We performed a comparison between Lacework and Microsoft Defender for Cloud based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Features: Microsoft Defender for Cloud focuses on regulatory compliance, ransomware protection, and incident alerts. On the other hand, Lacework prioritizes alerts based on severity, utilizes machine learning anomaly detection, and provides insights into the attacker's perspective. Microsoft Defender for Cloud could benefit from enhancements in various areas such as customization, integration, and transparency. On the other hand, Lacework could improve its offerings by providing better visibility, data governance, remediation features, and FedRAMP moderate authorization.
Service and Support: Microsoft Defender for Cloud's customer service has been criticized for outsourcing support and being difficult to reach the right level of support. Users also reported long wait times. However, Lacework's customer service is highly praised for being proactive, responsive, and providing helpful feedback and suggestions.
Ease of Deployment: Microsoft Defender for Cloud's initial setup requires some prior knowledge, but is generally straightforward. Deployment time depends on the number of subscriptions. Lacework's setup can be done quickly with Terraform scripts. Maintenance is manageable for both, but Microsoft Defender for Cloud may require users to create their own policies.
Pricing: Microsoft Defender for Cloud has flexible pricing options based on license and metrics, while Lacework has a fixed licensing fee per year. Microsoft Defender for Cloud is generally viewed as reasonable and competitive, while Lacework's pricing is rated moderately affordable.
ROI: For managed security service providers, Microsoft Defender for Cloud has resulted in positive ROI. On the other hand, Lacework has been successful in reducing monitoring time and effort for certain users.
Comparison Results: Microsoft Defender for Cloud is the preferred option over Lacework, as it offers more comprehensive features such as regulatory compliance, ransomware protection, and access controls. Although Lacework has some valuable features, it lacks visibility, data governance, and remediation features.
"Cloud Native Security offers attack path analysis."
"PingSafe's most valuable feature is its unified console."
"The agentless vulnerability scanning is great."
"PingSafe has a dashboard that can detect the criticality of a particular problem, whether it falls under critical, medium, or low vulnerability."
"All the features we use are equal and get the job done."
"PingSafe stands out for its user-friendly interface and intuitive software, making it easy to navigate and use."
"It is scalable, stable, and can detect any threat on a machine. It uses artificial intelligence and can lock down any virus."
"Cloud Native Security's best feature is its ability to identify hard-coded secrets during pull request reviews."
"Polygraph compliance is a valuable feature. In our perspective, it delivers significant benefits. The clarity it offers, along with the ability to identify and address misconfigurations, is invaluable. When such issues arise, we promptly acknowledge and take action, effectively collaborating with our teams and the responsible parties for those assets. This enables us to promptly manage problems as soon as they arise."
"The most valuable feature, from a compliance perspective, is the ability to use Lacework as a platform for multiple compliance standards. We have to meet multiple standards like PCI, SOC 2, CIS, and whatever else is out there. The ability to have reports generated, per security standard, is one of the best features for me."
"There are many valuable features that I use in my daily work. The first are alerts and the event dossier that it generates, based on the severity. That is very insightful and helps me to have a security cap in our infrastructure. The second thing I like is the agent-based vulnerability management, which is the most accurate information."
"The best feature, in my opinion, is the ease of use."
"The most valuable aspects are identifying vulnerabilities—things that are out there that we aren't aware of—as well as finding what path of access attackers could use, and being able to see open SSL or S3 buckets and the like."
"Lacework is helping a lot in reducing the noise of the alerts. Usually, whenever you have a tool in place, you have a lot of noise in terms of alerts, but the time for an engineer to look into those alerts is limited. Lacework is helping us to consolidate the information that we are getting from the agents and other sources. We are able to focus only on the things that matter, which is the most valuable thing for us. It saves time, and for investigations, we have the right context to take action."
"For the most part, out-of-the-box, it tells you right away about the things you need to work on. I like the fact that it prioritizes alerts based on severity, so that you can focus your efforts on anything that would be critical/high first, moderate second, and work your way down, trying to continue to improve your security posture."
"The most valuable feature is Lacework's ability to distill all the security and audit logs. I recommend it to my customers. Normally, when I consult for other customers that are getting into the cloud, we use native security tools. It's more of a rule-based engine."
"It is very intuitive when it comes to policy administration, alerts and notifications, and ease of setting up roles at different hierarchies. It has also been good in terms of the network technology maps. It provides a good overview, but it also depends on the complexity of your network."
"It's got a lot of great features."
"It works seamlessly on the Azure platform because it's a Microsoft app. Its setup is similar, so if you already have a Microsoft account, it just flows into it."
"Technical support is helpful."
"The most valuable features of this solution are the remote workforce capabilities and the general experience of the remote workforce."
"Defender lets you orchestrate the roll-out from a single pane. Using the Azure portal, you can roll it out over all the servers covered by the entire subscription."
