Microsoft Defender users appreciated its threat protection and integration capabilities, some requested better third-party integration and customization options. Wiz users praised its data security, exposure prevention, and actionable insights. Overall, both products offer value, but differ in areas like integration options, customization, and UI.
The summary above is based on 41 interviews we conducted recently with Microsoft Defender for Cloud and Wiz users. To access the review's full transcripts, download our report.
"It's quite a good product. It helps to understand the infections and issues you are facing."
"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."
"The product has given us more insight into potential avenues for attack paths."
"It has seamless integration with any of the services I mentioned, on Azure, such as IaaS platforms, virtual machines, applications, or databases, because it's an in-house product from Microsoft within the Azure ecosystem."
"Good compliance policies."
"It helps you to identify the gaps in your solution and remediate them. It produces a compliance checklist against known standards such as ISO 27001, HIPAA, iTrust, etc."
"Provides a very good view of the entire security setup of your organization."
"Everything is built into Azure, and if we go for cross-cloud development with Azure Arc, we can use most of the features. While it's possible to deploy and convert third-party applications, it is difficult to maintain, whereas Azure deployments to the cloud are always easier. Also, Microsoft is a big company, so they always provide enough support, and we trust the Microsoft brand."
"The security baseline and vulnerability assessments is the valuable feature."
"The solution is very user-friendly."
"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 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."
"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."
"With Wiz, we get timely alerts for leaked data or any vulnerabilities already existing in our environment."
"Our most important features are those around entitlement, external exposure, vulnerabilities, and container security."
"The vulnerability management modules and the discovery and inventory are the most valuable features. Before using Wiz, it was a very manual process for both. After implementing it, we're able to get all of the analytics into a single platform that gives us visibility across all the systems in our cloud. We're able to correspond and understand what the vulnerability landscape looks like a lot faster."
"You cannot create custom use cases."
"Consistency is the area where the most improvement is needed. For example, there are some areas where the UI is not uniform across the board."
"The solution's portal is very easy to use, but there's one key component that is missing when it comes to managing policies. For example, if I've onboarded my server and I need to specify antivirus policies, there's no option to do that on the portal. I will have to go to Intune to deploy them. That is one main aspect that is missing and it's worrisome."
"Microsoft sources most of their threat intelligence internally, but I think they should open themselves up to bodies that provide feel intelligence to build a better engine. There may be threats out there that they don't report because their team is not doing anything on that and they don't have arrangements with another party that is involved in that research."
"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."
"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."
"As an analyst, there is no way to configure or create a playbook to automate the process of flagging suspicious domains."
"No possibility to write or edit any capability."
"One significant issue is that the searches are case-sensitive, so finding a misconfigured resource can become very challenging."
"The only small pain point has been around some of the logging integrations. Some of the complexities of the script integrations aren't supported with some of the more automated infrastructure components. So, it's not as universal. For example, they have great support for cloud formation and other services, but if you're using another type of management utility or governance language for your infrastructure-as-code automation components, it becomes a little bit trickier to navigate that."
"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 solution's container security could be improved."
"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."
"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."
"The remediation workflow within the Wiz could be improved."
"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."
Microsoft Defender for Cloud is ranked 3rd in Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPP) with 46 reviews while Wiz is ranked 2nd in Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPP) with 11 reviews. Microsoft Defender for Cloud is rated 8.0, while Wiz is rated 9.2. The top reviewer of Microsoft Defender for Cloud writes "Provides multi-cloud capability, is plug-and-play, and improves our security posture". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Wiz writes "Multiple features help us prioritize remediation, and agentless implementation reduces overhead". 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, whereas Wiz is most compared with Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks, Orca Security, AWS Security Hub, Lacework and Aqua Cloud Security Platform. See our Microsoft Defender for Cloud vs. Wiz report.
See our list of best Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPP) vendors, best Vulnerability Management vendors, and best Container Security vendors.
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