Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps Reviews

I am not sure if the product has improved our organization yet. However, it certainly gives another level of confidence that the assets are secure. We are aware of the activity in the tenant.

The product’s most valuable feature is SQL database. It notifies us even in case of false positives when people log in after a long time and when we're out of compliance with the security baseline.

Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps’s technical support services needs improvement.

We have been using Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps for three years.

The product has good stability.

The product has good scalability.

The technical support services need improvement. They take a while to get responses. Their first-level engineers are generally not skilled. It takes time to get an engineer who can help us. Usually, whenever we come up with a problem, it is something that we can’t figure out on our own. We have to go through the process of submitting a ticket, waiting for a callback, and then finally getting help.

Neutral

I have used other products while working at other places. They all are more expensive than Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps.

The initial setup process was simple. We had to merge the landing zone and part of a template. Later, we started the portal and selected resources we wanted to protect along with the level of protection. The implementation strategy is to just start using it.

We did the product implementation ourselves.

I haven't tracked an ROI for the product. It was set by default while setting up Azure Tenant. It has been successful in monitoring activities and keeping the network safe. It is less expensive than buying a separate license. It provides ease and convenience of use. We just turn the product on by default.

The product has helped save a medium amount of money. It has pretty good pricing.

I don’t know if the product provides a single pane for managing immune access. We connect it with the Active Directory and other similar tools. It helps save a low amount of time.

I advise others to try using Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps. I rate it an eight out of ten.

We use it for security alerts for any possible trouble for users. 

In terms of deployment, we have on-prem servers for now for one of the customers. We also have several customers on the Azure cloud.

I like the web GUI/the management interface. I also like the security of Microsoft. As compared to other manufacturers, it's less complex and easy to understand and work with.

There are some features, such as user navigation content filtering, that are disabled by default, and it probably makes sense to enable them by default.

I have been using this solution for about six months. 

It is stable.

It is scalable. We have 100 licenses for one company, and we probably have 1,000 licenses for another company.

I haven't used it yet.

The customer with 100 licenses used Sophos EDR. Microsoft Defender is more manageable. Sophos EDR is not a bad product. It is a complete product, but the Microsoft Defender is better.

It was more or less straightforward. 

It was implemented in-house.

It is a little bit expensive. When you want to have the complete package with Office 365, Defender, and everything else, it is expensive.

My advice would be to try it first and compare it with other solutions.

I would rate it an eight out of ten.

The solution is primarily used for cloud visibility and getting a better understanding of what the data footprint is, including what kinds of files are exposed, and getting our heads around compliance. It's a component that adds DLP. Presently, there are two separate DLP policies between Microsoft's traditional DLP and the MCA DLP. 

The solution is bundled with E3 and E5 licenses. That's the reason it's most commonly deployed. It's part of the bundle. It's not a separate cost.

If your business requirements are relatively simple, it can get the job done. 

If you have more elaborate needs or if you have some more sophisticated use cases, for example, if you need an in-line component, or if you need to distinguish between sanctioned and unsanctioned applications, this solution doesn't cut it. You need to have some other solution.

Microsoft seems to want to mitigate that visible gap by deploying Microsoft DTP Defender for the in-line component. If you consume Microsoft, the more pieces you have, the better it is, although that's not necessarily true, technically speaking. They have limited deployment options. You have limited use cases for an endpoint with the firewalls port for IP tunnels for real-time traffic interception. You have to rule the endpoint. It's a less flexible deployment than the more mature players.

There are challenges with detection and there are challenges with false-positive rates.

They're improving it all the time. I haven't looked at it for six months or so, however, the last time I looked at it, they had to be configured in two different spots.

I've been dealing with the solution for a while, on and off. 

A lot of customers that we work with have the solution installed today and we see them running it by themselves as well.

The solution is stable. I haven't bumped any stability issues.

I haven't tested the scalability. I don't have any opinion on the scalability. It seems to me that it fits the customer's needs from a scalability perspective.

I don't work with technical support directly.

The solution is super easy to configure. All it requires is an admin for the various apps. Once it's authorized it can start the scans. Mainly, you need to be mindful of policies and what you're looking for. Tuning policies and making sure that your policies are set properly is important. It's very easy to do, especially the out-of-box stuff. 

You can buy it alone, however, it's not worth it. Nobody buys it alone as it's not that good as a standalone product. It's better as a part of the E3 and E5 suites. We don't sell it.

We're a Microsoft partner.

I'd rate the solution at a seven out of ten.