"The main feature is the security posture assessment through the security score. I find that to be very helpful because it gives us guidance on what needs to be secured and recommendations on how to secure the workloads that have been onboarded."
"This is a platform as a service provided by Azure. We don't need to install or maintain Azure Security Center. It is a ready-made service available in Azure. This is one of the main things that we like. If you look at similar tools, we have to install, maintain, and update services. Whereas, Azure Security Center manages what we are using. This is a good feature that has helped us a lot."
"PingSafe can improve by eliminating 100 percent of the false positives."
"PingSafe filtering has some areas that cause problems, and to achieve single sign-on functionality, a break-glass feature, which is currently unavailable, is necessary."
"It would be really helpful if the solution improves its agent deployment process."
"We don't get any notifications from PingSafe when the clusters are down."
"The recommended actions aren't always specific, so it might suggest recommendations that don't apply to the particular infrastructure code I'm reviewing."
"It took us a while to configure the software to work well in this type of environment, as the support documents were not always clear."
"Their search feature could be better."
"I export CSV. I cannot export graphs. Restricting it to the CSV format has its own disadvantages. These are all machine IP addresses and information. I cannot change it to the JSON format. The export functionality can be improved."
"Lacework lacks remediation features, but I believe they're working on that. They're focused on the reporting aspect, but other features need to improve. They're also adding some compliance features, so it's not worth saying they need to get better at it."
"There are a couple of the difficulties we encounter in the realm of cybersecurity, or security as a whole, that relate to potentially limited clarity. Having the capacity to perceive the configuration aspect and having the ability to contribute to it holds substantial advantages, in my view. It ranks high, primarily due to its role in guaranteeing compliance and the potential to uncover vulnerabilities, which could infiltrate the system and introduce potential risks. I had been exploring a specific feature that captured my interest. However, just yesterday, I participated in a product update session that announced the imminent arrival of this feature. The feature involves real-time alerting. This was something I had been anticipating, and it seems that this capability is now being integrated, possibly as part of threat intelligence. While anomaly events consistently and promptly appear in the console, certain alerts tend to experience delays before being displayed. Yet, with the recent product update, this issue is expected to be resolved. Currently, a comprehensive view of all policies is available within the console. However, I want a more tailored display of my compliance posture, focusing specifically on policies relevant to me. For instance, if I'm not subject to HIPAA regulations, I'd prefer not to see the HIPAA compliance details. It's worth noting that even with this request, there exists a filtering mechanism to control the type of compliance information visible. This flexibility provides a workaround to my preference, which is why it's challenging for me to definitively state my exact request."
"The configuration and setup of alerts should be easier. They should make it easier to integrate with systems like Slack and Datadog. I didn't spend too much time on it, but to me, it wasn't as simple as the alerting that I've seen on other systems."
"Lacework has not reduced the number of alerts we get. We've actually had to add resources as a result of using it because the application requires a lot of people to understand it to get the value out of it properly."
"I would like to see a remote access assistance feature. And the threat-hunting platform could be better."
"A feature that I have requested from them is the ability to sort alerts and policies based on a security framework. Right now, when you go into alerts, you have hundreds and hundreds of them that you have to manually pick. It would be useful to have categories for CIS Benchmark or SOC 2 and be able to display all the alerts and policies for one security framework."
"Its integrations with third-party SIEMs can be better. That is one of the things that we discussed with them."
"The biggest thing I would like to see improved is for them to pursue and obtain a FedRAMP moderate authorization... I don't believe they have any immediate plans to get FedRAMP moderate authorized, which is a bit of a challenge for us because we can only use Lacework in our commercial environment."
"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 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."
"Sometimes it's very difficult to determine when I need Microsoft Defender for Cloud for a special resource group or a special kind of product."
"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."
"The documentation could be much clearer."
"Customizing some of the compliance requirements based on individual needs seems like the biggest area of improvement. There should be an option to turn specific controls on and off based on how your solution is configured."
"They could always work to make the pricing a bit lower."
"You cannot create custom use cases."
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Lacework is ranked 10th in Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) with 9 reviews while Microsoft Defender for Cloud is ranked 3rd in Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) with 46 reviews. Lacework is rated 8.8, while Microsoft Defender for Cloud is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of Lacework writes "Makes us aware of vulnerabilities and provides a lot of data but it's not easily understood at first look". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Microsoft Defender for Cloud writes "Provides multi-cloud capability, is plug-and-play, and improves our security posture". Lacework is most compared with Wiz, AWS GuardDuty, Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks, Snyk and Orca Security, whereas Microsoft Defender for Cloud is most compared with AWS GuardDuty, Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks, Microsoft Defender XDR, Wiz and Microsoft Defender for Endpoint. See our Lacework vs. Microsoft Defender for Cloud report.
See our list of best Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) vendors, best Vulnerability Management vendors, and best Container Security vendors.
We monitor all Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.
