We performed a comparison between Illumio Zero Trust Segmentation 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.
Comparison Results: Illumio Zero Trust Segmentation outperforms Microsoft Defender for Cloud in terms of monitoring, automatic policy writing, and visibility. Microsoft Defender for Cloud needs improvements in automation, user interface, and pricing.
"The solution's most valuable features are its ability to detect vulnerabilities inside AWS resources and its ability to rescan after a specific duration set by the administrator."
"The solution is a good alerting tool."
"The agentless vulnerability scanning is great."
"Atlas security graph is pretty cool. It maps out relationships between components on AWS, like load balancers and servers. This helps visualize potential attack paths and even suggests attack paths a malicious actor might take."
"The ease of use of the platform is very nice."
"It's positively affected the communication between cloud security, application developers, and AppSec teams."
"The UI is very good."
"It used to guide me about an alert. There is something called an alert guide. I used to click on the alert guide, and I could read everything. I could read about the alert and how to resolve it. I used to love that feature."
"The product provides visibility into how the applications communicate and how the network protocols are being used."
"The features that I have found most useful is the ability to centralize all the rules and then distribute them across various locations. However, I've encountered challenges related to tagging policies, which can be complex to devise. It's a matter that requires careful consideration and stakeholder involvement before implementing such policies."
"The flexibility of the solution is its most valuable feature."
"The most valuable feature of Illumio Adaptive Security Platform is monitoring. When I have no requirement from the other application, I can use the web block traffic to build."
"It has helped us to understand internal network visibility and firewall policy implementation. We use the product to simplify firewall policy implementation."
"The solution helps to maintain logs and monitor activities. It also helps us with access management. The tool helps us to secure organizational data that include files."
"The Explorer allows you to know the traffic between source and destination."
"The solution is easy to use."
"The entire Defender Suite is tightly coupled, integrated, and collaborative."
"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 solution is very easy to deploy."
"Good compliance policies."
"It's got a lot of great features."
"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."
"Using Security Center, you have a full view, at any given time, of what's deployed, and that is something that is very useful."
"With respect to improving our security posture, it helps us to understand where we are in terms of compliance. We can easily know when we are below the standard because of the scores it calculates."
"I want PingSafe to integrate additional third-party resources. For example, PingSafe is compatible with Azure and AWS, but Azure AD isn't integrated with AWS. If PingSafe had that ability, it would enrich the data because how users interact with our AWS environment is crucial. All the identity-related features require improvement."
"If I had to pick a complaint, it would be the way the hosts are listed in the tool. You have different columns separated by endpoint name, Cloud Account, and Cloud Instances ID. I wish there was something where we could change the endpoint name and not use just the IP address. We would like to have custom names or our own names for the instances. If I had a complaint, that would be it, but so far, it meets all the needs that we have."
"We've found a lot of false positives."
"PingSafe can be improved by developing a comprehensive set of features that allow for automated workflows."
"We'd like to have better notifications. We'd like them to happen faster."
"The categorization of the results from the vulnerability assessment could be improved."
"One of our use cases was setting up a firewall for our endpoints, specifically for our remote users... We were hoping to utilize SentinelOne's firewall capabilities, but there were limitations on how many URLs we could implement. Because of those limitations on the number of URLs, we weren't able to utilize that feature in the way we had hoped to."
"In addition to our telecom and Slack channels, it would be helpful to receive Cloud Native Security security notifications in Microsoft Teams."
"The interaction we've had with the support team hasn't been ideal. Technical support should be improved."
"Illumio Adaptive Security Platform could improve by supporting more operating systems. For example, Cisco and Apache appliances."
"The customer service is lagging a bit. It could be better."
"Some of the features that can be improved is offer additional guidance on creating an effective and risk-free tagging policy would be highly beneficial."
"The solution is very basic and doesn't do anything other than the orchestration of layer four endpoint firewall rules."
"I would like to see better data security in the product."
"The product’s agents don't work very well in OT environments."
"It requires a low-level re-architecting of the product."
"I would like to have the ability to customize executive reporting."
"If a customer is already using Okta as an SSO in its entire environment, they will want to continue with it. But Security Center doesn't understand that and keeps making recommendations. It would help if it let us resolve a recommendation, even if it is not implemented."
"From my own perspective, they just need a product that is tailored to micro-segmentation so I can configure rules for multiple systems at once and manage it."
"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."
"Another thing is that Defender for Cloud uses more resources than CrowdStrike, which my current company uses. Defender for Cloud has two or three processes running simultaneously that consume memory and processor time. I had the chance to compare that with CrowdStrike a few days ago, which was significantly less. It would be nice if Defender were a little lighter. It's a relatively large installation that consumes more resources than competitors do."
"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."
"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."
"Defender is occasionally unreliable. It isn't 100% efficient in terms of antivirus detection, but it isn't an issue most of the time. It's also somewhat difficult to train new security analysts to use Defender."
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Illumio is ranked 14th in Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) with 8 reviews while Microsoft Defender for Cloud is ranked 3rd in Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) with 46 reviews. Illumio is rated 8.0, while Microsoft Defender for Cloud is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of Illumio writes "Pprevents attackers or threats from spreading or moving laterally". 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". Illumio is most compared with Akamai Guardicore Segmentation, VMware NSX, Cisco Secure Workload, Zscaler Internet Access and Forescout Platform, 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 Illumio vs. Microsoft Defender for Cloud report.
See our list of best Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) vendors.
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