We performed a comparison between Cloudflare 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, access controls, incident alerts, collaborative services, UEBA features, and a single pane of glass view. On the other hand, Cloudflare provides good load balancing, DDoS protection, a user-friendly GUI, and a proxy for hiding servers. Microsoft Defender for Cloud needs work on consistency, customization, integration, collaboration, and resource coverage. Cloudflare could use improvements in reporting, support response time, traffic routing, and on-premise solutions.
Service and Support: Microsoft Defender for Cloud's customer service has received a combination of positive and negative feedback, with some customers reporting satisfactory experiences, while others have encountered difficulties with outsourced support and slow response times. On the other hand, Cloudflare's support is generally considered good, although some users have suggested that it could be enhanced, particularly for those who are new to the service.
Ease of Deployment: Microsoft Defender for Cloud's setup requires prior knowledge and policy creation while Cloudflare's setup is easy and comes with configuration instructions. Deploying Cloudflare may take a few days if many pieces of equipment are needed.
Pricing: Microsoft Defender for Cloud is seen as a fair and cost-effective option, despite complex licensing. In contrast, Cloudflare is generally considered expensive, although some users don't pay for licensing. Both solutions are viewed as cost-effective, but Cloudflare may benefit from a customized pricing model for enterprise customers.
ROI: Microsoft Defender for Cloud provides basic security features and facilitates the management of security service providers, while Cloudflare specializes in website protection and server overload prevention.
Comparison Results: Microsoft Defender for Cloud is the preferred option when compared to Cloudflare. It has a lot more security features, such as regulatory compliance, access controls, and ransomware protection. Despite Cloudflare's decent load balancing and DDoS protection, it falls short in terms of regulatory compliance and ransomware protection.
"The CSPM module has been the most effective. It was easy to deploy and covered all our accounts through APIs, requiring no agents. Wiz provides instant visibility into high-level risks that we need to address."
"The security baseline and vulnerability assessments is the valuable feature."
"The first thing that stood out was the ease of installation and the quick value we got out of the solution."
"Out of all the features, the one item that has been most valuable is the fact that Wiz puts into context all the pieces that create an issue, and applies a particular risk evaluation that helps us prioritize when we need to address a misconfiguration, vulnerability, or any issue that would put our environment into risk."
"The solution is very user-friendly."
"Our most important features are those around entitlement, external exposure, vulnerabilities, and container security."
"The automation roles are essential because we ultimately want to do less work and automate more. The dashboards are easy to read and visually pleasing. You can understand things quickly, which makes it easy for our other teams. The network and infrastructure teams don't know as much about security as we do, so it helps to have a tool that's accessible and nice to look at."
"I like Wiz's reporting, and it's easy to do queries. For example, it's pretty simple to find out how many servers we have and the applications installed on each. I like Wiz's security graph because you can use it to see the whole organization even if you have multiple accounts."
"I like Cloudflare's application gateway and DDoS protection."
"DDoS attacks target unprotected machines. Cloudflare detects and stops these attacks using internal systems. It identifies incoming DDoS attacks, issuing challenges or blocking them immediately."
"The most valuable feature is the web application firewall."
"Cloudflare has many features."
"Smaller businesses have seen great ROI due to the low investment and strong performance."
"The solution is very good at mitigating threats."
"The solution offers the flexibility to control configuration rules."
"The web application firewall brought us good security and a view of the accesses/blocks of the entire domain and subdomain that were accessed both by region (country) and IPs."
"The most valuable features of this solution are the remote workforce capabilities and the general experience of the remote workforce."
"Threat protection is comprehensive and simple."
"The solution's robust security posture is the most valuable feature."
"It takes very little effort to integrate it. It also gives very good visibility into what exactly is happening."
"Provides a very good view of the entire security setup of your organization."
"Using Security Center, you have a full view, at any given time, of what's deployed, and that is something that is very useful."
"When you have commissioned Defender, you have these things visible already on your dashboard. This gives the efficiency to the people to do their actual work rather than bothering about the email, sorting out the email, or looking at it through an ITSM solution, whey they have to look at the description and use cases. Efficiency increases with this optimized, ready-made solution since you don't need to invest in something externally. You can start using the dashboard and auditing capability provided from day one. Thus, you have fewer costs with a more optimized, easier-to-use solution, providing operational efficiency for your team."
"We saw improvement from a regulatory compliance perspective due to having a single dashboard."
"The reporting isn't that great. They have executive summaries, but it's only a compliance report that maps all current issues to specific controls. Whether you look at one subscription or project, regardless of the size, you will get a multipage report on how the issues in that account map to that control. Our CSO isn't going to read through that. He won't filter that out or show that to his leadership and say, "Here's what we're doing." It isn't a helpful report. They're working on it, but it's a poor executive summary."
