We performed a comparison between Microsoft Defender for Cloud and Skyhigh 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 provides regulatory compliance, ransomware protection, and security scoring, while Skyhigh Security offers strong URL spam filtering, encrypted disk, and endpoint protection, and efficient backup features. In terms of improvement, Microsoft Defender for Cloud lacks consistency, customization, integration, collaboration, documentation, intuitive features, and coverage. Skyhigh Security, on the other hand, needs better implementation, API integration, and training resources.
Service and Support: While some customers have had positive experiences with both solutions, there have also been issues with slow response times and unhelpful support. Additionally, Microsoft Defender for Cloud has outsourced support which has caused some frustration. However, Skyhigh Security's tutorials and documentation are generally praised as excellent.
Ease of Deployment: Microsoft Defender for Cloud is easy to set up and can be done by one person. It is cloud-based and doesn't need infrastructure deployment. On the other hand, Skyhigh Security's setup time varies depending on the user's skills and knowledge of technology and networking, ranging from five minutes to two weeks.
Pricing: Microsoft Defender for Cloud is seen as a fair and cost-effective option for pricing, with some complexity in licensing but often bundled with other Microsoft solutions. Skyhigh Security, on the other hand, is considered to have higher pricing and its hardware is seen as expensive. While its licensing is reasonably priced, some reviewers suggest there is room for improvement in this area.
ROI: Microsoft Defender for Cloud consolidates security solutions and reduces management time, resulting in a positive ROI. On the other hand, Skyhigh Security offers improved security posture, reduced risk of data breaches, increased visibility, and compliance, all of which can contribute to a positive ROI.
Comparison Results: Microsoft Defender for Cloud is a better option than Skyhigh Security based on user reviews. Microsoft Defender for Cloud has more valuable features such as regulatory compliance, ransomware protection, and access controls. Skyhigh Security needs improvements in virtual solutions, API integration, and technical support.
"The most valuable feature of PingSafe is its integration with most of our technology stack, specifically all of our cloud platforms and ticketing software."
"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."
"I like CSPM the most. It captures a lot of alerts within a short period of time. When an alert gets triggered on the cloud, it throws an alert within half an hour, which is very reasonable. It is a plus point for us."
"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."
"PingSafe can integrate all your cloud accounts and resources you create in the AWS account, We have set it up to scan the AWS transfer services, EC2, security groups, and GitHub."
"There's real-time threat detection. It can show threats and find issues based on their severity and helps us with real-time monitoring."
"It is advantageous in terms of time-saving and cost reduction."
"We really appreciate the Slack integration. When we have an incident, we get an instant notification. We also use Joe Sandbox, which Singularity can integrate with, so we can verify if a threat is legitimate."
"DSPM is the most valuable feature."
"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."
"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."
"The most valuable features of this solution are the remote workforce capabilities and the general experience of the remote workforce."
"Defender for Cloud is a plug-and-play solution that provides continuous posture management once enabled."
"Defender is user-friendly and provides decent visibility into threats."
"It's got a lot of great features."
"Defender lets you orchestrate the roll-out from a single pane. Using the Azure portal, you can roll it out over all the servers covered by the entire subscription."
"The stability is the most valuable feature. We haven't had any issues with the product."
"The feature I like best about Skyhigh Security is its wide range of product support. For example, my company had NetApp storage running, and Skyhigh Security has on-premises NetApp storage support, which isn't available in other solutions. Skyhigh Security also has a better filtering feature versus the filtering feature in other solutions."
"Tokenization."
"It also prevents you from writing data to your Gmail and does not allow you to move your data outside of the corporate system. That is the most important feature for me."
"We have gained a deep insight into our Shadow IT usage as well as the different activities involved in Office 365."
"Good anti-virus filtering, URL categorization, and reporting capabilities."
"User analytics."
"The initial setup is fairly straightforward and easy to perform."
"We've found a lot of false positives."
"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."
"It took us a while to configure the software to work well in this type of environment, as the support documents were not always clear."
"There's room for improvement in the graphic explorer."
"For vulnerabilities, they are showing CVE ID. The naming convention should be better so that it indicates the container where a vulnerability is present. Currently, they are only showing CVE ID, but the same CVE ID might be present in multiple containers. We would like to have the container name so that we can easily fix the issue."
"Maybe container runtime security could be improved."
"There is a bit of a learning curve for new users."
"Cloud Native Security's reporting could be better. We are unable to see which images are impacted. Several thousand images have been deployed, so if we can see some application-specific information in the dashboard, we can directly send that report to the team that owns the application. We'd also like the option to download the report from the portal instead of waiting for the report to be sent to our email."
"You cannot create custom use cases."
"As an analyst, there is no way to configure or create a playbook to automate the process of flagging suspicious domains."
"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."
"The remediation process could be improved."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"An area for improvement in Skyhigh Security is its UI. It needs to be enhanced and made more user-friendly. Right now, the UI of Skyhigh Security is sometimes confusing. For example, my company is deploying Skyhigh Security for a client and integrating it on the cloud, from an on-premises deployment to a hybrid deployment. Though the experience isn't bad, there needs to be more enhancements. Another room for improvement in Skyhigh Security is the limited training resources, especially when you compare it with Cisco, which has many study materials in the market, even free training resources. You'll get limited resources if you search for Skyhigh Security tutorials on Google and YouTube. Because of high-security requirements and the training material for Skyhigh Security not being available, most engineers and architects avoid the product because there'd be a lack of knowledge in configuring and achieving the goals you'd want to reach via the use of Skyhigh Security. The NOC team deploying the product is having difficulty getting training resources for Skyhigh Security. You'll be charged an enormous amount if you search the market for training because of the limited resources available. Skyhigh Security needs to work on marketing and awareness as an improvement to the product."
"One area for improvement I've seen in Skyhigh Security is that it lacks support for unsanctioned applications, where customers have their applications. Those applications do not come from Microsoft or other popular vendors. For example, Microsoft has support for Teams and it has support for OneDrive, but it doesn't have support for custom applications built by customers. Customers have internal teams building and publishing applications to the external world, but Skyhigh Security doesn't have support for those applications, and this is the main problem I've seen. The solution only supports a pool of applications that are from Microsoft and other major SaaS vendors. McAfee doesn't provide support for custom applications, compared to other vendors who provide it. For example, Bitglass and Netskope both have support for custom applications. Another area for improvement in Skyhigh Security is that its API support is a little weak. I also have not seen a strong integration between the solution and other McAfee products."
"Skyhigh Security, as a product, is excellent, but in terms of the right services and support, those are lagging very much, for example, in Trellix. From one hundred, its score has gone down to ten, so ten out of one hundred, otherwise, it's the number one product."
"It is an expensive solution."
"De-tokenization."
"User interface could be more intuitive."
"The solution is hard to configure, our team does not have specific training requirements for McAfee making it difficult."
"It needs to be more user-friendly, as it is a little bit complicated to use."
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Microsoft Defender for Cloud is ranked 3rd in Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) with 46 reviews while Skyhigh Security is ranked 17th in Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) with 51 reviews. Microsoft Defender for Cloud is rated 8.0, while Skyhigh Security is rated 8.4. 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 Skyhigh Security writes "Good scalability, but the technical support service needs improvement". 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, whereas Skyhigh Security is most compared with Zscaler Internet Access, Netskope , Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps, Symantec Proxy and Prisma Access by Palo Alto Networks. See our Microsoft Defender for Cloud vs. Skyhigh Security report.
See our list of best Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) vendors and best Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPP) vendors.
We monitor all Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.