Mainly you want to just be clear on what your use cases are, and what you're trying to accomplish, as everything's use case driven. If you know what you need to accomplish from a security strategy standpoint, it's better. For example, it might be helpful for compliance or having an understanding of where sensitive data is. It might be part of a broader initiative around classification and data protection. Having those use cases written out first and going from there is better. Then, I suggest taking a measured approach as you go in. Implement it right. Test for or validate that the policies that you have in place are working as expected. However, you have to build out requirements for the policies. 

If there's any data that is taken out from their corporate applications, on their managed devices, and being taken out and stored somewhere else, on an application that is not managed, they don't have visibility on that.

Therefore, with Cloud App Security, the main use case is to identify information about applications that are way beyond their boundaries and to understand what people are accessing them as well as if those applications are safe or not. It's a Shadow IT discovery solution.

Apart from that, it's a solution used to protect corporate data from being taken out of those applications and being shared externally with people who are not meant to have those documents or data. It's a solution designed to prevent exfiltration and data filtration of corporate data from those applications to unknown people that may happen without proper visibility.

Basically, it's used for two purposes: providing control of the data that is in cloud applications, and shadow IT discovery. That's the major purpose of Cloud App Security.

This solution acts as an identity and posture management assessment solution also. When you have your on-prem AD integrated with Defender for Identity, it can understand your identity posture.

It can understand things like your Active Directory spread or the current state of your Active Directory on certain recommended practices. For example, if users in your organization are not using secure log-in methods. If their LDAP authentication is not secure, you'll get that information. That's identity and posture management. For your on-prem AD, if you have the solution deployed, which is Defender for Identity, it'll give you an understanding of your identity state, of your on-prem AD state, and give you recommendations accordingly, on what needs to be changed and managed, to make sure that you're secure.

Apart from that, it also integrates with third-party solutions and services. For example, in an organization with multiple cloud applications. Typically, you don't have visibility over user activities or logs. You don't have control over the data. If a user logs in from one location and then the user logs into that application from another location, you don't have the visibility as you don't have ML and AI capabilities inbuilt. With this solution, once it integrates with those applications, it has inbuilt default functionality of ML and automation. It is able to understand the user's behavior and identify inconsistencies in user accounts, for those applications, and can give you suggestions or raise alerts. 

The solution does not affect a user's workflow. It is not a user-specific solution. Users would not see the change in their usual behavior and their usual activities as such. The user does not really know what's happening in the background. The Cloud App Security is a solution for your whole organization, to make sure that you're monitoring the right activities - for example, those activities that are really uncommon - or specific activities that you want to monitor. The company has the ability to create Cloud App Security policies for sets of users, however, the users themselves do not see or feel the impact. 

An IT administrator manages the solution and it gives them a lot of information. They can see a lot of detail around how other users interact with data and applications across the company, and if anything unusual happens. 

The integration with macOS operating systems needs to be better. The Cloud App Security integrates with Windows Defender for Endpoint, which is able to monitor the traffic from Windows 10 operating systems. When it integrates with Defender for Endpoints, the macOS capability does not let you directly see the shadow IT discovery. You have to be in your network, to be able to see if any activity from a macOS operating system is happening. If you're working from home without a VPN connection nowadays, which is the usual case for a remote workplace, you can't really monitor or track the activities in the shadow IT that users are using offsite on macOS operating systems.

The Cloud App Security integration with external DLP solutions is not so seamless. There are solutions that you can integrate with Cloud App Security as an external DLP solution, however, it's not so seamless that you can have the integration with the endpoint. It's there, yet, it's not so seamless and integrable.

I've been using the solution for the past five years.

It's been stable for the past little while. The improvement has been immense, however, overall, it's a stable solution. It has not changed so much. Of course, the implementation of feature sets and improvements have happened, although they're almost similar. I would say it's a stable solution in general.

An average organization would almost utilize 100 to over 150 applications. They wouldn't really have an understanding of what activities are happening across those corporate applications. You can integrate N number of applications. There are approximately 16,000 plus applications that you can monitor and integrate with Cloud App Security. Then, based on those applications, you can understand the users' behavior.

The benefit you get is that you are able to monitor all your applications and control the data that goes out of those applications. You can also control any sort of activity, which you feel should not be happening on that application. The user can be prevented from doing certain activities. Cloud App Security helps you do that across as many apps as you want.

In terms of users. the default Cloud App Security is just a license-based solution. As long as you have users in your organization, you just buy licenses from Microsoft and assign those licenses to your user accounts. It's very scalable. 

There are a few parts to it. For example, shadow IT discovery, which is an added feature that allows you to be able to implement additional users in your organization. The Cloud App Security will also require additional infrastructure. Let's say if the data set that Cloud App Security is absorbing at a particular time span, if it increases, then you probably have to implement additional on-prem resources or cloud resources for it to be able to track all of the network data.

