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."The feature that helps us in detecting the sensitive information being shared has been very useful. In addition, the feature that allows MCAS to apply policies with SharePoint, Teams, and OneDrive is being used predominantly."
"The product’s most valuable feature is SQL database."
"If your business requirements are relatively simple, it can get the job done."
"The most valuable feature is its policy implementation."
"On-demand scanning is the most valuable feature. In addition, it's a fairly fluid product. It syncs back to the cloud and provides metrics. It's pretty intelligent."
"Everything from Microsoft is integrated. You receive regular reports on them all. You can push your reports, logs, and security alerts, which are all integrated. It is crucial that these solutions work natively together to deliver coordinated detection and response across our environment."
"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."
"The product helps us with privileged identity management to control who has access to what and for how long."
"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."
"One of our users had the same password for every personal and company account. That was a problem because she started receiving phishing emails that could compromise all of her accounts. Defender told us that the user was not changing their password."
"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."
"Defender for Identity has not affected the end-user experience."
"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."
"I would like to see them include more features in the older licenses. There are some features that are not available, such as preventing or analyzing cloud attacks."
"I would like for it to be available on Mac and for it to support all of the features of Microsoft financing products. It is really for Windows."
"There are some features, such as user navigation content filtering, that are disabled by default, and it probably makes sense to enable them by default."
"There are challenges with detection and there are challenges with false-positive rates."
"Defender for Cloud apps is primarily useful for Azure apps. It has limited capabilities for applications based on other cloud platforms."
"The integration with macOS operating systems needs to be better."
"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."
"Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps' initial setup was quite technical but we were prepared. The time of the implementation depends on the job and how many users are being set up."
"When the data leaves the cloud, there are security issues."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"The solution could be better at using group-managed access and they could replace it with broad-based access controls."
"We observe a lot of false positives. Sometimes, when we go for a coffee break, we lock our screens. Locking the screen has a separate Windows event ID and sometimes I see it is detected as a failed login."
"One potential area for improvement could be exploring flexibility in the installation of Microsoft Defender for Identity agents."
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Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps is ranked 12th 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 Obsidian CDR Platform, 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.
See our list of best Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) vendors and best Microsoft Security Suite vendors.
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