Microsoft Defender for Office 365 Reviews

We mainly use it to identify software vulnerabilities. It reports all the software vulnerabilities installed in our web stations and servers.

With Defender for Office 365, we have been able to increase the security posture across our organization. Within the first month of using this product, we realized that benefit.

When it comes to software vulnerabilities, we can target them and update the software as soon as we see that there is a vulnerability. And then we can make sure that they are updated and check that the update process was successful within a different department. That has really helped us improve our productivity.

The solution saves us time because we don't have to go here and there to identify things. It's a single portal that has all the details we need. Their support is also good. These features have, again, helped us improve our productivity a lot. It saves us about 25 percent of our time.

It has also saved us money because we don't have to pay for other security products like Nessus. This solution has almost everything we got from other products, so we don't have to go for an additional solution. It's saving us about 50 percent, cost-wise.

Our time to detect threats has decreased. With products like Nessus, until their scan runs, we are not aware whether a threat is fixed or not. But with Defender, within one to two hours that information is reflected. With Nessus, sometimes we had to wait a day to see that information reflected in the portal. Because we are aware of issues earlier, we can act on them sooner.

The most valuable feature is the score. By looking at the score, you can identify if you are at risk or not.

It also gives the vulnerability status according to the versions you have selected. Let's say you have Google Chrome. It mentions the versions it has, and it updates. Within two hours of an update, it is reflected in the dashboard. That's really nice to have.

It gives me everything I need, visibility-wise. It also helps prioritize threats across our enterprise and that's very important. That means we can identify the critical vulnerabilities first and keep an eye on other vulnerabilities. By looking at the dashboard, I immediately get an idea of how critical an issue is and we can fix vulnerabilities before they result in an attack.

It has also helped eliminate looking at multiple dashboards, giving us one XDR dashboard, which has made our security operations really easy. We can also create internal tickets within the portal itself. We can assign them to people and see how long it took them to close the tickets. That makes things really easy.

In one of the reports, I can get the exact place where a vulnerable file resides. But for that, I need to explicitly go into the device and check. If they could include that file part in the report, without my having to go to the device itself, that would help.

I have been using Microsoft Defender for Office 365 for about two years.

It is stable.

There are bugs here and there, but they have been able to rectify them.

It's scalable. It discovers almost all of the workstations and servers across our organization. We have about 3,000 endpoints.

Whenever we ask a question, they provide us with a solution. I'm happy with their technical support.

We previously used Nessus. We switched mainly because of the cost and the integration. With Nessus, we had to install an agent, but with Defender, since we were already using it, we could just turn it on with the cloud portal and deploy it very easily.

I wasn't involved in the initial setup, but in terms of maintenance, we push it through Windows Update so we don't have to explicitly do any updates.

I would recommend Microsoft Defender for Office 365. 

If you already have a deployment method, like CCM or something similar, it will be easy. Even if not, there are several other deployment methods that could support any scenario.

We already had an Office subscription, so we just started a trial and we were happy with it and we went with it.

In terms of a best-of-breed strategy rather than a single vendor security suite, a single vendor security suite is good when it comes to deployment and manageability. It's easy.

I use it for investigating incidents.

It has helped eliminate looking at multiple dashboards, which is very useful. During the investigation of incidents, it helps in making reports.

It has saved me time and my nerves. It has also likely saved us money by blocking unexpected threats. It has also definitely decreased our time to detection and time to respond. 

I like its investigation capabilities, as that is what is most important to me. It is fairly simple with a user-friendly interface. 

Also, all Microsoft products can be used with each other, as opposed to other vendors' products that cannot be used with each other.

They have moved features from one console to another. Things have been moved around in the interface and it takes me time to find where certain features are. 

I've been working with Microsoft 365 for two years.

It's a stable solution. I have only had one serious incident, a few months ago, when Microsoft wrote that there were some difficulties with networking.

It's scalable and this is important. I have had clients with 10 to 20 users and others with a few thousand.

Unfortunately, support has become difficult. Very often I get a hyperlink from Microsoft as an answer, but I only submit requests after I have read all the information that is available. My questions are not simple. In the past, I would have rated their support a nine or 10 out of 10, but now it's a seven.

Neutral

I used ESET and Fortinet at my previous companies. 

Our deployments are on private cloud, hybrid, and on-premises. Deployment time depends on the tasks involved. Some are done in a few days and others can take six weeks.

The initial setup can be straightforward or complex. For one client, due to authentication methods, some users couldn't access their old clients.

One problem is its pricing because I was working in the government and it was too expensive for us to use our Microsoft products.

For protection, I like Microsoft Defender for Office 365 and ESET in this price range.

We use it for detecting any kind of breach or intrusion. It is not enabled for everyone because we have our own antivirus.

It has helped us in improving our security posture. It detects any kind of attack or abnormal behavior in accessing the system and sends an alert to the administrator who can check, understand, and review on time to ensure that all activities are legit.