Depending on the data set that you're ingesting in Cloud App Security, you might have to increase your workload on-prem. Other than that, Cloud App Security itself is a very scalable solution.

When it comes to the size of organizations I've worked with, I should note I am personally a Microsoft consultant only. I work on Microsoft projects and with Microsoft's clients only. I've worked with organizations with 15,000 users and an organization that has approximately 6,000 users. I've worked with organizations that have 500 users. The size of the company varies.

Microsoft has different support tiers. If it's Pro support I would rate it at a seven or seven-and-a-half at a maximum. There are Premier support services and there are Professional supports, another type of support service. Premier support service is very good. I would rate that at an eight-and-a-half or nine. 

Pro support is if you buy a basic license for an organization. It's not so great and yet still good. For Pro support, you usually do not get routed to Microsoft people. Those are generally people who are third-party support service providers.

The problem is, specifically in India, it's also specific to locations, as sometimes if you're working in a different location, you get different support. As I mentioned, it's third-party support usually that you get with Cloud App Security or any Microsoft solution Pro support.

The level of knowledge you get is totally dependent on how the organization and how the third-party service provider is. Usually, there are time delays. Sometimes their initial response will happen, and then they will take time in responding back and/or aligning a resource. Sometimes that resource is not technically advanced or technically skilled and can't fully understand the problems at hand. In that case, they require escalating most of those cases to the technical consultants. If it's a typical question, a typical scenario, I would say it's good. Cloud App Security is a beast of a product, so the major issue is with the Pro support.

If it would have been directly with Microsoft, this help has been really good, however, it's a third-party service provider who's helping you out, and they just don't have the insights an actual Microsoft user has. 

I don't have any experience working with a third party or a competitor of Cloud App Security, however, I know there is one called McAfee, which is supposed to be equally good.

McAfee offers a cloud app security service that is very, very good and close to what Microsoft offers. That is what I understand from customers and the discussions I've had surrounding it, though I have not really worked on McAfee. What I understand from customers is, Cloud App Security, the integration, the capabilities that it has to offer, are much more advanced. For example, Microsoft's identity posture assessment. There is no solution in Europe, anywhere, which offers such a capability. It's an integrated solution with Defender for Identity, however, it's a service that Cloud App Security at least offers, which otherwise would not be available.

Similarly, integration with the number of applications, as I mentioned, is great with Microsoft. The capability for you to monitor and route your traffic for all of these different applications, and to be able to analyze the traffic from those corporate applications is important.

The reverse proxy capability that Microsoft Cloud App Security offers is really good. It lets you track anything in real-time, and monitor all those things, which is not possible using other solutions.

The initial onboarding of Cloud App Security with Office 365 is pretty straightforward. For an organization that does not use Office 365 as its primary SaaS application, you will still have to follow a few steps, however, those are also straightforward steps.

In general, I would say, Cloud App Security implementation, within the initial adoption of an application, is very seamless. 

The time it takes to deploy depends on the use cases. If you're talking about a simple activation of Cloud App Security, and enabling and monitoring the activities of certain basic applications, it shouldn't take more than a few hours for integration. If there are more complex situations, more complex scenarios, depending on what the scenarios are, then there may be a little bit more effort and time required. Other than that, if the default integration with applications is already there, it should not take more than a few hours to have it up and running.

I've worked with almost eight to 10 customers using Cloud App Security. This is Microsoft Cloud App Security. Cloud App Security has two offerings. One is Office 365 Cloud App Security, which is a basic cloud app security. Then there is Advanced Cloud App Security which is called Microsoft Cloud App Security.

The Office 365 one, the one which you get with E5 licenses, it'll give you basic Office 365 monitoring and snapshot reports, but not a whole lot of capabilities.

That said, I don't have any information about the actual costs of the license themselves. 

I deploy this solution. I don't utilize this solution as a solution for my organization, and instead, deploy this solution for clients. I'm a consultant for this product. My company is a Microsoft partner. 

This is a SaaS application.

I would advise new users to first try to identify the applications which are corporate-owned applications, be it if it's an on-prem application or if it's a cloud application. Once you identify all those applications which you're using in your organizations as a whole, you should try to integrate all those applications with Cloud App Security. 

Once you've started integrating and planning ahead what applications are needed to be monitored first, start integrating those applications and monitoring them. Slowly, integration after integration, all the monitoring will start happening.

