We performed a comparison between FortiSASE and Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."The most valuable features are the antivirus as a whole, the anti-malware, and all of the protection features that scan our enterprise devices."
"The protection offered by the product is the most valuable feature. It detects vulnerabilities or traps on our users' phones and then prompts them to clean up their devices. Tools we used previously would only discover, which required us to gather information on the backend, so Lookout is a welcome upgrade."
"The solution is stable."
"On the outside, the main differentiation is because Lookout ingest. They have ingested basically all of the apps for the last ten years and all the versions of all the apps, and we have that in a corporate database that allows us to do very large-scale machine learning and analysis on that data set. That's not something that any of the competitors really have the capability to do because they don't have access to the data set. A lot of the apps you can no longer get them because that version of the app is five or six years old, and it just doesn't exist anywhere anymore, except within our infrastructure. So, the ability to have that very rich dataset and learn from that dataset is a real differentiator."
"The integration with the company's existing security infrastructure enhanced our security posture since it was a straightforward process."
"I feel that it is a stable solution...It is a scalable solution."
"Deep packet inspection is easier to deploy in the FortiSASE environment. It's much simpler to configure one-touch deployment. It was considerably more convoluted to get that to work using FortiClient. All that processing horsepower is happening in Fortinet's cloud infrastructure, reducing the load on our local routers and on-prem FortiGate firewalls."
"The product can scale."
"The solution is easy to deploy and simple to manage."
"One of the most valuable features is auditing. Some of the other protection services have issues with auditing. Microsoft Defender for Cloud has an excellent auditing technique that helps us avoid the risk of filtering or information loss. You can use different tools to guarantee these things. It allows you to conduct an in-depth exploration of applications, users, and files that are harmful or suspicious. You can also enhance your security setup by creating personalized rules or policies that help you better control traffic in the cloud."
"All of the features are valuable because all of the features are related."
"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 most valuable feature is the ease of management. It's important."
"In Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps, there is an option to enable files. Once you enable that, it will give you all the files in your organization and where they are located in the cloud... That feature is very useful for investigation purposes."
"The product’s most valuable feature is SQL database."
"Threat detection is its key feature, and that's why we use this tool. It gives an alert if a PC is attacked or there is any kind of anomaly, such as there is a spike in sending emails or we see an unauthorized website being accessed. So, it keeps us on our toes. We get to know that there is something wrong, and we can isolate the user and find any issues with it. So, threat detection is very robust in this tool."
"The general usability of the solution is very straightforward."
"Lookout was moving into the SSE space. And so their work on SecureWeb Gateway and SD-WAN is still sort of evolving."
"From the analysis that we've done, they do seem to be maybe a step behind in trying to enter the market with a new solution. But when they do pick up, they do come out with some good products."
"The stability depends on the service from where you access it. Because sometimes, the place you are in, you have Gateway. You don't have Gateway. The gateway is overutilized. At the end, you need to go through their gateways. And this is the key point here. You have a tracking point. If it's not well orchestrated, and it scales up as you add more to the existing team, you will suffer"
"We just submitted an enhancement request reflecting the main area we want to see improvement in; the APIs. Currently, we're able to build dashboards, but it's somewhat backward because we use our MDM API to create them. Lookout should provide API to customers so we can query our data and use it in our cloud, and this is the only outstanding area for improvement with the product right now."
"Security and support are two areas with certain shortcomings in the product where improvements are required."
"FortiSASE is a work in progress. One area where there is room for improvement is the ability to use FortiSASE on an endpoint that doesn't have the client on it. Other solutions do that by building a VPN tunnel from their on-prem router into the SASE environment. FortiSASE doesn't have that feature yet, but it is on the roadmap for Q3 of this year. I've seen it in their development environment."
"Some of the solution's back-end connectivity and visibility are not robust and could be improved."
"They need to have more concise or precise ways to come up with the return on investment for convincing or presenting this to customers."
"The GUI and connectivity, along with the support offered, are some of the areas of concern in the product where improvements are required."
"In the future, I would like to see more plug-and-play capabilities that use AI to tell you what needs to be done. It would be helpful if it scanned our devices and made security suggestions, on a configuration basis."
"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."
"Sometimes, we'll get false positive alarms. For example, when a SharePoint path has no file sharing, but there is an external user, it will trigger an alarm that the file has been shared with an external user... the alerting mechanism should be more precise when giving you an alert about what activity has been done with the file..."
"The technical support team has room for improvement."
"Defender for Cloud apps is primarily useful for Azure apps. It has limited capabilities for applications based on other cloud platforms."
"Currently, reporting is not very straightforward and it needs to be enhanced. Specific reports are not included and you need to run a query, drill down, and then export it and share it. I would love to have reports with more fine-tuning or granularity, and more predefined reports."
"I believe it's only set to be integrated with Microsoft Defender for identity and identity protection. I would like to see it available for use with something like Office 365 Defender. I don't think it's integrated with that yet."
"There are challenges with detection and there are challenges with false-positive rates."
More Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps Pricing and Cost Advice →
FortiSASE is ranked 14th in Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) with 5 reviews while Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps is ranked 2nd in Cloud Access Security Brokers (CASB) with 30 reviews. FortiSASE is rated 7.4, while Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of FortiSASE writes "An easy to deploy and simple to manage solution that can be used for remote worker access". On the other hand, 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". FortiSASE is most compared with Zscaler Internet Access, Prisma Access by Palo Alto Networks, Cisco Umbrella, Cato SASE Cloud Platform and Axis Security, whereas Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps is most compared with Zscaler Internet Access, Cisco Umbrella, Netskope and Prisma Access by Palo Alto Networks. See our FortiSASE vs. Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps report.
We monitor all Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) 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.