We performed a comparison between Microsoft Defender for Identity and NetWitness Platform based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Identity Threat Detection and Response (ITDR) solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."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."
"This solution has advanced a lot over the last few years."
"Microsoft Defender for Identity provides excellent visibility into threats by leveraging real-time analytics and data intelligence."
"The best feature is security monitoring, which detects and investigates suspicious user activities. It can easily detect advanced attacks based on the behavior. The credentials are securely stored, so it reduces the risk of compromise. It will monitor user behavior based on artificial intelligence to protect the identities in your organization. It will even help secure the on-premise Active Directory. It syncs from the cloud to on-premise, and on-premise modifications will be reflected in the cloud."
"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."
"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 automates routine testing and helps automate the finding of high-value alerts."
"Defender for Identity has not affected the end-user experience."
"Setting up NetWitness is straightforward. There are multiple connectors, including standard and specialized connectors. One purpose of the connectors is the enhanced capability integrate the custom applications. NetWitness comes with E6 appliances and application images that we use for the initial configurations and for the OS stack information. From there, you can consider the correlation rules, integrate the different log sources, and easily create correlation rules and backlog reports."
"The most valuable feature is that we can create our own connectors for any application, and NetWitness provides the training and tools to do it."
"Possibility to investigate incidents based on logs and raw packets, such as extracting files sent over the network"
"It's quite economical compared to other solutions in the market."
"What we are mainly using are the RSA concentrator, RSA Decoder, Archiver, Broker, and Log Decoder."
"It's fully scalable. There is no limit. Of course, the license limits per day the number of terabytes. In my opinion, it's very flexible."
"The most valuable feature is the ability to write rules and triggers for network communication, and then being able to investigate based on that."
"The product's initial setup phase was not at all difficult."
"When the data leaves the cloud, there are security issues."
"One potential area for improvement could be exploring flexibility in the installation of Microsoft Defender for Identity agents."
"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."
"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."
"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 tracking instance needs to be configured appropriately."
"The solution could be better at using group-managed access and they could replace it with broad-based access controls."
"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."
"The documentation is not as structured as I would like, personally, and I think that it can be improved and made much more user-friendly."
"It is not so easy to customize this product."
"The initial setup is very complex and should be simplified."
"They should implement algorithms to digest that data and produce additional, more advanced reporting, alerting and support of internal security teams."
"The system architecture is complex and sometimes it’s hard to troubleshoot potential problems."
"Sometimes, it gives me static when integrating Windows-based systems. It should produce a precise log of sorts as to where the problem is. For example, a few days ago because of the McAfee application firewall, I couldn't get access to the particular Windows machine. So, my team and I had to figure out by ourselves that there was a virus responsible for the obstacle. This solution should trigger a meaningful log or message indicating the reason the user or implementer can't get into the machine."
"The tool's integration capability isn't so great."
"Log aggregation is an issue with this solution because there are a huge number of alerts in a single instance."
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Microsoft Defender for Identity is ranked 1st in Identity Threat Detection and Response (ITDR) with 13 reviews while NetWitness Platform is ranked 19th in Log Management with 36 reviews. Microsoft Defender for Identity is rated 9.0, while NetWitness Platform is rated 7.4. 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 NetWitness Platform writes "Can find out if there is lateral movement, but integration and workflow need improvement". 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 Microsoft Defender for Endpoint, whereas NetWitness Platform is most compared with Splunk Enterprise Security, RSA enVision, IBM Security QRadar, Cisco Secure Network Analytics and Microsoft Sentinel. See our Microsoft Defender for Identity vs. NetWitness Platform report.
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