We performed a comparison between Microsoft Defender for Identity and Microsoft Defender for Office 365 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."This solution has advanced a lot over the last few years."
"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."
"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."
"All the integration it has with different Microsoft packages, like Teams and Office, is good."
"The feature I like the most about Defender for Identity is the entity tags. They give you the ability to identify sensitive accounts, devices, and groups. You also have honeytoken entities, which are devices that are identified as "bait" for fraudulent actors."
"The solution offers excellent visibility into threats."
"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."
"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."
"I like its investigation capabilities, as that is what is most important to me. It is fairly simple with a user-friendly interface."
"I would say that 90% of the spam and phishing attack emails get blocked right off the bat."
"Defender for 365 is a comprehensive cloud-based solution. The value of the cloud is that you aren't alone. Threat intelligence and analytics are shared in the cloud. We don't have to find the solution alone. If you face an unknown threat with traditional solutions like Trend Micro and Symantec, you need to open a case and send your information to them to analyze forensically and identify the source of the attack."
"The most valuable feature is protection against malicious links, fishing, and impersonation. You can train people to be aware of these threats, but they're not always careful. When they're using their phones between meetings, they click on a link, and it's game over."
"It also gives me good visibility because, with Defender, I'm using a Microsoft product to defend Microsoft products. The integration was really seamless and I have wide visibility because it picks up almost everything. Literally, I can see almost every activity that happens, from the e-mail to the workstation itself."
"The product's scalability is good."
"Defender enables us to secure all 365-related activity from a single place. It gives us visibility into everything happening in Outlook, protecting us against phishing and other email-based threats. Defender helps us detect any suspicious behaviors."
"Threat Explorer is one of the features that I very much like because it is a real-time report that allows you to identify, analyze, and trace security attacks."
"One potential area for improvement could be exploring flexibility in the installation of Microsoft Defender for Identity agents."
"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."
"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."
"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 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."
"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."
"When the data leaves the cloud, there are security issues."
"Microsoft security solutions work as expected. They are constantly updating the solutions to make them better. At the same time, the changes can impact a customer's environment, and we need to adjust settings. Sometimes we aren't aware of the changes, and nothing is pushed from the backend automatically."
"There is room for improvement in terms of reporting."
"Several simulation options are available within 365, and the phishing simulation could be better."
"The product must provide better malware detection."
"Too many false positives and lacks an accurate capability to detect malicious SharePoint sites."
"The company should focus on adding threats that the solution is currently unable to detect."
"The UI needs to be more user-friendly."
"The XDR dashboard has room for improvement."
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Microsoft Defender for Identity is ranked 6th in Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) with 13 reviews while Microsoft Defender for Office 365 is ranked 1st in Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) with 41 reviews. Microsoft Defender for Identity is rated 9.0, while Microsoft Defender for Office 365 is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Microsoft Defender for Identity writes "Offers robust protection from insider threats, but the customer support is poor". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Microsoft Defender for Office 365 writes "Allows for easy reporting of problems, valuable anti-phishing, and anti-malware support". Microsoft Defender for Identity is most compared with Microsoft Entra ID Protection, Microsoft Entra Verified ID, Splunk User Behavior Analytics, Microsoft Defender for Endpoint and Microsoft Entra ID, whereas Microsoft Defender for Office 365 is most compared with Proofpoint Email Protection, Mimecast Email Security, Microsoft Exchange Online Protection (EOP), Cisco Secure Email and Avanan. See our Microsoft Defender for Identity vs. Microsoft Defender for Office 365 report.
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