Microsoft Defender for Cloud Reviews

This solution replaces, in many ways, the on-premises operations manager that used to be part of the System Center.

The most valuable feature of this solution is the support for a multi-cloud environment.

The policy-related features are good. For example, there is a compliance policy that is related to PCI and another related to NIST.

The support for dynamic networking is good.

Alerting and incident management are valuable features.

The integration with Logic Apps allows for automated responses to incidents. It is also integrated with Microsoft Defender.

They added new functionality into the pretty long list of features and it is constantly being updated. 

There is no perfect product in the world and there are always features that can be added. Innovation is something that is always on the table.

I have been working with Azure Security Center for more than four years.

This product is much more stable than anything else. The SLA has four nines of stability and it is impossible to compare it with anything that is on-premises. Cloud systems are much more stable.

Scalability is not something that we talk about because this product only exists in the cloud. We talk about it in terms of regions. There are approximately 50 zones across the globe, where for example, Canada has three zones that are split into Central, East, and West.

This is an example of Software as a Service, so scalability is out of the question.

If you need tech support, you need to go to the support site, find the proper program, and subscribe to it. Only basic support is included. If you need premium support or if you need a developer, the support is available, you just need to go to the site and find it.

It is extremely easy to subscribe, and extremely easy to understand. It depends on your requirements and on exactly what you need but a description of every program is readily available.

If you have questions, go to the FAQ, and on the same page, you will have access to the documentation. The documentation is crystal clear. It's very practical and actionable. It explains in simple phrases, or words, what the action is, what the purpose is, and what the benefit or value of it is. 

There is no need to find anything else. You start from the price calculator, and then click and get more information, and from the same page, you find what you need. 

You don't need to do anything else.

With respect to implementation, you just switch it on.

If you need to deploy something else then there are step-by-step instructions available. Setup and deployment will be easy for those who have experience working with this type of solution.

For those not used to this type of operation or not working in this area, it is absolutely possible to talk to their partners, such as the one that I work for, and they will help you.

If you hire the consulting service from a partner then they will help you to plan and design, including performing a capacity review to see what is required and what services need to be integrated. You will identify needs such as an on-premises data center versus using a third-party cloud.

This is a worldwide service and depending on the country, there will be different prices. 

There is a price calculator for Azure Services. You select the service that you are interested in, and the basic or the standard is there immediately, which has support options. Different levels of support are available for different prices. A subscription is part of the Azure Service. You will need to find what type of service you need.

If you need to negotiate the price, based on the enterprise agreement or per commitment, the price schema is available. You just need to speak with a partner.

You can also pay with your credit card, but you will need to read the documentation online.

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. There is no need to implement anything else.

There are multiple things that are absolutely nice about this product. That said, there is no such thing as a perfect product.

I would rate Azure Security Center a nine out of ten.

The most valuable features of this solution are the vulnerability assessments and the glossary of compliance.

As an analyst, there is no way to configure or create a playbook to automate the process of flagging suspicious domains. Azure Defender does not have this capability and that is one of the features that is very crucial. 

When we receive an alert on suspicious domains, we have to do it manually. We go to VirusTotal, or AlienVault to confirm. It would be useful to have it done automatically.

I have been using Azure Defender for three months.

We are using the latest version.

It's a stable solution. We have not had any issues.

We have not paid for Azure technical support. We have not contacted technical support.

We have not worked with any other solution.

The initial setup was straightforward. It was easy, very easy.

Azure Defender is a bit pricey. The price could be lower.

We are also researching Darktrace. We wanted to see the capabilities that it offers. 

Azure Defender and Azure Resource Manager are all a part of Microsoft Azure. We use all of them.

This solution has the best security center, security manager dashboard that I have ever seen. I would recommend using this solution. It has everything in one place, and it's easy to configure and easy to deploy.

I would rate Azure Defender an eight out of ten.

Our primary use case of this solution is to monitor infrastructure. I'm a senior security architect and we are customers of Azure Security Center. 

The most valuable feature for me are the compliance policies.

I think that the documentation and implementation guides could be improved. It would make the implementation process easier.

I've been using this solution for a couple of years. 

This solution is stable. 

