We performed a comparison between Check Point Harmony Email & Collaboration and Microsoft Defender for Cloud based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Check Point Harmony Email & Collaboration outperforms Microsoft Defender for Cloud among our reviewers. Check Point Harmony seamlessly integrates with different platforms and services, offers advanced data leak prevention features, and provides comprehensive monitoring. Microsoft Defender for Cloud received mixed reviews for its customer service, support, setup process, and licensing experience.
"This DLP is very useful, as it gives our users additional protection."
"The API is its most valuable feature. On the API side, relative to the rest of the market, Check Point is decades ahead of its competitors."
"Getting reports and finding threats in the console is easy."
"The most valuable features would be its ability to intercept phishing emails and emails laden with malware, viruses, false links, etc."
"It helped us to bring security compliance and ensure system robustness throughout."
"Encryption of emails enhances safe communication that ransomware attacks cannot compromise."
"Its total protection has been the greatest aspect since it completely protects all the mail from the cloud."
"In my opinion, it's one of the best products. It does protect other things like Slack and Salesforce, which are more about communication."
"The most valuable features are ransomware protection and access controls. The solution has helped us secure some folders on our systems from unauthorized modifications."
"The most valuable features of the solution are the insights, meaning the remediation suggestions, as well as the incident alerts."
"The most valuable features of this solution are the remote workforce capabilities and the general experience of the remote workforce."
"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."
"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."
"Technical support is helpful."
"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."
"The solution's robust security posture is the most valuable feature."
"The solution fails to support hybrid deployments."
"A phishing simulator would be helpful as a user training module."
"At this time, the two-factor authentication does not work for Active Directory."
"We still get some false positives. There are times when legitimate stuff gets flagged and it could be that somebody is expecting a very important email but they don't end up getting it. On the flip side, when we alert Check Point about stuff like this, it is corrected, so they are improving. That's a plus."
"I have learned enough to make the product stable. However, the stability has some challenges."
"The implementation could definitely be better."
"The integration with Gsuite could be improved, especially when reporting the amount of emails it manages to filter."
"Check Point Infinity Portal sometimes feels a bit slow, and there are performance issues that should be easy to fix."
"The solution is quite complex. A lot of the different policies that actually get applied don't pertain to every client. If you need to have something open for a client application to work, then you get dinged for having a port open or having an older version of TLS available."
"Microsoft Defender could be more centralized. For example, I still need to go to another console to do policy management."
"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."
"Azure is a complex solution. You have so many moving parts."
"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."
"I would like to see better automation when it comes to pushing out security features to the recommendations, and better documentation on the step-by-step procedures for enabling certain features."
"Azure's system could be more on point like AWS support. For example, if I have an issue with AWS, I create a support ticket, then I get a call or a message. With Azure support, you raise a ticket, and somebody calls back depending on their availability and the priority, which might not align with your business priority."
"The product was a bit complex to set up earlier, however, it is a bit streamlined now."
More Check Point Harmony Email & Collaboration Pricing and Cost Advice →
Check Point Harmony Email & Collaboration is ranked 8th in Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) with 47 reviews while Microsoft Defender for Cloud is ranked 2nd in Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) with 46 reviews. Check Point Harmony Email & Collaboration is rated 8.8, while Microsoft Defender for Cloud is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of Check Point Harmony Email & Collaboration writes "Has a user-friendly dashboard, a great anti-phishing algorithm, and sandboxing for testing". 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". Check Point Harmony Email & Collaboration is most compared with Microsoft Defender for Office 365, Avanan, Mimecast Email Security, Cisco Secure Email and Barracuda Email Protection, whereas Microsoft Defender for Cloud is most compared with AWS GuardDuty, Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks, Microsoft Defender XDR, Wiz and Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks. See our Check Point Harmony Email & Collaboration vs. Microsoft Defender for Cloud report.
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