We performed a comparison between Azure Firewall and Microsoft Defender for Cloud based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Microsoft Security Suite solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."We secure the entry point to the virtual data center with the firewall."
"I like its order management feature. It doesn't have the kind of threat intelligence that Palo Alto has, but the order management makes it much simpler to know the difference."
"Among the most valuable features are the DDoS protection that protects your virtual machines, the threat intelligence, and traffic filtering."
"Performance and stability are the key features of this product."
"I can easily configure it."
"All its features are good. That's why we recommend it."
"The SIEM that Azure Firewall provides us is very robust."
"The solution is stable."
"We saw improvement from a regulatory compliance perspective due to having a single dashboard."
"This is a platform as a service provided by Azure. We don't need to install or maintain Azure Security Center. It is a ready-made service available in Azure. This is one of the main things that we like. If you look at similar tools, we have to install, maintain, and update services. Whereas, Azure Security Center manages what we are using. This is a good feature that has helped us a lot."
"Defender lets you orchestrate the roll-out from a single pane. Using the Azure portal, you can roll it out over all the servers covered by the entire subscription."
"The dashboard is very good. It gives our clients a lot of information and allows them to have a complete overview of the system. Everything is visible in one glance."
"Defender is user-friendly and provides decent visibility into threats."
"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."
"It's got a lot of great features."
"It helps you to identify the gaps in your solution and remediate them. It produces a compliance checklist against known standards such as ISO 27001, HIPAA, iTrust, etc."
"We find it's different implementing it region-to-region. It might help if it was universal across all regions."
"Azure should be able to work better as a balancer also, instead of just being a firewall. It should have a wider mandate."
"The product could be made more customizable."
"Azure has new versions including a premium firewall. But I would like to see them not put the premium features on Azure Firewall Premium alone because it is quite expensive."
"This solution is not mature when it comes to handling perimeter traffic like internet browsing."
"The tool needs to improve the onboarding and transition process for on-prem users."
"Currently, it only supports IP addresses, so you have to be specific about the IPs that are in your environment."
"They can improve the pricing of Azure Firewall."
"The solution could improve by being more intuitive and easier to use requiring less technical knowledge."
"Sometimes, it's very difficult to determine when I need Microsoft Defender for Cloud for a special resource group or certain kinds of products. That's not an issue directly with the product, though."
"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."
"After getting a recommendation, it takes time for the solution to refresh properly to show that the problem has been eliminated."
"From a compliance standpoint, they can include some more metrics and some specific compliances such as GDPR."
"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."
"We would like to have better transparency as to how the security score is calculated because as it is now, it is difficult to understand."
"As an analyst, there is no way to configure or create a playbook to automate the process of flagging suspicious domains."
Azure Firewall is ranked 14th in Microsoft Security Suite with 33 reviews while Microsoft Defender for Cloud is ranked 2nd in Microsoft Security Suite with 46 reviews. Azure Firewall is rated 7.2, while Microsoft Defender for Cloud is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of Azure Firewall writes "Easy to use and configure but could be more robust". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Microsoft Defender for Cloud writes "Provides multi-cloud capability, is plug-and-play, and improves our security posture". Azure Firewall is most compared with Fortinet FortiGate-VM, Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls, Palo Alto Networks VM-Series, Fortinet FortiGate and Check Point NGFW, whereas Microsoft Defender for Cloud is most compared with AWS GuardDuty, Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks, Microsoft Defender XDR, Wiz and Microsoft Sentinel. See our Azure Firewall vs. Microsoft Defender for Cloud report.
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