The solution is scalable, we have a couple of hundred people using it. 

The technical support is fine. 

The initial setup was reasonably straightforward. Implementation took a couple of months and was carried out internally. It required four or five staff, including engineers, managers and admins.

The licensing costs are included and wrapped up in a suite of other products that we are also using. 

I would recommend this product. 

I would rate this solution an eight out of 10. 

We have been using Azure Security Center for one year. 

I don't know what the issue is but when we do the agent deployment, sometimes it works, and sometimes it fails and we need to go inside the virtual machine and manually install the agent. That's been a bug that we've experienced. 

There are 5000 users.

I do the maintenance. We have 35 engineers who use it. 

Their support is good.

The initial setup is not actually so complex but it feels complex because there are many add-ons. There are many options and my team needs to be aware of all of these changes happening on the backend which is a distraction. 

I would rate Security Center an eight out of ten. Not a ten because of the bugs that we have experienced and because of the cost. 

It's quite a good product. It helps to understand the infections and issues you are facing. 

We are using this solution to implement our CAS policy and it monitors compliance with the Security Center.

Also, we use it for thereat protection. It detects any threats and provides threat recommendations.

Azure Security Center should be more easily understood by a non-technical person. It's more about the security before getting into the product.

It needs to be simplified and made more user-friendly for a non-technical person.

In the next release, I would like to see a better dashboard and more integration with IT sales Management.

I have been using Azure Security Center for one year.

We are working with the latest version.

It's a stable solution.

Azure Security Center is scalable. We have ten users in our organization.

The technical support is very good.

The initial setup was straightforward, but you have to understand the product.

It took us 48 hours to deploy.

We have a team of two to maintain this solution. One is an architect and the other is a service engineer.

We did not use a vendor team to implement this solution. I did it myself.

We are using the free version of the Azure Security Center.

I plan to continue using this solution and I recommend it to others.

I would rate Azure Security Center a seven out of ten.

It takes very little effort to integrate it. It also gives very good visibility into what exactly is happening.

From a compliance standpoint, they can include some more metrics and some specific compliances such as GDPR.

I have been using Azure Security Center for one and a half years.

We have seen a few big downtimes in Azure where Office 365 was disconnected. I do see challenges in terms of stability, not just for Azure Security Center but also for Azure.

Microsoft being a big provider, Azure Security Center is quite scalable. 

Microsoft's community support and technical support is very good. They are very quick in their response and very thorough. 

In my previous organization, I have used Palo Alto. It is a pretty cool vendor-agnostic tool.

The initial setup is straightforward. It takes a few hours.

We implemented it ourselves. We have ten members to deploy and manage it, and they all are admins. We use it monthly or weekly for reports, and we also monitor it for alerts.

We are using the latest version, and it is a part of Azure. We keep on updating to the latest version.

I would highly recommend this solution. I would rate Azure Security Center an eight out of ten.

We are using Azure Security Center for software development.

It's a cloud service that includes the security center and tailoring certain options.

The most valuable features of this solution are the remote workforce capabilities and the general experience of the remote workforce.

Pricing could be improved. There are limited options based on pricing for the government.

The initial setup could be simplified.

In the next release, I would like to see more development in the area of NECES scanning or Splunk, or Universal Forwarding. 

I have been working with Azure Security Center for six months.

We are working with Microsoft Azure for the government version of the cloud.

This solution is stable. It's 100% guaranteed and I've never had any problems with it other than some planned IT downtime.

Azure Security Center is scalable. We've been able to scale pretty well for a workforce that has over 400 developers.

My experience with technical support was more like a consultation. "Tell us what you need and we'll see if we can do that for you."

In some cases, they had to develop on top of the commercial product just to conform to certain government regulations and cybersecurity requirements.

Previously, we did not use a different solution, this is the first option.

It was pretty complex. We had to go back and negotiate with Azure on a few of the options that were commercially available, but not in the government products.

I'm not privy to pricing information, but I know it's probably close to a million dollars a year.

The pricing is comparable. The features that we're getting are tailored to what we need.

It was the best fit for us.

In the future, we will be looking at government brands of the same thing that are part of the DISA.

