We performed a comparison between Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps and Microsoft Entra ID 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."If your business requirements are relatively simple, it can get the job done."
"The most valuable feature is the ease of management. It's important."
"All of the features are valuable because all of the features are related."
"It's very easy to install and it includes the Intune portal from Microsoft where I can control all the devices from one place."
"There are a lot of features with benefits, including discovery, investigation, and putting controls around things. You can't say that you like the investigation part but not the discovery. Everything is correlated; that's how the tool works."
"The product helps us with privileged identity management to control who has access to what and for how long."
"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."
"The most valuable feature is its policy implementation."
"The most valuable feature is its ability to act as an identity provider for other cloud-based, SaaS applications. In our bank, this is the main identity provider for such features."
"The initial setup was very straightforward."
"Just because I've been in the Azure space since it started out and in the Microsoft Cloud AD since the BPOS days in the early 2000s, and it's just a product that made life simpler for my clients to be able to integrate everything."
"The valuable features I use daily are enterprise application, conditional access, identity governance, password monitoring, and a password reset."
"The solution is free to use and you can use it for every service."
"Its ability to provide secure connections to people at all locations is the most valuable. It is mostly used by enterprises."
"It helps with privacy control of identity data. It makes security very easy."
"Application integration is easy. MFA and password self-service have reduced most of the supportive work of IT. We use multi-factor authentication. Every access from a user is through multi-factor authentication. There is no legacy authentication. We have blocked legacy authentication methods. For people who use the MDM on mobile, we push our application through Intune. In a hybrid environment, users can work from anywhere. With Intune, we can push policies and secure the data."
"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."
"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."
"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 would like for it to be available on Mac and for it to support all of the features of Microsoft financing products. It is really for Windows."
"Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps’s technical support services needs improvement."
"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."
"It doesn't actually decrease the time to respond. This has been an issue with Microsoft recently. Sometimes, there is a delay when it comes to getting an alert policy email... Sometimes it takes two or three hours for that email to be sent."
"Defender for Cloud apps is primarily useful for Azure apps. It has limited capabilities for applications based on other cloud platforms."
"I think the solution can improve by making the consumption of that data easier for our customers."
"The product needs to improve its support."
"They have had a few outages, so stability is a little bit of an issue. It is global. That is the thing. I know some of the other competitors are regionalized ID platforms, but Entra ID is global, so when something goes wrong, it is a problem because it underpins everything, whether you are logging in to M365 or you have single sign-on to Azure, Autopilot, Intune, Exchange mailbox or another application. If there is a problem with Entra ID, all of that falls apart, so its great strength and weakness is the global single tenant for it. Stability is a key area for me. Otherwise, it is generally pretty good."
"It doesn't function the same way as an Active Directory inside of an infrastructure, that is, a physical infrastructure. In the cloud, it is all flat. That's one of the disadvantages."
"There are some features, where if you want to access them, then you need to make use of PowerShell. If someone is not really versed in PowerShell scripting, then they would definitely have issues using some of those features in Azure Active Directory."
"Entra ID is not battle-tested or stable enough to support a business of our size. There are some design issues specifically around support for legacy services."
"The support is a bit slow."
"We previously used Microsoft's technical support, which was excellent; they were very responsive. Now, we use a CSP, and their support is lacking, so I rate them five out of ten."
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Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps is ranked 10th in Microsoft Security Suite with 30 reviews while Microsoft Entra ID is ranked 4th in Microsoft Security Suite with 190 reviews. Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps is rated 8.4, while Microsoft Entra ID is rated 8.6. 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". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Microsoft Entra ID writes "Saves us time and money and features Conditional Access policies, SSPR, and MFA". Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps is most compared with Zscaler Internet Access, Cisco Umbrella, Netskope , Prisma Access by Palo Alto Networks and Qualys VMDR, whereas Microsoft Entra ID is most compared with Microsoft Intune, Google Cloud Identity, CyberArk Privileged Access Manager, Ping Identity Platform and Okta Workforce Identity. See our Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps vs. Microsoft Entra ID report.
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