


Find out in this report how the two Cloud Access Security Brokers (CASB) solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.
With iboss, whenever you turn on your laptop, the iboss agent automatically connects to the iboss cloud, enforcing all security policies. So with respect to the security side, it strengthens measures.
Deploying iboss leads to good return on investment, estimated around 70% to 80%.
I have seen some cost effectiveness from iboss; it has reduced certain support requirements, making it a more hands-off solution.
At Amazon, we knew exactly how much it would cost if a fulfillment center was down for an hour.
The AI features further contribute by expediting threat detection and incident response, ensuring tangible returns through operational savings.
It is one of those tools that needs to work right out of the box, and thankfully, it does; it is reliable, and the setup time was quick and straightforward.
The biggest return on investment so far has been visibility, knowing what we have in our environment.
As a small team, Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps allowed us to manage systems with just one or two people.
We have at least saved the costs we had from the Netskope solution this year.
They are very fast, responsive, and knowledgeable.
The quality of the support is fantastic.
We had promising discussions about resolving these issues, but no real action followed.
Cisco TAC is very competent.
With our established point of contact within Cisco, our experience has greatly improved; we no longer log all issues through technical cases, as we can go directly to our account managers or customer service team, which expedites resolution.
I would rate the technical support ten out of ten. Hands down.
Their customer service is pretty good, but it's frustrating to go through three or four channels before reaching the right person.
The support is excellent, and the speed of response is commendable.
There were instances where the engineers were knowledgeable and helpful, but at other times it felt like a ping pong game, with unnecessary transfers until the right person was found.
They are also able to meet on-demand requirements based on your contract with them, and can easily provide adequate resources and scalability.
I would rate it a nine out of ten for scalability.
If I start seeing sluggishness or anything like that, I just reach out to my rep, and they connect with their dev team, typically resolving it the same day.
We turn the traffic to the Cisco Secure Access cloud, and we can manage and apply the policies that are necessary, making it very easy to scale the solution.
Cisco has a great benefit in that you can integrate with other solutions in an easy way because it has a lot of protocols to integrate with others and sophisticated steps that we can apply for integration.
Performance has remained consistent, usage has increased, and we have not experienced scalability-related limitations.
For what I know about the log collector and how much data it can take in, it is super scalable and capable of handling high workloads.
Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps is very scalable, provided you have the right subscription.
In my experience, Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps is good enough for small to medium businesses.
It's been pretty solid; I've never had an outage with them, and if I ever had, it's only been once out of the seven years.
We've experienced zero downtime.
Our biggest problem with their service was it did not recognize the device despite our ClearPass sending information to the iboss box.
Cisco is renowned for their reliability, and their products perform well under high data usage.
The service consistently provides secure connectivity for remote users, contractors, and hybrid environments with minimal disruption.
I rate the stability of Cisco Secure Access as ten out of ten.
I would rate it a ten because I have not experienced any stability issues so far with Defender for Cloud Apps.
I would assess the stability and reliability of Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps as stable
My impression on the stability and reliability of Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps is that it is very stable.
It is not as intuitive as the rest of the platform.
iboss's single pane of glass console gives centralized visibility into web traffic, user activity, security policies, and alerts from one dashboard.
We also had a problem with a transition when we upgraded from one appliance of theirs to another, but their engineer lost a good deal of our data.
Modernization is needed, specifically in the enhancement of security features and functionality.
It was challenging to learn because it has a significant learning curve and requires considerable training to become proficient.
The granular access issue is coming from the product limitation at the moment, as it does not offer us the option to tell it that a particular role can only manage websites, allowed sites, and blocked sites.
For data loss prevention, it would be useful to be able to drill down into the kind of data being transferred over CloudApp.
Defender typically connects to Entra ID, but we have local users on the cloud for database access, SSH, or RDS, and there is nothing produced by Defender regarding those local IAM users.
Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps would benefit if Microsoft allows users to fine-tune false positives, enabling us to dismiss alerts or make adjustments so that such things don't trigger multiple times in the future.
It offers the same features you would get from a vendor that charges 250,000 British pounds for a fraction of the price.
The following year, the cost of just licensing was similar to what was paid the previous year for a new appliance along with the implementation and licensing costs.
Regarding pricing, setup costs, and licensing, iboss is not cheap, and that's my only concern.
The solution is cheaper than premium options such as Palo Alto, existing Cisco licenses facilitate replacing previous solutions with Cisco Secure Access smoothly and affordably.
It is good because you want to push Cisco Secure Access, and regarding the price, it is very much below other products.
Improvement on the pricing will help in expanding the market for Cisco Secure Access and then it can be affordable to much more number of companies than what it is right now.
The pricing for Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps is acceptable.
My organization is currently revisiting pricing, but previously, the cost was a bit expensive, yet comparable to other solutions with similar functionalities and features.
It's not the cheapest, but also not the most expensive, placing it in the mid-level range.
The solution's mental health function can detect if someone needs help.
It's given us a lot more visibility into our computer assets that may be infected with viruses and also shows us people who have unusually large uploads or might be engaging in high-risk activities, such as searches or going to sites not categorized by their web crawler.
iboss was the best solution for us because, no matter what domain you were in, everything is under a single pane of glass, which is exactly what we wanted.
It eliminates the hassle of switching on VPNs and provides a direct connection to resources via Cisco Secure Access.
They are sending the traffic encrypted and categorizing the traffic based on the type, whether web traffic or internet traffic, and doing the security mechanism that is needed for the traffic type.
