We performed a comparison between Azure Firewall and Microsoft Defender for Cloud based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Microsoft Security Suite solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."In terms of the reporting, it's beautiful. It integrates with Azure monitoring and with Azure policies. That piece is a big help. You can set governing policies and you can use the application firewall, as well as the Azure Firewall, to enforce those policies."
"I can easily configure it."
"The feature that I have found the most valuable is the control over the network permissions and the network."
"Azure's cost-effectiveness is its major advantage."
"The most valuable feature is the integration into the overall cloud platform."
"It is easy for me to protect certain ports or even the IP addresses, as well as do whitelisting, blacklisting, and the FQDN when we want virtual machines connected and to protect certain websites."
"All its features are good. That's why we recommend it."
"We secure the entry point to the virtual data center with the firewall."
"The first valuable feature was the fact that it gave us a list of everything that users were surfing on the web. Having the list, we could make decisions about those sites."
"It's quite a good product. It helps to understand the infections and issues you are facing."
"This is a platform as a service provided by Azure. We don't need to install or maintain Azure Security Center. It is a ready-made service available in Azure. This is one of the main things that we like. If you look at similar tools, we have to install, maintain, and update services. Whereas, Azure Security Center manages what we are using. This is a good feature that has helped us a lot."
"The product has given us more insight into potential avenues for attack paths."
"The most valuable features of the solution are the insights, meaning the remediation suggestions, as well as the incident alerts."
"The integration with Logic Apps allows for automated responses to incidents."
"Microsoft Defender has a lot of features including regulatory compliance and attaching workbooks but the most valuable is the recommendations it provides for each and every resource when we open Microsoft Defender."
"It takes very little effort to integrate it. It also gives very good visibility into what exactly is happening."
"The tool needs to improve the onboarding and transition process for on-prem users."
"They can improve the pricing of Azure Firewall."
"There should be better monitoring and logging. Currently, it is put in Sentinel. It should be more seamless and from the interface."
"The solution lacks artificial intelligence and machine learning. It might be in the roadmap. However, currently, it's not available."
"Azure should be able to work better as a balancer also, instead of just being a firewall. It should have a wider mandate."
"The solution doesn't offer the same capabilities of Fortinet. It should offer intrusion prevention and advance filtering. These are two very useful features offered on Fortinet that Azure lacks."
"It has fewer features than you can get from other firewalls, like anti-spam and anti-phishing. Those kinds of things are not included. It only includes IDS and IDB."
"For large organizations, a third-party firewall would be an added advantage, because it would have more advanced features, things that are not in Azure Firewall."
"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."
"The documentation could be much clearer."
"Microsoft sources most of their threat intelligence internally, but I think they should open themselves up to bodies that provide feel intelligence to build a better engine. There may be threats out there that they don't report because their team is not doing anything on that and they don't have arrangements with another party that is involved in that research."
"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."
"After getting a recommendation, it takes time for the solution to refresh properly to show that the problem has been eliminated."
"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."
"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."
"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."
Azure Firewall is ranked 14th in Microsoft Security Suite with 33 reviews while Microsoft Defender for Cloud is ranked 2nd in Microsoft Security Suite with 46 reviews. Azure Firewall is rated 7.2, while Microsoft Defender for Cloud is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of Azure Firewall writes "Easy to use and configure but could be more robust". 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". Azure Firewall is most compared with Fortinet FortiGate-VM, Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls, Palo Alto Networks VM-Series, Fortinet FortiGate and Check Point NGFW, whereas Microsoft Defender for Cloud is most compared with AWS GuardDuty, Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks, Microsoft Defender XDR, Wiz and CrowdStrike Falcon. See our Azure Firewall vs. Microsoft Defender for Cloud report.
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