Microsoft Defender users appreciated its threat protection and integration capabilities, some requested better third-party integration and customization options. Wiz users praised its data security, exposure prevention, and actionable insights. Overall, both products offer value, but differ in areas like integration options, customization, and UI.
The summary above is based on 41 interviews we conducted recently with Microsoft Defender for Cloud and Wiz users. To access the review's full transcripts, download our report.
"It's got a lot of great features."
"Provides a very good view of the entire security setup of your organization."
"The security policy is the most valuable feature for us. We can go into the environment settings and attach any globally recognized framework like ISO or any benchmark."
"When you have commissioned Defender, you have these things visible already on your dashboard. This gives the efficiency to the people to do their actual work rather than bothering about the email, sorting out the email, or looking at it through an ITSM solution, whey they have to look at the description and use cases. Efficiency increases with this optimized, ready-made solution since you don't need to invest in something externally. You can start using the dashboard and auditing capability provided from day one. Thus, you have fewer costs with a more optimized, easier-to-use solution, providing operational efficiency for your team."
"It's quite a good product. It helps to understand the infections and issues you are facing."
"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 most valuable features are ransomware protection and access controls. The solution has helped us secure some folders on our systems from unauthorized modifications."
"Good compliance policies."
"The security baseline and vulnerability assessments is the valuable feature."
"The product supports out-of-the-box reporting with context about the asset and allows us to perform complex custom queries on UI."
"The first thing that stood out was the ease of installation and the quick value we got out of the solution."
"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."
"With Wiz, we get timely alerts for leaked data or any vulnerabilities already existing in our environment."
"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 solution is very user-friendly."
"The vulnerability management modules and the discovery and inventory are the most valuable features. Before using Wiz, it was a very manual process for both. After implementing it, we're able to get all of the analytics into a single platform that gives us visibility across all the systems in our cloud. We're able to correspond and understand what the vulnerability landscape looks like a lot faster."
"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."
"I would suggest building a single product that addresses endpoint server protection, attack surface, and everything else in one solution. That is the main disadvantage with the product. If we are incorporating some features, we end up in a situation where this solution is for the server, and that one is for the client, or this is for identity, and that is for our application. They're not bundling it. Commercially, we can charge for different licenses, but on the implementation side, it's tough to help our end-customer understand which product they're getting."
"Azure is a complex solution. You have so many moving parts."
"I felt that there was disconnection in terms of understanding the UI. The communication for moving from the old UI to the new UI could be improved. It was a bit awkward."
"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."
"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."
"I would like to see better automation when it comes to pushing out security features to the recommendations, and better documentation on the step-by-step procedures for enabling certain features."
"Microsoft sources most of their threat intelligence internally, but I think they should open themselves up to bodies that provide feel intelligence to build a better engine. There may be threats out there that they don't report because their team is not doing anything on that and they don't have arrangements with another party that is involved in that research."
"Wiz's reporting capabilities could be refined a bit. They are making headway on that, but more executive-style dashboards would be nice. They just implemented a community aspect where you can share documents and feedback. This was something users had been requesting for a while. They are listening to customer feedback and making changes."
"The solution's container security could be improved."
"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."
"We wish there were a way, beyond providing visibility and automated remediation, to wait on a given remediation, due to a critical aspect, such as the cost associated with a particular upgrade... We would like to see preventive controls that can be applied through Wiz to protect against vulnerabilities that we're not going to be able to remediate immediately."
"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."
"The remediation workflow within the Wiz could be improved."
"One significant issue is that the searches are case-sensitive, so finding a misconfigured resource can become very challenging."
"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."
Microsoft Defender for Cloud is ranked 3rd in Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPP) with 46 reviews while Wiz is ranked 2nd in Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPP) with 11 reviews. Microsoft Defender for Cloud is rated 8.0, while Wiz is rated 9.2. 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 Wiz writes "Multiple features help us prioritize remediation, and agentless implementation reduces overhead". Microsoft Defender for Cloud is most compared with AWS GuardDuty, Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks, Microsoft Defender XDR, Microsoft Defender for Endpoint and Microsoft Sentinel, whereas Wiz is most compared with Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks, Orca Security, AWS Security Hub, Lacework and Aqua Cloud Security Platform. See our Microsoft Defender for Cloud vs. Wiz report.
See our list of best Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPP) vendors, best Vulnerability Management vendors, and best Container Security vendors.
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