Once the integration for those applications has happened, you should go ahead and start implementing what kind of policies you want. If you want activity monitoring policies, then you should start creating those activity monitoring policies. Let's say you want to apply DLP policies for third-party applications. You will need to reach out to those different teams who'll be able to give you better answers as to how to approach the data that is being shared or being uploaded from those applications to any other applications.

Based on that, create those policies in Cloud App Security. The correct and the right approach is to use the network appliances that you have in your organization. Once you have identified that information, you can go ahead and start implementing the Cloud App Security and start integrating those network appliances and those applications with Cloud App Security.

Overall, I would rate the solution at an eight out of ten.

I used to deploy it in the customer's environment and set the requirements. It's used for blocking downloads, for example, and is a security feature for data centers.

The solution is helping a lot. We get a lot of very detailed reporting on security that really shows what users are doing, including what they've opened, what else they're sharing, downloading, viewing, et cetera, as well as when they are logging in. It's a very detailed activity and reporting of my units.

The file policy and activity policy are very useful aspects of the solution.

I can get information, for example, data location, IP address, et cetera. I use it for getting information about what's happening in my environment with certain files. I can see, for example, which user is sharing files externally, and if they're downloading or might be downloading, the documents on their personal device, a corporate device, or if they are sharing any folders with the outside world.

The initial setup is straightforward.

The general usability of the solution is very straightforward.

We've had an issue where an in-session policy was not working. I want them to enhance the in-session policy. It's something I came across while adding the application into MCAS as I wanted to apply some MCAS policies on those applications.

I've been using the solution for about five years now. 

The solution is 99.99% stable.

The solution is extremely scalable. 

I've handled technical support for my customers. 

I've only really worked with this solution. 

The initial setup is straightforward. I already have experience putting the solution into place and therefore I'm pretty adept at setting it up. The implementation simply requires understanding how the customer wants to use it and what they want to monitor. 

It's an ongoing deployment and I've been deploying the solution for almost six years now. 

I basically use authority to integrate all users and exchanges together. We have basically a Microsoft-oriented system.

When I deployed it, I applied it to around 4,000 users. I indirectly did it myself and it took around one month for me to integrate everything and to meet those policies to ensure they were in line and working as to my expectations and that I was getting the expected results that I wanted.

You only need one person to handle the deployment. Maybe two people.

We do not need the assistance of an integrator or consultant. 

I'm not acquainted with the licensing and pricing of the solution. 

I did not evaluate other options previously. 

I don't have a business relationship with Microsoft. I deploy the solution and I am managing MCAS for customers.

If a person has an Office-specific environment and they are looking for a solution, this is a good option. It's a good native application. Even if they were in a different cloud, I'd advise migration to a Microsoft environment. 

I'd rate the solution an eight out of ten.

They were testing Microsoft Defender and performing some checks with Microsoft Defender. On the Microsoft side of the same security cloud app, I believe.

We have a complete portfolio of election solutions. These election solutions, in general, require a high level of security. There are preparations to have within them, such as cloud apps or websites, or even an off-premise or on-premise type of solution. As a result, we must have both types of services and products in order to secure them. For example, we used the Microsoft denial-of-service attack. It's a software subscription service from Asia that you get for a set period of time.

If you are running a live elections operation, you should seriously consider using such a service from them because it is extremely reliable. It essentially protects your entire environment. So you wouldn't be too concerned about someone hacking into your environment or anything because you need to have results that you should be publishing. That is when having a security system becomes extremely important for you. That's on the app side of things, then, on the web, we publish these results. You must also have a system that will never fail due to an attack. That's also one of the things we usually think about when we have an election operation going on.

The most valuable feature of this solution is its monitoring. The monitoring of the application. 

Integration is simple, and you can monitor your applications at the enterprise level. As a result, you can have a holistic view of all applications and their statuses. 

It's very robust and it's very good.

The capabilities are very good. It has a lot of features in it, which is why many people recommend it.

It's not the cheapest. I believe it can be more reasonably priced. 

Sometimes the support is actually lacking. But we are talking about Microsoft.

I have been doing the testing for the past six or eight months.

Because it is a cloud-based solution, I believe that versioning is not a critical factor to consider.

Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps is a stable product.

Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps is scalable.

Sometimes you don't get to the appropriate support channel from the start. When you open a ticket, you don't always get what you're looking for right away. We tend to get stuck in loops or go from one support guy to the next until we escalate. That happens quite frequently. I believe that this is one of the areas that should be looked into.

We have an in-house ABAP development team that works on ABT software. I have heard the technical team conducting this evaluation, but I'm not sure which SAP application they're testing.

The price could be better and should be reconsidered.