It blocks all known threats immediately and sends alerts to follow up. It is not used on all devices. On the devices on which it is being used, it has improved the security by 80%.

It has improved our security awareness. It helped us in understanding the weaknesses in our configuration that needed to be fixed to avoid any kind of breach. It has increased our security level and mitigated the risk of being compromised.

The risk level notifications are most valuable. We get to know what kind of intrusion or attack is there, and we can fix a problem on time.

The visibility for the weaknesses in the system and unauthorized access can be improved.

Its price should be improved. Its cost is a major concern for us.

We started using it in 2019.

Its stability is good.

Its scalability is good. It is able to leverage more and more functions, which is essential because cybersecurity threats are increasing nowadays.

Initially, we had only 10 users, and currently, most of the users are switching to another platform. We only have one user, and only the system administrator is managing it.

I didn't need any tech support because the documentation and the procedures are simple and easy to understand.

We have Symantec Endpoint Protection, and we also use Sophos. We are using Defender only on our Azure system because it is a suitable tool for the Microsoft environment.

Its initial setup is straightforward. Because it is cloud-based, when we assign the license for Office 365, it can be automatically deployed from the console. Because the number was small, we manually installed it on each device one by one. Its deployment requires minimal staff. Depending on the connectivity, it can take about 30 minutes for each device.

We have not seen an ROI yet.

Defender is a little bit more expensive as compared to others. We are in the manufacturing environment. So, we don't have a high budget for all of our endpoint devices. Its cost is a major concern for us.

It is a good product, but its price is the most critical point for consideration. In terms of technology and capability, I would rate Microsoft Defender an eight out of 10.

We primarily use the solution for security purposes. 

Microsoft Defender for Office 365 is a cloud-based email filtering service that helps protect our organization against unknown malware and viruses by providing robust zero-day protection and includes features to safeguard our organization from harmful links in real-time. Defender for Office 365 has rich reporting and URL trace capabilities that give us (administrators) insight into the kind of attacks happening in our organization. We can discover how Defender for Office 365 can help in define protection policies, analyze threats to our organization, and respond to attacks.

Defender for Office 365 can help your organization configure policies, analyze threats to your organization and respond to attacks.  It is important to note that there are different levels of protection and capabilities depending upon which version of Office365 license you have. The best features we found most valuable are Forwarding Report, Safe Attachment Files Types, Treat Protection Status, Malware Detected in Email, URL Threat Protection and many more.

The custom alerts have to improve a lot. Though the system is very good, we have to go and check inside the admin panel to look at all kinds of reports. We won't get any mail alerts that highlight for us, for example, "today this many of spam attacks have happened". Or "these many emails have been blocked." We have to manually go into the admin panel and have to check it out. It would be nice if there are custom email notifications/alerts.

Right now, there are additional features such as mobile device management and data loss prevention, or eDiscovery (where the admin scans through the inboxes and see all your mail and notes any deviation) that are only currently available under the E5 license. You can't get these services as part of a base plan. In the future, it would be nice if they were added as part of the base plan as well.  

We've been using the solution for two years at this point. 

In terms of Scalability, Microsoft has heavily invested in scalability and security of its Microsoft 365 platform in the last few years.

Since it is a cloud based solution, at any point of time we can upgrade the number of users without any hassle and there is no user cap limit.

Currently, we have 350 users at this time.

The technical support is good. However, for us, personally, we didn't had any serious issues to contact with the technical support team as most of the errors or issues we faced we easily resolved from documentation from Microsoft website. 

We have been using Fortinet Mail however, later on, we went with the Office 365 Email Protection Plan. The main reason for switching is before we were using G-Suite from google for emailing solution and later on we shifted to Office 365 and the Defender is an inbuilt feature provided by microsoft.

The initial setup is so easy and the Microsoft Help Center is available to assist as necessary. In our case, we just went through the documentation which was provided on the Microsoft website and based on the document, we were able to easily configure it.

We implemented it in-house and no support was taken from vendor. Everything is in the documentation of Microsoft Website.

The pricing is pretty good and was a major factor in choosing it. The pricing is reasonable when compared with Cisco or some other products.

If it is an IT company, the budget allocation will be more and focused on the IT part. However, when it comes to a manufacturing company, the budget focus will be more on manufacturing and the budget allocation will be very low in terms of IT. 

For us Office 365 was better in terms of Pricing.

Before choosing this solution, we had evaluated Cisco. I just visited your site and I just downloaded that datasheet. I compared it to Office 365 Mail Protection. Both are good, however, in terms of the pricing part, Office 365 was better choice.

No matter what ever solution we take be it Google/ Cisco/ Microsoft, every one provided the same security. However there would be some features differ based on the plan/license we take.

With my personal experience, If you don't have any budget constraints go for Google or Cisco.
If you are on a low budget and if you want a solution that needs to be suitable for your business, then you can go for Microsoft.

