We performed a comparison between Microsoft Defender for Cloud and Tenable.sc based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Features: Microsoft Defender for Cloud focuses on regulatory compliance, ransomware protection, and access controls, while also providing real-time assessment, incident alerts, and UEBA features. On the other hand, Tenable.sc's strengths lie in accuracy in vulnerability detection, prioritization, automation, and risk-based approach. In terms of room for improvement, some users have cited issues with Microsoft Defender for Cloud's reporting capabilities and ease of use. On the other hand, Tenable.sc users have mentioned a need for more user-friendly interfaces and better integration with other security tools.
Service and Support: Some Microsoft Defender users faced challenges with slow response times and difficulty reaching the appropriate support level. Tenable.sc's support is generally positive, with some users finding it prompt and helpful, but others reporting delays and a lack of helpful information.
Ease of Deployment: The setup process for both Microsoft Defender for Cloud and Tenable.sc is reportedly easy, with Microsoft's requiring less maintenance. However, the on-prem version of Tenable.sc can take longer to deploy and needs integration with other solutions.
Pricing: The cost of Microsoft Defender for Cloud depends on the license and metrics, but is often seen as reasonable. Tenable.sc's pricing is based on the number of addresses to be scanned and can include extra costs for advanced support, leading to mixed opinions on its affordability.
ROI: Microsoft Defender for Cloud and Tenable.sc are two different tools that offer unique benefits. Microsoft Defender for Cloud has improved security measures and saved time, while Tenable.sc is useful for reducing the workload and has impressive reporting features.
Comparison Results: Microsoft Defender for Cloud is the preferred option over Tenable.sc due to its comprehensive cloud environment features, including regulatory compliance, ransomware protection, and access controls. Tenable.sc has accurate vulnerability detection and a user-friendly interface, but it lacks some critical cloud environment features and has mixed reviews on customer support and pricing.
"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 first thing that stood out was the ease of installation and the quick value we got out of the solution."
"The CSPM module has been the most effective. It was easy to deploy and covered all our accounts through APIs, requiring no agents. Wiz provides instant visibility into high-level risks that we need to address."
"The product supports out-of-the-box reporting with context about the asset and allows us to perform complex custom queries on UI."
"The automation roles are essential because we ultimately want to do less work and automate more. The dashboards are easy to read and visually pleasing. You can understand things quickly, which makes it easy for our other teams. The network and infrastructure teams don't know as much about security as we do, so it helps to have a tool that's accessible and nice to look at."
"Our most important features are those around entitlement, external exposure, vulnerabilities, and container security."
"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 security baseline and vulnerability assessments is the valuable feature."
"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."
"Defender is a robust platform for dealing with many kinds of threats. We're protected from various threats, like viruses. Attacks can be easily minimized with this solution defending our infrastructure."
"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."
"The integration with Logic Apps allows for automated responses to incidents."
"Using Security Center, you have a full view, at any given time, of what's deployed, and that is something that is very useful."
"The security policy is the most valuable feature for us. We can go into the environment settings and attach any globally recognized framework like ISO or any benchmark."
"It is very intuitive when it comes to policy administration, alerts and notifications, and ease of setting up roles at different hierarchies. It has also been good in terms of the network technology maps. It provides a good overview, but it also depends on the complexity of your network."
"It works seamlessly on the Azure platform because it's a Microsoft app. Its setup is similar, so if you already have a Microsoft account, it just flows into it."
"Tenable also helps us to focus resources on the vulnerabilities that are most likely to be exploited. And since it is continuously updated, it allows us to reevaluate quickly if there are new vulnerabilities found..."
"One of the most valuable features is their distributed scan model for allotting engines to work together as a pool and handle multiple scans at once, across multiple environments. Automatic scanning distribution is a distinguishing feature of their toolset."
"Tenable.sc's best features are the availability model, accident management, and scoring."
"Their overall cost of service is pretty good."
"The scans are the most valuable aspect of this solution."
"It is a very good and user-friendly product."
"I found the dashboard features very useful. It made it easy to track remediation progress. I could publish dashboards to remediation teams and track the progress on the dashboards."
"The Auto-Remediate feature is good."
"One significant issue is that the searches are case-sensitive, so finding a misconfigured resource can become very challenging."
"We would like to see improvements to executive-level reporting and data reporting in general, which we understand is being rolled out to the platform."
"The remediation workflow within the Wiz 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 only small pain point has been around some of the logging integrations. Some of the complexities of the script integrations aren't supported with some of the more automated infrastructure components. So, it's not as universal. For example, they have great support for cloud formation and other services, but if you're using another type of management utility or governance language for your infrastructure-as-code automation components, it becomes a little bit trickier to navigate that."
"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 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."
"You cannot create custom use cases."
"Sometimes it's very difficult to determine when I need Microsoft Defender for Cloud for a special resource group or a special kind of product."
"After getting a recommendation, it takes time for the solution to refresh properly to show that the problem has been eliminated."
"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."
"Customizing some of the compliance requirements based on individual needs seems like the biggest area of improvement. There should be an option to turn specific controls on and off based on how your solution is configured."
"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."
"The solution's portal is very easy to use, but there's one key component that is missing when it comes to managing policies. For example, if I've onboarded my server and I need to specify antivirus policies, there's no option to do that on the portal. I will have to go to Intune to deploy them. That is one main aspect that is missing and it's worrisome."
"Support could be faster."
"There is not much room for improvement. However, there should be a guide that describes the step-by-step procedures for doing tasks. Otherwise, training is required from a senior guy to a junior guy."
"There's a lot of information being streamed out of the reports. What would be nice, and maybe we just haven't found it, would be more of an executive-type view. We still expect it to collect all this information, but we would like a feature that would allow us to show it to an executive or a director or someone like that and give them some type of high-level overview but not get into the nitty-gritty."
"The web application scanning area can be improved."
"The GUI could be improved to have all concerns and priorities use the same GUI, allowing them to see all tickets, assign vulnerabilities, and assign variation failures to each member of their team."
"A good plugin editor would be a good additional option for the Security Center."
"We would like to see the inclusion of external IPs and simplified reporting that's easier to deal with"
"We are facing some challenges related to our channel."
Microsoft Defender for Cloud is ranked 6th in Vulnerability Management with 46 reviews while Tenable Security Center is ranked 1st in Vulnerability Management with 48 reviews. Microsoft Defender for Cloud is rated 8.0, while Tenable Security Center is rated 8.2. 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 Tenable Security Center writes "A security solution for vulnerability assessment with automated scans". 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 Tenable Security Center is most compared with Tenable Vulnerability Management, Qualys VMDR, Tenable Nessus, Rapid7 InsightVM and Cisco Vulnerability Management (formerly Kenna.VM). See our Microsoft Defender for Cloud vs. Tenable Security Center report.
See our list of best Vulnerability Management vendors and best Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) vendors.
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