We performed a comparison between Microsoft Defender for Cloud and Orca Security 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, Orca Security excels in container posture and cloud security posture management, ranking gaps and tasks, and non-intrusive vulnerability management and attack detection. Microsoft Defender for Cloud could improve in consistency, customization, integration, collaboration, and resource usage. On the other hand, Orca Security could improve in risk assessment, coverage, and dashboard descriptions.
Service and Support: The customer service for Microsoft Defender for Cloud has received mixed feedback, including reports of outsourced support, lengthy wait times, and difficulty in reaching the appropriate level of assistance. Conversely, Orca Security has garnered positive reviews for its customer service, which has been described as highly responsive and competent.
Ease of Deployment: Microsoft Defender for Cloud's setup is straightforward but may require some knowledge prerequisites, while Orca Security's setup is incredibly easy and agentless, taking only a few minutes to deploy. Both require minimal maintenance, but Orca Security's agentless nature reduces overhead and saves time.
Pricing: Microsoft's pricing varies depending on the license type and metrics used, while Orca's pricing includes standard licensing fees with no additional costs for networking or computing. Orca's pricing is aligned with market demand and discounts are available, but it may be expensive for smaller organizations. On the other hand, Microsoft Defender for Cloud is usually packaged with other Microsoft solutions, while Orca's licensing is per-VM and offers discounts for potential strategic partners.
ROI: Microsoft Defender for Cloud has basic security features and its ROI varies depending on the company's context. On the other hand, Orca Security provides significant ROI, replaces multiple solutions, and requires minimal IT knowledge to use.
Comparison Results: Users prefer Orca Security over Microsoft Defender for Cloud due to its agentless approach, simple setup, and thorough visibility into cloud environments, particularly container posture and cloud security posture management. Microsoft Defender for Cloud offers important features like regulatory compliance and ransomware protection but has mixed reviews for customer support and requires more technical expertise.
"The product supports out-of-the-box reporting with context about the asset and allows us to perform complex custom queries on UI."
"Our most important features are those around entitlement, external exposure, vulnerabilities, and container security."
"The security baseline and vulnerability assessments is the valuable feature."
"The solution is very user-friendly."
"With Wiz, we get timely alerts for leaked data or any vulnerabilities already existing in our environment."
"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."
"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 most valuable features are ransomware protection and access controls. The solution has helped us secure some folders on our systems from unauthorized modifications."
"It's quite a good product. It helps to understand the infections and issues you are facing."
"Technical support is helpful."
"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."
"The most valuable features of this solution are the remote workforce capabilities and the general experience of the remote workforce."
"It isn't a highly complex solution. It's something that a lot of analysts can use. Defender gives you a broad overview of what's happening in your environment, and it's a great solution if you're a Microsoft shop."
"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."
"We saw improvement from a regulatory compliance perspective due to having a single dashboard."
"The visibility Orca provides into my environment is at the highest level... When I dropped them into the environment, from the very get-go I had more insight into the risks in my environment than I had had during the entire two and a half years I had been here."
"Orca Security has patented technologies. It's an agentless solution, so you don't need to install an agent. Instead, it contacts your account provider and fetches metadata, eliminating the need for snapshots or reserved space to copy client infrastructure."
"Orca provides X-ray vision into everything within the cloud properties, whereas normally, this would require multiple tools."
"It's for protection. It's an agentless tool. We don't need to install anything at a customer's premises. We can just scan the entire assets in the cloud."
"Another valuable feature with Orca, something that's not talked about enough, is its ability to rank your gaps and your tasks... You can get visibility with agents and there are a lot of ways to do that. But the ranking and the context across the entire environment, that is what is unique about Orca."
"There are so many valuable features that I could list, but one that I appreciate is the PCI DSS compliance report."
"Orca's dashboard is excellent. My team needs to be able to focus on specific areas for improvement in our cloud environment. And most recently, we've started to get good use out of sonar, the search capabilities, and the alert creation."
"The reporting and automated remediation capabilities are valuable to me. They're real game-changers."
"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."
"One significant issue is that the searches are case-sensitive, so finding a misconfigured resource can become very challenging."
"The remediation workflow within the Wiz could be improved."
"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 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 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."
"The only thing that needs to be improved is the number of scans per day."
"Azure is a complex solution. You have so many moving parts."
"You cannot create custom use cases."
"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."
"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."
"After getting a recommendation, it takes time for the solution to refresh properly to show that the problem has been eliminated."
"Azure Security Center takes a long time to update, compared to the on-premises version of Microsoft Defender."
"No possibility to write or edit any capability."
"It needs to be simplified and made more user-friendly for a non-technical person."
"The solution could improve by making the dashboards more elaborative and more descriptive."
"Another improvement would be that, in addition to focusing on endpoint compliance, they would focus on general compliance."
"I would like to see better customization options for security frameworks and better integration with reporting tools like Power BI or Grafana dashboards."
"As with all software, the user interface can always be made simpler to use. It would be helpful for people with very little knowledge, like somebody sitting behind the SOC, to allow them to be able to drill down into things a little bit easier than it is currently."
"I think Orca could give me more alerts. It could give me a dashboard with all the specific types of alerts I want to see for the day. It should just be one click."
"The main drawback in an agentless approach is that if the solution detects a virus or malware in the environment, we need to manually remove it. But from my experience with other production environments, it's not straightforward to install agents in the hope they will automatically remediate viruses, even from production environments... Ultimately, the ability to auto-remediate is something that I would like to see."
"There were a couple of times when Orca was down when I was trying to access it. I work strange hours because all of my team is in the UK right now. It was 2 a.m. on a Saturday and I was trying to log in but it wasn't working. But relative to my other security tools, Orca is definitely the most stable that I've seen."
"I would like to see an option to do security checks on a code level. This is possible because they have access to all of the code running in the cloud provider, and combining their site-scanning solution with that would be a nice add-on."
Microsoft Defender for Cloud is ranked 3rd in Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) with 46 reviews while Orca Security is ranked 8th in Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) with 15 reviews. Microsoft Defender for Cloud is rated 8.0, while Orca Security is rated 9.4. 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 Orca Security writes "Allows agentless data collection directly from the cloud". Microsoft Defender for Cloud is most compared with AWS GuardDuty, Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks, Microsoft Defender XDR, Microsoft Defender for Endpoint and Check Point Harmony Email & Collaboration, whereas Orca Security is most compared with Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks, Tenable Vulnerability Management, CrowdStrike Falcon Cloud Security, AWS Security Hub and Tenable Cloud Security. See our Microsoft Defender for Cloud vs. Orca Security report.
See our list of best Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) vendors, best Vulnerability Management vendors, and best Container Security vendors.
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