We're evaluating Microsoft. We're also looking into SAPs, and other options are being considered at the moment.

From what I've seen, it's a good product. We occasionally encounter some, inefficiencies in its performance. But not all of the time, because our country has a lot of internet problems. As a result, the synchronization side tends to disconnect from time to time. So whenever we get disconnected, it causes some problems. You have to have a good connection after all because it is a cloud service, you must have a good internet connection in order to connect to it. We believe it is one of the best on the market. I believe it is a good option for anyone to use. But, once again, there are other players in the mix, which is why we are always doing some benchmarking and continuing with trials for other solutions.

I would rate Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps an eight out of ten.

We are a consulting firm and we configure this service for our clients.

Our clients use it for Shadow IT systems and processes. It is used specifically for cloud services, such as services that reside in Microsoft Azure.

It is very easy to use, which is what we look for in these types of solutions. 

This service would be better if it had a separate license, only for this service, that could be used to track usage. 

We have been using Microsoft Cloud App Security for the past month.

This is a stable product.

This solution is scalable. You simply buy licenses and access the platform.

Currently, we have five people in the company who are using it. With new clients using our service and other clients moving to the cloud, I want to have a security broker in place so I expect to increase our usage.

I have not contacted technical support yet.

As a cloud-based service, there is no installation.

Our clients normally use the Microsoft E1 licensing, which is renewed yearly. It gives them access to many Microsoft services, and one of them is Microsoft Cloud App Security.

We are currently evaluating other products such as Netskope, to see what it can offer us. We primarily want to see if it is easier for our clients to use. It seems that the integration with the cloud service is much more difficult.

Licensing for this product is not as expensive as Netskope.

This is a pretty good service and I definitely recommend it if you are using Microsoft Azure or Microsoft services.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

Our primary reason for implementing this product is to deal with spam email.

In general, this product helps to best secure our network.

It has features that help to improve our security posture that include better logging and better detection of threats. Since implementing it, we have been finding more malicious emails and files. Better logging allows us to find problems and take appropriate steps to lock them out.

We really like the fact that we have a single web-based pane of glass for administration. We can use our Azure Active Directory accounts to access it, and we don't need a local application.

The most valuable feature is the anti-spam capabilities.

Since implementing this solution, we have had more support calls regarding false positives. This means that we have had to do a little more work finding these issues, although it is getting better. It is just a matter of fine-tuning the system at this point.

The false positives we have experienced so far are rare and have come from customer-specific programs. I can't say that it would be easy for Microsoft to solve them. Fortunately, we have not had any false positives for known software.

In the future, I would like to see more plug-and-play capabilities that use AI to tell you what needs to be done. It would be helpful if it scanned our devices and made security suggestions, on a configuration basis. For example, it could make more suggestions that include specific points, or offer to have something configured in the standard way.

We have been using Microsoft Cloud App Security for approximately three months.

Stability-wise, so far, I'm satisfied and it works well. We haven't had any issues that I attribute to Microsoft. There were a couple of days where we had problems logging on but I think that it was related to an issue with SolarWinds. My understanding is that some sites were shut down and a lot of companies had the same problem.

At this point, we have not had the need to scale up or scale down. We have approximately 250 devices that we are protecting.

We have not needed to contact technical support.

We were using F-Secure before implementing Microsoft Cloud App Security, and we are still using it. In fact, it is just another layer of protection. If in the future we see that the Microsoft product is good enough, then we might stop using F-Secure. However, that is not the plan at the moment.

The main reason that we chose this product is for its good compatibility with Office 365 and Azure Active Directory.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. There were some Azure Active Directory options that we needed to tweak before we got everything running properly.

Our deployment took approximately one month to complete. Part of this time was spent adjusting for false positives.

We followed a step-by-step process for deployment where we started with the computers in our location, then moving to other devices. After our location was complete, we moved to other offices.

We set it up with the help of an external consultant. The company sold us the product, set it up, and we use it. We have an ongoing support contract with them. Our experience with them was good and the consultant's knowledge of Microsoft products was very good. They are a Microsoft partner.

We are still learning the product and over time, we are getting more versed in it. There are two of us, myself and my colleague, responsible for the maintenance. We are both system administrators.

The pricing is a little bit high but right now, we are okay with it because of the compatibility with Office 365, Teams, and Azure AD. These features make it worth the cost.

We did not evaluate other options before choosing this one.

My advice for anybody who is implementing this product is to get assistance with deployment from somebody who can help you. Don't do it by yourself, if you're not a reseller for it. As a company, get somebody who has experience with the product.

In summary, we have just begun using this product but so far, it works well and we are satisfied with it.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.