should be reconsidered.

We're evaluating Microsoft. We're also looking into SAPs, and other options are being considered at the moment.

From what I've seen, it's a good product. We occasionally encounter some, inefficiencies in its performance. But not all of the time, because our country has a lot of internet problems. As a result, the synchronization side tends to disconnect from time to time. So whenever we get disconnected, it causes some problems. You have to have a good connection after all because it is a cloud service, you must have a good internet connection in order to connect to it. We believe it is one of the best on the market. I believe it is a good option for anyone to use. But, once again, there are other players in the mix, which is why we are always doing some benchmarking and continuing with trials for other solutions.

I would rate Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps an eight out of ten.