These Microsoft Defender solutions focus on cloud security and target different aspects. They are complementary solutions, working together for a comprehensive cloud security strategy.
Defender for Cloud Focuses on securing your entire cloud environment, including infrastructure, workloads, and platforms. It offers Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) and DevSecOps functionalities, identifying vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and recommending remediation steps. It can extend beyond Azure to AWS, GCP, and on-premises environments.
Defender for Cloud Apps primarily secures user access and data within SaaS applications. It offers features like Data Loss Prevention (DLP), User and Entity Behavior Analytics (UEBA), and Adaptive Access Control (AAC). It integrates with Microsoft Defender XDR for a broader security view.
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"Threat protection is comprehensive and simple."
"It has seamless integration with any of the services I mentioned, on Azure, such as IaaS platforms, virtual machines, applications, or databases, because it's an in-house product from Microsoft within the Azure ecosystem."
"It isn't a highly complex solution. It's something that a lot of analysts can use. Defender gives you a broad overview of what's happening in your environment, and it's a great solution if you're a Microsoft shop."
"The security alerts and correlated alerts are most valuable. It correlates the logs and gives us correlated alerts, which can be fed into any security information and event management (SIEM) tool. It is an analyzed correlation tool for monitoring security. It gives us alerts when there is any kind of unauthorized access, or when there is any malfunctioning in multifactor authentication (MFA). If our Azure is connected with Azure Security Center, we get to know what types of authentication are happening in our infra."
"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."
"Everything is built into Azure, and if we go for cross-cloud development with Azure Arc, we can use most of the features. While it's possible to deploy and convert third-party applications, it is difficult to maintain, whereas Azure deployments to the cloud are always easier. Also, Microsoft is a big company, so they always provide enough support, and we trust the Microsoft brand."
"One important security feature is the incident alerts. Now, with all these cyberattacks, there are a lot of incident alerts that get triggered. It is very difficult to keep monitoring everything automatically, instead our organization is utilizing the automated use case that we get from Microsoft. That has helped bring down the manual work for a lot of things."
"When you have commissioned Defender, you have these things visible already on your dashboard. This gives the efficiency to the people to do their actual work rather than bothering about the email, sorting out the email, or looking at it through an ITSM solution, whey they have to look at the description and use cases. Efficiency increases with this optimized, ready-made solution since you don't need to invest in something externally. You can start using the dashboard and auditing capability provided from day one. Thus, you have fewer costs with a more optimized, easier-to-use solution, providing operational efficiency for your team."
"All of the features are valuable because all of the features are related."
"The product’s most valuable feature is SQL database."
"Defender helps us control which applications are being used and gain more security insight into remote and hybrid users based on user identity and log in location. You can also integrate Defender for Cloud Apps with Defender for Endpoint to extend its capabilities."
"The product helps us with privileged identity management to control who has access to what and for how long."
"I like the alert policies because they are quite robust. It has some built-in templates that we can easily pick up. One of them is the alert for mass downloads, when a particular user is running a massive download on your SharePoint site."
"The most valuable feature is the ease of management. It's important."
"Defender's integration with our identity solutions is critical in our current setup."
"It does a great job of monitoring and maintaining a security baseline. For us, that is a key element. The notifications are pretty good."
"Azure is a complex solution. You have so many moving parts."
"Agent features need to be improved. They support agents through Azure Arc or Workbench. Sometimes, we are not able to get correct signals from the machines on which we have installed these agents. We are not able to see how many are currently reporting to Azure Security Center, and how many are currently not reporting. For example, we have 1,000 machines, and we have enrolled 1,000 OMS agents on these machines to collect the log. When I look at the status, even though at some places, it shows that it is connected, but when I actually go and check, I'm not getting any alerts from those. There are some discrepancies on the agent, and the agent features are not up to the mark."
"If a customer is already using Okta as an SSO in its entire environment, they will want to continue with it. But Security Center doesn't understand that and keeps making recommendations. It would help if it let us resolve a recommendation, even if it is not implemented."
"When you work with it, the only problem that we're struggling with is that we have 21 different subscriptions we're trying to apply security to. It's impossible to keep everything organized."
"The product must improve its UI."
"The documentation could be much clearer."
"You cannot create custom use cases."
"Microsoft can improve the pricing by offering a plan that is more cost-effective for small and medium organizations."
"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."
"There could be more granular roles that are out of the box included in the product."
"The technical support team has room for improvement."
"I want them to enhance in-session policy."
"It takes some time to scan and apply the policies when there is some sensitive information. After it applies the policies, it works, but there is a delay. This is something for which we are working with Microsoft."
"They should continue integration with all other Microsoft security-related products. The integration with all the other products is still ongoing."
"We sometimes get errors when we create policies, which is somewhat annoying because some policies stop working due to misconfigurations. We find this challenging because it limits our options for troubleshooting an issue."
"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."
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Microsoft Defender for Cloud is ranked 2nd in Microsoft Security Suite with 46 reviews while Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps is ranked 10th in Microsoft Security Suite with 30 reviews. Microsoft Defender for Cloud is rated 8.0, while Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps is rated 8.4. 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 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". Microsoft Defender for Cloud is most compared with AWS GuardDuty, Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks, Microsoft Defender XDR, Wiz and Microsoft Defender for Endpoint, whereas Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps is most compared with Zscaler Internet Access, Cisco Umbrella, Netskope , Prisma Access by Palo Alto Networks and Qualys VMDR. See our Microsoft Defender for Cloud vs. Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps report.
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