Microsoft Defender users appreciated its threat protection and integration capabilities, some requested better third-party integration and customization options. Wiz users praised its data security, exposure prevention, and actionable insights. Overall, both products offer value, but differ in areas like integration options, customization, and UI.
The summary above is based on 41 interviews we conducted recently with Microsoft Defender for Cloud and Wiz users. To access the review's full transcripts, download our report.
"Good compliance policies."
"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."
"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."
"The most valuable features of the solution are the insights, meaning the remediation suggestions, as well as the incident alerts."
"When we started out, our secure score was pretty low. We adopted some of the recommendations that Security Center set out and we were able to make good progress on improving it. It had been in the low thirties and is now in the upper eighties."
"The most valuable features of this solution are the remote workforce capabilities and the general experience of the remote workforce."
"Defender is user-friendly and provides decent visibility into threats."
"The integration with Logic Apps allows for automated responses to incidents."
"With Wiz, we get timely alerts for leaked data or any vulnerabilities already existing in our environment."
"Out of all the features, the one item that has been most valuable is the fact that Wiz puts into context all the pieces that create an issue, and applies a particular risk evaluation that helps us prioritize when we need to address a misconfiguration, vulnerability, or any issue that would put our environment into risk."
"Our most important features are those around entitlement, external exposure, vulnerabilities, and container security."
"The first thing that stood out was the ease of installation and the quick value we got out of the solution."
"The vulnerability management modules and the discovery and inventory are the most valuable features. Before using Wiz, it was a very manual process for both. After implementing it, we're able to get all of the analytics into a single platform that gives us visibility across all the systems in our cloud. We're able to correspond and understand what the vulnerability landscape looks like a lot faster."
"The product supports out-of-the-box reporting with context about the asset and allows us to perform complex custom queries on UI."
"I like Wiz's reporting, and it's easy to do queries. For example, it's pretty simple to find out how many servers we have and the applications installed on each. I like Wiz's security graph because you can use it to see the whole organization even if you have multiple accounts."
"The security baseline and vulnerability assessments is the valuable feature."
"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."
"Azure Security Center takes a long time to update, compared to the on-premises version of Microsoft Defender."
"The solution could extend its capabilities to other cloud providers. Right now, if you want to monitor a virtual machine on another cloud, you can do that. However, this cannot be done with other cloud platform services. I hope once that is available then Defender for Cloud will be a unified solution for all cloud platform services."
"After getting a recommendation, it takes time for the solution to refresh properly to show that the problem has been eliminated."
"Most of the time, when we log into the support, we don't get a chance to interact with Microsoft employees directly, except having it go to outsource employees of Microsoft. The initial interaction has not been that great because outsourced companies cannot provide the kind of quality or technical expertise that we look for. We have a technical manager from Microsoft, but they are kind of average unless we make noise and ask them to escalate. We then can get the right people and the right solution, but it definitely takes time."
"The most significant areas for improvement are in the security of our identity and endpoints and the posture of the cloud environment. Better protection for our cloud users and cloud apps is always welcome."
"The initial setup is not actually so complex but it feels complex because there are many add-ons. There are many options and my team needs to be aware of all of these changes happening on the backend which is a distraction."
"Microsoft can improve the pricing by offering a plan that is more cost-effective for small and medium organizations."
"We're looking at some of the data compliance stuff that they've got Jon offer. I know they're looking at container security, which we gonna be looking at next."
"The reporting isn't that great. They have executive summaries, but it's only a compliance report that maps all current issues to specific controls. Whether you look at one subscription or project, regardless of the size, you will get a multipage report on how the issues in that account map to that control. Our CSO isn't going to read through that. He won't filter that out or show that to his leadership and say, "Here's what we're doing." It isn't a helpful report. They're working on it, but it's a poor executive summary."
"Given the level of visibility into all the cloud environments Wiz provides, it would be nice if they could integrate some kind of mechanism to better manage tenants on multiple platforms. For example, let's say that some servers don't have an application they need, such as an antivirus. Wiz could include an API or something to push those applications out to the servers. It would be great if you could remedy these issues directly from the Wiz platform."
"The solution's container security could be improved."
"Wiz's reporting capabilities could be refined a bit. They are making headway on that, but more executive-style dashboards would be nice. They just implemented a community aspect where you can share documents and feedback. This was something users had been requesting for a while. They are listening to customer feedback and making changes."
"We wish there were a way, beyond providing visibility and automated remediation, to wait on a given remediation, due to a critical aspect, such as the cost associated with a particular upgrade... We would like to see preventive controls that can be applied through Wiz to protect against vulnerabilities that we're not going to be able to remediate immediately."
"The remediation workflow within the Wiz could be improved."
"One significant issue is that the searches are case-sensitive, so finding a misconfigured resource can become very challenging."
Microsoft Defender for Cloud is ranked 2nd in Compliance Management with 46 reviews while Wiz is ranked 1st in Compliance Management with 11 reviews. Microsoft Defender for Cloud is rated 8.0, while Wiz is rated 9.2. 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 Wiz writes "Multiple features help us prioritize remediation, and agentless implementation reduces overhead". Microsoft Defender for Cloud is most compared with AWS GuardDuty, Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks, Microsoft Defender XDR, Microsoft Defender for Endpoint and Microsoft Sentinel, whereas Wiz is most compared with Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks, Orca Security, AWS Security Hub, Lacework and Aqua Cloud Security Platform. See our Microsoft Defender for Cloud vs. Wiz report.
See our list of best Vulnerability Management vendors, best Container Security vendors, and best Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) vendors.
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