Using ZTNA in Cisco Secure Access has positively affected my transition and my clients' transition to Zero Trust and least privilege principles, reinforcing the security posture.
It provides excellent suggestions and options for configuration; for example, it can track suspicious files getting uploaded to cloud resources on Azure based on their signatures, generating alerts for those files.
The product recommends things that need to be blocked and allows for dynamic configuration, which cuts down on potential issues that might arise from going through lists and understanding what needs to be blocked.
The ability to sanction unsanctioned apps using Secure Score benchmarking, included in Cloud, is also beneficial.
| Product | Mindshare (%) |
|---|---|
| Cisco Secure Access | 4.8% |
| Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps | 5.9% |
| iboss | 4.5% |
| Other | 84.8% |

| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 13 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 7 |
| Large Enterprise | 11 |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 28 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 15 |
| Large Enterprise | 41 |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 15 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 13 |
| Large Enterprise | 19 |
iboss is the Zero Trust SASE platform that gives organizations complete visibility and governance over their AI, data, and applications through one unified platform, one console, one policy engine, and one data lake.
Your endpoints may already stop malware. Your data and application activity can still be invisible. iboss decrypts and understands every connection, then turns that signal into answers security leaders can act on.
The platform leads with three capabilities in this order: AI Security and Visibility, Data Security and Visibility, and App Visibility and Control. Zero Trust Network Access, VPN replacement, and SD-WAN sit underneath as the access fabric that carries those three. Trusted by global enterprises and government agencies.
What are the most important features of Iboss?
- AI Security and Visibility: conversation capture, shadow-AI discovery, AI DLP, and agent governance across Claude, Co-Work, ChatGPT, Gemini, and Grok, and emerging services.
- Data Security and Visibility: full SSL/TLS decryption, deep content inspection, MIP label compliance, and one-click compliance reporting.
- App Visibility and Control: signatureless CASB, dual risk scoring, in-app controls, and SSPM for major SaaS.
- Containerized Zero Trust SASE: dedicated containers, isolated SSL keys, one console, one policy engine, one data lake.
- Access fabric: ZTNA, VPN replacement, and SD-WAN under the same platform.
What benefits should users consider in reviews?
- Complete visibility over AI, data, and applications from one platform instead of separate point tools.
- Encrypted traffic is inspected by default so data decisions use content and context together.
- Shadow SaaS and new web tools appear as they are used, with enforceable controls in one console.
- Native data sovereignty through dedicated containers, in-region inspection, and per-customer SSL key custody.
- Scale proven in published materials: 10M+ users, 100+ countries, 150B+ transactions, 2.5B+ threats blocked.
Economic buyers are CISOs, CIOs, and VPs of Security. Champions include security architects, network and infrastructure leaders, SecOps, and GRC. Primary segments: enterprise and business, financial services, government (including FedRAMP Gov Cloud), healthcare, manufacturing, legal and professional services, retail and hospitality, and MSP/MSSP partners. Education, including K-12, is one vertical among these.
Cisco Secure Access is a comprehensive Security Service Edge (SSE) solution (a key component of a SASE solution) that addresses the complexities of securing a hybrid enterprise. Cloud-delivered and grounded in zero trust, it delivers a unique blend of user simplicity and IT efficiency for frictionless, secure access to all applications—SaaS (with gen AI), private apps, and the internet—regardless of user location or device. Secure Access protects users, data, and devices against relentless, sophisticated, and constantly evolving threats including AI-driven attacks and identity breaches.
Provides all core SSE components (ZTNA, SWG, CASB, and FWaaS) plus extended capabilities.
Includes VPN-as-a-Service (VPNaaS), data loss prevention (DLP), AI Assistant, visibility/control/guardrails for generative AI use, digital experience monitoring (DEM), reserved IP, remote browser isolation (RBI), DNS-layer security, flexible security enforcement (in cloud or on-premises), policy verification, and more.
Protects users as they seamlessly access resources and apps with no extra steps needed, regardless of protocol, port, or level of customization
Simplifies IT operations through a single client, single dashboard, single license, and unified policies.
Lowers risk with least privilege, granular controls backed with unmatched threat intelligence of Cisco Talos.
Eases interoperability with other products from Cisco and third-party vendors with common administrative controls, data structures, and policy management.
Robust integrations
Integrates with Cisco Identity Intelligence to protect against the startling increase in identity-based attacks.
Integrates with many SAML Identity Providers (IDPs) such as AD, Azure AD, Okta, Ping, etc.
Integrates with Cisco offerings including SD-WAN, Splunk, XDR, Thousand Eyes, third party technologies such as Menlo RBI, Chrome Enterprise Browser, and AppOmni for SSPM.
Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps is a robust tool for shadow IT detection, cloud integration, and threat detection, enhancing security management with capabilities in auditing and data protection.
Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps strengthens cloud security by providing comprehensive insights into user activities, seamlessly integrating with Microsoft security products and platforms like SharePoint, Teams, and OneDrive. Its investigative capabilities enhance threat detection, while real-time alerts and policy applications improve security posture. Organizations benefit from its monitoring, auditing, and privileged identity management features that contribute to enhanced security management and data protection.
What are the key features of Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps?Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps implementation varies across industries, crucial for sectors needing stringent data protection and compliance, like finance and healthcare. Firms use it to monitor user activity, enforce data loss prevention policies, and ensure security across multi-cloud environments while integrating with Azure services for comprehensive threat management. These implementations are particularly beneficial in improving compliance efforts and protecting sensitive data.
We monitor all Cloud Access Security Brokers (CASB) reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.