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

We use Microsoft Defender for Office 365 for our external developers. 

The tool offers the best experience to meet international contractors. 

Microsoft Defender for Office 365 helps people to work remotely. It is a secure solution. We don't need to use our company's computers or get VPN connections to the networks. I can control how they share screens and what they send to the devices. It keeps our organizations confidential and sensitive information safe. 

Microsoft Defender for Office 365 is scalable. 

Microsoft Defender for Office 365's deployment is straightforward. 

The product is expensive. 

The flexible tool helps hide windows from people trying to control the PC's remote. I rate it a seven out of ten. 

We are resellers of this solution and Microsoft partners. 

Defender for Office 365 helps in securing your users' email which is the number one method of compromise for most networks.

The solution does a thorough job of examining emails for malicious content and examines the URLs and potential malicious content in emails. It offers peace of mind with more real-time updates as far as what they're looking for as opposed to a signature-based solution. It's probably the most valuable feature in my mind. I've deployed it for a couple of clients in a 365 environment and it seems to be a pretty solid solution. 

This is not really a defined product. You have to go to a lot of different places to enable things so it would be nice if you could go to one tab that says 365 Defender for Office 365 or something similar. You would be able to make all the settings and changes there, rather than having to go to lots of different places in the admin center to get it configured.

Configuring Defender for Office 365 is not as easy as I would like but with some research and patience, you can tweak the solution to meet your needs. There are some pretty good articles online that assist in setting up Defender for Office 365 to meet your needs.

Creating a path for your Security Awareness Training (SAT) phishing tests to go around the Defender filtering is way too complex for our current solution KnowBe4. But I learned that is a KnowBe4 limitation. Phin SAT has a much easier method of injecting test phishing emails that do not require such acrobatics to configure.

I've been using this solution for two years. 

This is a stable solution. 

Defender is very scalable, it sits on the 365 environment so however big your 365 environment is, is how much you can expand. We've probably set up 300 or 400 users so far. There's no maintenance and you don't have to deploy updates. It's all taken care of in the background by Microsoft so it's pretty much set and forget it once you get it configured.

The support is mostly responsive, but I've had instances going for longer than a week that shouldn't have taken that long.

There's no specific solution I would relate to, Microsoft just seems like a cleaner solution as opposed to having a third party. We've used some other solutions in the past where we have to send the mail to that solution and then forward it from there to Microsoft. In this case, it all takes place in the Microsoft environment. 

Like most Microsoft products, it's not the easiest thing to get installed, but it seems to work once you have it deployed. You can easily do it in half a day, especially once you get familiar with it, but it's not particularly time-consuming. It's best to start out with more lenient definitions so you're not working on every mail, but we can tune it after that. Our in-house IT department deals with deployment. 

We haven't done any sort of analysis with regard to ROI, but in my mind, if you can stop one piece of ransomware or malware from getting onto your network, it's priceless.

The solution is not too expensive. 

This is the first option I tried. I'm considering looking into others to see if they are easier to set up and manage.

I'd highly recommend reading the documentation. It was pretty helpful in getting the solution set up.

I rate the solution an eight out of 10. 

Defender for Office 365 protects Office 365, which is the industry standard office software suite. It is the only Microsoft security solution we use. We don't use any specialized features. It's a standard deployment. 

Defender helps us prioritize threats across our organization. Defender for 365 is highly efficient and saves us time. We save about 35 percent compared to other solutions. 

The pre-sales cost calculations could be more transparent. 

I have used Defender for Office 365 for the last three years.

We mostly rely on internal support at my organization. They are not certified by Microsoft, but they have some experience with Microsoft solutions. We contact Microsoft if we need additional support. I would rate them highly. 

Setting up Defender for 365 is straightforward, and we did it ourselves following the standard Office 365 setup. 

I rate Microsoft Defender for Office 365 an eight out of ten. 

We use the solution to add and move staff when they leave to secure the laptops and other assets for the company. All our contractors work remotely.

The solution helps us prioritize threats across our entire enterprise. 

I found the prioritization to be effective for the amount I have used it.

The solution helps us automate routine tasks and find high-value alerts. We use automation to create printers in terms of notifications that notify us when a device is trying to gain access.

The solution saved us between 24 and 48 hours of time.

The solution saved us money.

We are a small Software as a Service company, so when we hire contractors for projects, we usually move on to a different contractor with the relevant expertise. This means we have a lot of contractors coming in and out of the company, and the solution helps to keep our platforms secure when they have finished working by removing their credentials.

The solution provides us with visibility into threats; however, there is room for improvement in the threat visibility, as it could be more granular, refined, and detailed.

The UI needs to be more user-friendly. Some of the dashboard views are hard to follow and make the reporting complicated.

I have been using the solution for two years.

The technical support is good and quick to resolve issues.

Positive

I give the solution a six out of ten.