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.
"The dashboard gives me an overview of all the things happening in the product, making it one of the tool's best features."
"It's positively affected the communication between cloud security, application developers, and AppSec teams."
"It is fairly simple. Anybody can use it."
"The offensive security feature is valuable because it publicly detects the offensive and vulnerable things present in our domain or applications. It checks any applications with public access. Some of the applications give public access to certain files or are present over a particular domain. It detects and lets us know with evidence. That is quite good. It is protecting our infrastructure quite well."
"The solution helped free other staff to work on other projects or other tasks. We basically just had to do a bunch of upfront configuring. With it, we do not have to spend as much time in the console."
"The offensive security where they do a fix is valuable. They go to a misconfiguration and provide detailed alerts on what could be there. They also provide a remediation feature where if we give the permission, they can also go and fix the issue."
"Cloud Native Security offers a valuable tool called an offensive search engine."
"It saves time, makes your environment more secure, and improves compliance. PingSafe helps with audits, ensuring that you are following best practices for cloud security. You don't need to be an expert to use it and improve your security."
"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."
"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 compliance reports are definitely most valuable because they save time and are accurate. So, instead of relying on a human going through and checking or providing me with a report, I could just log into Lacework and see for myself."
"The best feature, in my opinion, is the ease of use."
"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."
"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 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."
"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."
"Defender is a robust platform for dealing with many kinds of threats. We're protected from various threats, like viruses. Attacks can be easily minimized with this solution defending our infrastructure."
"Provides a very good view of the entire security setup of your organization."
"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."
"The security alerts and correlated alerts are most valuable. It correlates the logs and gives us correlated alerts, which can be fed into any security information and event management (SIEM) tool. It is an analyzed correlation tool for monitoring security. It gives us alerts when there is any kind of unauthorized access, or when there is any malfunctioning in multifactor authentication (MFA). If our Azure is connected with Azure Security Center, we get to know what types of authentication are happening in our infra."
"It's got a lot of great features."
"The most valuable features of this solution are the vulnerability assessments and the glossary of compliance."
"Defender for Cloud is a plug-and-play solution that provides continuous posture management once enabled."
"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 categorization of the results from the vulnerability assessment could be improved."
"PingSafe can improve by eliminating 100 percent of the false positives."
"I would like PingSafe's detections to be openly available online instead of only accessible through their portal. Other tools have detections that are openly available without going through the tool."
"There is no break-glass account feature. They should implement this as soon as possible because we can't implement SSO without a break-glass feature."
"We had a glitch in PingSafe where it fed us false positives in the past."
"We'd like to have better notifications. We'd like them to happen faster."
"In addition to our telecom and Slack channels, it would be helpful to receive Cloud Native Security security notifications in Microsoft Teams."
"In terms of ease of use, initially, it is a bit confusing to navigate around, but once you get used to it, it becomes easier."
"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."
"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."
"I would like to see a remote access assistance feature. And the threat-hunting platform could be better."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"When you work with it, the only problem that we're struggling with is that we have 21 different subscriptions we're trying to apply security to. It's impossible to keep everything organized."
"Agent features need to be improved. They support agents through Azure Arc or Workbench. Sometimes, we are not able to get correct signals from the machines on which we have installed these agents. We are not able to see how many are currently reporting to Azure Security Center, and how many are currently not reporting. For example, we have 1,000 machines, and we have enrolled 1,000 OMS agents on these machines to collect the log. When I look at the status, even though at some places, it shows that it is connected, but when I actually go and check, I'm not getting any alerts from those. There are some discrepancies on the agent, and the agent features are not up to the mark."
"No possibility to write or edit any capability."
"After getting a recommendation, it takes time for the solution to refresh properly to show that the problem has been eliminated."
"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."
"From a compliance standpoint, they can include some more metrics and some specific compliances such as GDPR."
"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."
"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."
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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.
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