We performed a comparison between Microsoft Defender for Cloud and XM Cyber based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."The security baseline and vulnerability assessments is the valuable feature."
"With Wiz, we get timely alerts for leaked data or any vulnerabilities already existing in our environment."
"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."
"The product supports out-of-the-box reporting with context about the asset and allows us to perform complex custom queries on UI."
"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 first thing that stood out was the ease of installation and the quick value we got out of the solution."
"The CSPM module has been the most effective. It was easy to deploy and covered all our accounts through APIs, requiring no agents. Wiz provides instant visibility into high-level risks that we need to address."
"Our most important features are those around entitlement, external exposure, vulnerabilities, and container security."
"It works seamlessly on the Azure platform because it's a Microsoft app. Its setup is similar, so if you already have a Microsoft account, it just flows into it."
"The most valuable features of this solution are the remote workforce capabilities and the general experience of the remote workforce."
"Most importantly, it's an integrated solution. We not only have Defender for Cloud, but we also have Defender for Endpoint, Defender for Office 365, and Defender for Identity. It's an integrated, holistic solution."
"Good compliance policies."
"One of the features that I like about the solution is it is both a hybrid cloud and also multi-cloud. We never know what company we're going to buy, and therefore we are ready to go. If they have GCP or AWS, we have support for that as well. It offers a single-panel blast across multiple clouds."
"Using Security Center, you have a full view, at any given time, of what's deployed, and that is something that is very useful."
"The main feature is the security posture assessment through the security score. I find that to be very helpful because it gives us guidance on what needs to be secured and recommendations on how to secure the workloads that have been onboarded."
"We can create alerts that trigger if there is any malicious activity happening in the workflow and these alerts can be retrieved using the query language."
"The platform's most valuable feature is attack simulation."
"What I personally like very much, from my experience, is that it is very reliable."
"The remediation workflow within the Wiz could be improved."
"The solution's container security could be improved."
"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 only small pain point has been around some of the logging integrations. Some of the complexities of the script integrations aren't supported with some of the more automated infrastructure components. So, it's not as universal. For example, they have great support for cloud formation and other services, but if you're using another type of management utility or governance language for your infrastructure-as-code automation components, it becomes a little bit trickier to navigate that."
"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."
"The only thing that needs to be improved is the number of scans per day."
"Given the level of visibility into all the cloud environments Wiz provides, it would be nice if they could integrate some kind of mechanism to better manage tenants on multiple platforms. For example, let's say that some servers don't have an application they need, such as an antivirus. Wiz could include an API or something to push those applications out to the servers. It would be great if you could remedy these issues directly from the Wiz platform."
"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."
"Defender is occasionally unreliable. It isn't 100% efficient in terms of antivirus detection, but it isn't an issue most of the time. It's also somewhat difficult to train new security analysts to use Defender."
"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."
"Microsoft can improve the pricing by offering a plan that is more cost-effective for small and medium organizations."
"It needs to be simplified and made more user-friendly for a non-technical person."
"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."
"Another thing is that Defender for Cloud uses more resources than CrowdStrike, which my current company uses. Defender for Cloud has two or three processes running simultaneously that consume memory and processor time. I had the chance to compare that with CrowdStrike a few days ago, which was significantly less. It would be nice if Defender were a little lighter. It's a relatively large installation that consumes more resources than competitors do."
"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."
"Most of the time, when we log into the support, we don't get a chance to interact with Microsoft employees directly, except having it go to outsource employees of Microsoft. The initial interaction has not been that great because outsourced companies cannot provide the kind of quality or technical expertise that we look for. We have a technical manager from Microsoft, but they are kind of average unless we make noise and ask them to escalate. We then can get the right people and the right solution, but it definitely takes time."
"XM Cyber could identify all areas of vulnerability. They could expand the identification span for different areas."
"We'd like to see a cheaper price."
Microsoft Defender for Cloud is ranked 3rd in Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) with 46 reviews while XM Cyber is ranked 26th in Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) with 2 reviews. Microsoft Defender for Cloud is rated 8.0, while XM Cyber is rated 8.0. 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 XM Cyber writes "Reliable with no false-positives and helpful support". 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 XM Cyber is most compared with Pentera, Cymulate, SafeBreach, Tenable Security Center and CrowdStrike Falcon Cloud Security. See our Microsoft Defender for Cloud vs. XM Cyber report.
See our list of best Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) vendors and best Vulnerability Management vendors.
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