We performed a comparison between Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps and Microsoft Defender for Identity based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."It is very easy to use, which is what we look for in these types of solutions."
"The product helps us with privileged identity management to control who has access to what and for how long."
"The most valuable feature is the alerting system."
"Threat detection is its key feature, and that's why we use this tool. It gives an alert if a PC is attacked or there is any kind of anomaly, such as there is a spike in sending emails or we see an unauthorized website being accessed. So, it keeps us on our toes. We get to know that there is something wrong, and we can isolate the user and find any issues with it. So, threat detection is very robust in this tool."
"Shadow IT discovery is the feature I like the most."
"The ability to prevent users from using certain applications is one of the most valuable features. It doesn't require any configuration for implementation from the client perspective. It just works right away and gives you the information you need."
"All of the features are valuable because all of the features are related."
"There are a lot of features with benefits, including discovery, investigation, and putting controls around things. You can't say that you like the investigation part but not the discovery. Everything is correlated; that's how the tool works."
"The solution offers excellent visibility into threats."
"The basic security monitoring at its core feature is the most valuable aspect. But also the investigative parts, the historical logging of events over the network are extremely interesting because it gives an in-depth insight into the history of account activity that is really easy to read, easy to follow, and easy to export."
"This solution has advanced a lot over the last few years."
"The most valuable aspect is its connection to Microsoft Sentinel and Defender for Endpoint, and giving exact timelines for incidents and when certain events occured during an incident."
"The feature I like most is that you can create your own customized detection rules. It has a lot of default alerts and rules, but you can customize them according to your business needs."
"It is easy to set up. Based on the number of devices you would like to set up, you can use scripts, Group Policy, etc. It takes five minutes to set up."
"All the integration it has with different Microsoft packages, like Teams and Office, is good."
"It automates routine testing and helps automate the finding of high-value alerts."
"I would prefer to have filtering options incorporated within the policies, enabling the solution to perform tasks beyond mere blocking or allowing."
"The technical support team has room for improvement."
"This service would be better if it had a separate license, only for this service, that could be used to track usage."
"I want them to enhance in-session policy."
"Defender could integrate better with multi-cloud and hybrid environments. It requires some additional configuration to ingest data from non-Azure environments and integrate it with Sentinel."
"Sometimes, we'll get false positive alarms. For example, when a SharePoint path has no file sharing, but there is an external user, it will trigger an alarm that the file has been shared with an external user... the alerting mechanism should be more precise when giving you an alert about what activity has been done with the file..."
"They need to improve the attack surface reduction (ASR) rules. In the latest version, you can implement ASR rules, which are quite useful, but you have to enable those because if they're not enabled, they flag false positives. In the Defender portal, it logs a block for WMI processes and PowerShell. Apparently, it's because ASR rules are not configured. So, you generally have to enable them to exclude, for example, WMI queries or PowerShell because they have a habit of blocking your security scanners. It's a bit weird that they have to be enabled to be configured, and it's not the other way around."
"Defender for Cloud apps is primarily useful for Azure apps. It has limited capabilities for applications based on other cloud platforms."
"The solution could be better at using group-managed access and they could replace it with broad-based access controls."
"And when you are working in a priority IP address, Identity is not able to know that those IPs are from the company. It sees that the IPs are from Taiwan or from Hong Kong or from India, even though they are internal IPs, resulting in a lot of false positives."
"Defender for Identity gives us visibility, but we often get false positives from Azure that take us down the garden path. We go through 30 incidents each day and most of those are false positives or benign positive alerts. Occasionally, we get true positive alerts."
"The technical support needs significant improvement. Documentation for more minor issues in the form of guides or walkthroughs could help to resolve this issue. The number of tickets raised would decrease, removing some pressure from the support team and making it easier to clear the remaining tickets."
"The impact of the sensors on the domain controllers can be quite high depending on your loads. I don't know if there's any room for improvement there, but that's one of the things that might be improved."
"There is no option to remedy an issue directly from the console. If we see an alert, we can't fix it from the console. Instead, we must depend on other Microsoft products, such as MDE. That is a significant drawback. It simply works as a scanner, which can sometimes put enough load on the sensors. Immediate actions should be possible from the dashboard because. It can prevent issues from spreading further."
"Microsoft should look at what competing vendors like CrowdStrike and Broadcom are doing and incorporate those features into Sentinel and Defender. At the same time, I think the intelligence inside the product is improving fast. They should incorporate more zero-trust and hybrid trust approaches. They need to build up threat intelligence based on threats and methods used in attacks on other companies."
"I would like to be able to do remediation from the platform because it is just a scanner right now. If you onboard a device, it shows you what is happening, but you can't use it to fix things. You need to go into the system to fix it instead."
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Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps is ranked 11th in Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) with 30 reviews while Microsoft Defender for Identity is ranked 6th in Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) with 13 reviews. Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps is rated 8.4, while Microsoft Defender for Identity is rated 9.0. The top reviewer of Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps writes "Integrates well and helps us in protecting sensitive information, but takes time to scan and apply the policies and cannot detect everything we need". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Microsoft Defender for Identity writes "Offers robust protection from insider threats, but the customer support is poor". Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps is most compared with Zscaler Internet Access, Cisco Umbrella, Netskope , Prisma Access by Palo Alto Networks and Forcepoint CASB, whereas Microsoft Defender for Identity is most compared with Microsoft Entra ID Protection, Microsoft Defender for Office 365, Microsoft Entra Verified ID, Splunk User Behavior Analytics and IBM Security QRadar. See our Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps vs. Microsoft Defender for Identity report.
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