Microsoft Defender for Cloud and Zscaler Cloud Protection aren't direct alternatives, but rather complementary solutions that work together to enhance cloud security. Microsoft Defender for Cloud, is a cloud protection platform, that focuses on securing cloud applications and workloads. Zscaler Cloud Protection encompasses several Zscaler security solutions, including Zscaler Internet Access and Zscaler data protection solutions that inspects and filters all cloud traffic.
The summary above is based on 46 interviews we conducted recently with Microsoft Defender for Cloud and Zscaler Cloud Protection users. To access the review's full transcripts, download our report.
"The product supports out-of-the-box reporting with context about the asset and allows us to perform complex custom queries on UI."
"The solution is very user-friendly."
"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."
"With Wiz, we get timely alerts for leaked data or any vulnerabilities already existing in our environment."
"Our most important features are those around entitlement, external exposure, vulnerabilities, and container security."
"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."
"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."
"The security baseline and vulnerability assessments is the valuable feature."
"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."
"It takes very little effort to integrate it. It also gives very good visibility into what exactly is happening."
"The product has given us more insight into potential avenues for attack paths."
"The entire Defender Suite is tightly coupled, integrated, and collaborative."
"Provides a very good view of the entire security setup of your organization."
"The solution is very easy to deploy."
"One of the features that I like about the solution is it is both a hybrid cloud and also multi-cloud. We never know what company we're going to buy, and therefore we are ready to go. If they have GCP or AWS, we have support for that as well. It offers a single-panel blast across multiple clouds."
"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 feature is its seamless integration capabilities, streamlining the process by eliminating the need for extensive installations."
"The agent's versatility is notable, used for digital experience monitoring to collect valuable endpoint metrics for troubleshooting."
"The product provides a seamless user experience."
"This secure connection allows users to connect to the Zscaler VPN and access the resources on the office network, making it a highly valuable component of our system."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"The only thing that needs to be improved is the number of scans per day."
"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 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."
"When you work with it, the only problem that we're struggling with is that we have 21 different subscriptions we're trying to apply security to. It's impossible to keep everything organized."
"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."
"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."
"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 a special kind of product."
"From a compliance standpoint, they can include some more metrics and some specific compliances such as GDPR."
"The product was a bit complex to set up earlier, however, it is a bit streamlined now."
"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."
"Occasionally, issues arise in the LogStack by a third party, particularly for government websites accessed by numerous users."
"Occasionally, there are certain delays in report generation."
"The product is not reliable."
"Having a Zscaler-specific device could streamline this process and provide a more consistent user experience across diverse branches."
Microsoft Defender for Cloud is ranked 3rd in Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) with 46 reviews while Zscaler CSPM is ranked 22nd in Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) with 4 reviews. Microsoft Defender for Cloud is rated 8.0, while Zscaler CSPM 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 Zscaler CSPM writes "Secure and scalable internet access, maintaining stability, providing robust technical support and ensuring consistent policy enforcement across various user locations". 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 Zscaler CSPM is most compared with Orca Security, Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks, AWS Security Hub and Trend Vision One - Cloud Security. See our Microsoft Defender for Cloud vs. Zscaler CSPM report.
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