After looking at DISA's product options, they usually select commercial versions and government versions of commercial products like Azure. For example, Amazon Web Services, and Google cloud.

This was our first option or our first go-to solution because we were considering not only Microsoft but Amazon and Google as well.

Microsoft seemed to have most of what we need.

I am currently working on my Cloud Security Certification.

For anyone who is considering this solution, from a cybersecurity standpoint, if they are doing any kind of scanning, vulnerability scanning for software or systems and they're feeding into the cloud, make sure to check whether the security center doesn't offer adequate options for them to work with. If not, then look into other software like Spunk. They look into everything and they have plenty of conversations with the staff. That's the cloud security provider.

I would rate Azure Security Center an eight out of ten.

The dashboard is very good. It gives our clients a lot of information and allows them to have a complete overview of the system. Everything is visible in one glance.

The solution is quite complex. A lot of the different policies that actually get applied don't pertain to every client. If you need to have something open for a client application to work, then you get dinged for having a port open or having an older version of TLS available. 

Even though the TLS is only allotted for a single application, single box, and everything else is completely up to date, it just gives us an inaccurate reporting of how secure the environment actually is.

The solution could use a bit more granularity.

I believe we've been using the solution for one and a half to two years at this point.

I haven't had any real problems with the solution's stability. I'm trying to think of any complaints that anybody may have had. It's always worked whenever we needed it to. I'd describe it as reliable.

The solution is actually easy to scale. You'd be surprised how many cloud solutions out there that aren't scalable. I don't even know why some are in the cloud. As far as this solution is concerned, I've taken it up to a higher medium-sized company. I've scaled as high as 4,500 users. I'm just not sure if it is infinitely scalable. I don't know if it would scale into the tens of thousands. 

In terms of increasing usage in the future, we'll use it as required. It all depends on the client for us. We're solely dependent on what they want and which solution they want to go with.

It's like with any vendor, it's hit and miss. Sometimes you get the new person, sometimes you get the person that's been there for five years. You have to go in asking exactly what you want and use probing questions, and if you work with them enough, you learn what the right answer is. However, you ask those same questions, anyway, upfront. It gives you a baseline at least of where their technical expertise is. Just because they're on the help desk doesn't mean that they know what they're doing.

We use Intune for a lot of the app security purposes with Office 365, and then once we actually get into the AD section, it's just that a lot of people are really getting Office Secure Scores right now.

I've had both complex and straightforward implementations. Some of them can be extremely complex. It's all just tailored to what the client wants. I have other setups where everything is very basic ad easy and all the client wants is some basic reporting and a few easy policies. 

If you utilize everything, then it might take a while for deployment, and also the implementation could be extended. It's all very client-specific.

We're an MSP, so we have massive teams all over the place and I couldn't accurately say how many people it takes to maintain the solution. I know that, generally, you have one project manager and then you would have the main admin who was setting up the portal, but then you have other security personnel that goes in there and does the work on the different sections. It takes a couple of people, but I couldn't give you a hard number as to how many people a typical setup would need for maintenance.

I don't have any idea what the cost of the solution is. That aspect of the product is handled by a separate department.

We're a Microsoft partner.

The solution works for us, however, a client has its own needs and requirements. It's not a one-size-fits-all solution.

I'd rate the solution seven out of ten.

The solution is used for risks, vulnerabilities, and compliance. The solution helps us with CPS 234 and CIS compliance. We know what is onboarded onto Microsoft Defender, and we can see the compliance around those and how much we are compliant.

The solution is not very effective at integrating with EDR and other integrations. Features like code scanning and pipeline scanning are not included in the solution. The correlation between all the findings is completely missing, and the product is not mature.

Microsoft Defender has other native tools; it is not under one umbrella. You want one umbrella to see everything for your entire cloud posture.

I have been using Microsoft Defender for Cloud for four years.

A couple of products, like Orca and Wiz, are leaders in the CSPM and CNAPP space. I'll rate them way above Microsoft Defender for Cloud. The world is currently moving from CSPM towards CNAPP. That is why we are evaluating other products like Wiz.

The solution is fine for the native resources and native tools. However, it is not that great at integrating with EDR and other integrations.

Overall, I rate the solution a five out of ten.