"We wish there were a way, beyond providing visibility and automated remediation, to wait on a given remediation, due to a critical aspect, such as the cost associated with a particular upgrade... We would like to see preventive controls that can be applied through Wiz to protect against vulnerabilities that we're not going to be able to remediate immediately."
"The only thing that needs to be improved is the number of scans per day."
"We're looking at some of the data compliance stuff that they've got Jon offer. I know they're looking at container security, which we gonna be looking at next."
"We would like to see improvements to executive-level reporting and data reporting in general, which we understand is being rolled out to the platform."
"The remediation workflow within the Wiz could be improved."
"One significant issue is that the searches are case-sensitive, so finding a misconfigured resource can become very challenging."
"The solution's container security could be improved."
"In the last two years, there has been a certain amount of downtime when using the VDM."
"It should be easier to collect the logs with companies like Sumo. However, based on my discussions with the salespeople, I understand that's how they make their money. With the enterprise product, they want people doing those kinds of enterprise features to do the logging. They want them to pay a lot of money, and that's where I have an issue with them. That should be a default. You should be able to get the log no matter what. The logging should be universal."
"For the free and Pro plans, Cloudflare could use a simple bot to provide information to users. This would improve support, especially for less advanced users who utilize the free components."
"It would be beneficial for us if Cloudflare could offer a scrubbing solution. This would involve taking a snapshot of my website and keeping it live during a DDoS attack, ensuring uninterrupted service for our users. DDoS attacks are typically short in duration, and having Cloudflare maintain the site's availability from its secure network would enhance the overall user experience. I would appreciate it if Cloudflare could consider implementing this feature. Many organizations already utilize similar capabilities in their CDN platforms, where a static snapshot of the web page is displayed during DDoS attacks. In terms of features, Cloudflare needs to enhance its resilience and stay more focused on adopting new technologies. For instance, solutions like F5 XC Box, Access Solution, and Distributed Cloud Solution have impressive features, and Cloudflare should strive to match and exceed those capabilities. There's a need for improvement in areas like AI-based DDoS attacks and Layer 7 WAF features. Cloudflare should prioritize enhancements in areas such as behavioral DDoS and protection against SQL injection attacks, considering the prevalent trend of public exposure to the internet for business reasons. Overall, Cloudflare needs to invest more in advancing its feature set."
"Cloudflare could offer a better view or maybe dashboards of the main resources used in the client."
"It should have easier documentation for the configuration. It's very technical and people who aren't technical should also be able to do the configuration."
"Sometimes their more advanced caching tools can cause higher first-byte times and problems with JavaScript."
"One area of improvement is in the Access Rules. Hypothetically, if we wanted to block or challenge traffic outside of the United States, the only way to currently do that (as far as I know) is to enter every single country outside of the United States. That could be a labor intensive job. A solution could be to enable users to create a rule where traffic is only allowed within a certain country."
"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."
"We would like to have better transparency as to how the security score is calculated because as it is now, it is difficult to understand."
"Sometimes, it's very difficult to determine when I need Microsoft Defender for Cloud for a special resource group or certain kinds of products. That's not an issue directly with the product, though."
"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."
"One of the main challenges that we have been facing with Azure Security Center is the cost. The costs are really a complex calculation, e.g., to calculate the monthly costs. Azure is calculating on an hourly basis for use of the resource. Because of this, we found it really complex to promote what will be our costs for the next couple of months. I think if Azure could reduce the complex calculation and come up with straightforward cost mapping that would be very useful from a product point of view."
"The most significant areas for improvement are in the security of our identity and endpoints and the posture of the cloud environment. Better protection for our cloud users and cloud apps is always welcome."
"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."
"The solution could extend its capabilities to other cloud providers. Right now, if you want to monitor a virtual machine on another cloud, you can do that. However, this cannot be done with other cloud platform services. I hope once that is available then Defender for Cloud will be a unified solution for all cloud platform services."
Cloudflare is ranked 11th in Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) with 56 reviews while Microsoft Defender for Cloud is ranked 3rd in Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) with 46 reviews. Cloudflare is rated 8.4, while Microsoft Defender for Cloud is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of Cloudflare writes "It's easy to set up because you point the DNS to it, and it's working in under 15 minutes". 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". Cloudflare is most compared with Akamai, Azure Front Door, Imperva DDoS, AWS Shield and Microsoft Azure Application Gateway, whereas Microsoft Defender for Cloud is most compared with AWS GuardDuty, Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks, Microsoft Defender XDR, Microsoft Defender for Endpoint and Microsoft Sentinel. See our Cloudflare vs. Microsoft Defender for Cloud report.
See our list of best Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) vendors.
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