Cisco Secure Workload vs Microsoft Defender for Cloud comparison

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Cisco Secure Workload and Microsoft Defender for Cloud based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out in this report how the two CWPP (Cloud Workload Protection Platforms) solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.
To learn more, read our detailed Cisco Secure Workload vs. Microsoft Defender for Cloud Report (Updated: March 2023).
687,256 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Featured Review
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use.
Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros
"Secure Workload's best feature is that it's an end-to-end offering from Cisco.""It's stable.""The solution offers 100% telemetry coverage. The telemetry you collect is not sampled, it's not intermittent. It's complete. You see everything in it, including full visibility of all activities on your endpoints and in your network."

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"The most valuable features of the solution are the insights, meaning the remediation suggestions, as well as the incident alerts.""The security alerts and correlated alerts are most valuable. It correlates the logs and gives us correlated alerts, which can be fed into any security information and event management (SIEM) tool. It is an analyzed correlation tool for monitoring security. It gives us alerts when there is any kind of unauthorized access, or when there is any malfunctioning in multifactor authentication (MFA). If our Azure is connected with Azure Security Center, we get to know what types of authentication are happening in our infra.""Using Security Center, you have a full view, at any given time, of what's deployed, and that is something that is very useful.""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.""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.""It isn't a highly complex solution. It's something that a lot of analysts can use. Defender gives you a broad overview of what's happening in your environment, and it's a great solution if you're a Microsoft shop.""One important security feature is the incident alerts. Now, with all these cyberattacks, there are a lot of incident alerts that get triggered. It is very difficult to keep monitoring everything automatically, instead our organization is utilizing the automated use case that we get from Microsoft. That has helped bring down the manual work for a lot of things.""It has seamless integration with any of the services I mentioned, on Azure, such as IaaS platforms, virtual machines, applications, or databases, because it's an in-house product from Microsoft within the Azure ecosystem."

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Cons
"Secure Workload is a little complicated to use, and the dashboard isn't intuitive, so it takes a while to learn how to use it.""The integration could be better, especially with different types of solutions.""The multi-tenancy, redundancy, backup and restore functionalities, as well as the monitoring aspects of the solution, need improvement. The solution offers virtually no enterprise-grade possibility for monitoring."

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"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.""The product was a bit complex to set up earlier, however, it is a bit streamlined now.""If a customer is already using Okta as an SSO in its entire environment, they will want to continue with it. But Security Center doesn't understand that and keeps making recommendations. It would help if it let us resolve a recommendation, even if it is not implemented.""One of the main challenges that we have been facing with Azure Security Center is the cost. The costs are really a complex calculation, e.g., to calculate the monthly costs. Azure is calculating on an hourly basis for use of the resource. Because of this, we found it really complex to promote what will be our costs for the next couple of months. I think if Azure could reduce the complex calculation and come up with straightforward cost mapping that would be very useful from a product point of view.""Azure is a complex solution. You have so many moving parts.""The solution could improve by being more intuitive and easier to use requiring less technical knowledge.""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.""We would like to have better transparency as to how the security score is calculated because as it is now, it is difficult to understand."

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Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "The cost for the hardware is around 300k."
  • More Cisco Secure Workload Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "This is a worldwide service and depending on the country, there will be different prices."
  • "Security Center charges $15 per resource for any workload that you onboard into it. They charge per VM or per data-base server or per application. It's not like Microsoft 365 licensing, where there are levels like E3 and E5. Security Center is pretty straightforward."
  • "There is a helpful cost-reducing option that allows you to integrate production subscriptions with non-production subscriptions."
  • "Its pricing is a little bit high in terms of Azure Security Center, but the good thing is that we don't need to maintain and deploy it. So, while the pricing is high, it is native to Azure which is why we prefer using this tool."
  • "I am not involved in this area. However, I believe its price is okay because even small customers are using Azure Security Center. I don't think it is very expensive."
  • "The cost of the license is based on the subscriptions that you have."
  • "Although I am outside of the discussion on budget and costing, I can say that the importance of security provided by this solution is of such importance that whatever the cost is, it is not a factor."
  • "This solution is more cost-effective than some competing products. My understanding is that it is based on the number of integrations that you have, so if you have fewer subscriptions then you pay less for the service."
  • More Microsoft Defender for Cloud Pricing and Cost Advice →

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    Questions from the Community
    Top Answer:I'm in pre-sales. I have no technical complaints in regard to the product. The integration could be better, especially with different types of solutions.
    Top Answer:Azure Security Center is very easy to use, integrates well, and gives very good visibility on what is happening across your ecosystem. It also has great remote workforce capabilities and supports a… more »
    Top Answer:The integration with Logic Apps allows for automated responses to incidents.
    Top Answer:This is a worldwide service and depending on the country, there will be different prices. There is a price calculator for Azure Services. You select the service that you are interested in, and the… more »
    Ranking
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    Average Words per Review
    321
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    7.7
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    31
    Average Words per Review
    1,200
    Rating
    8.1
    Comparisons
    Also Known As
    Cisco Tetration
    Microsoft Azure Security Center, Azure Security Center, Microsoft ASC, Azure Defender
    Learn More
    Overview

    Cisco Secure Workload is a cloud and data security solution that offers a zero-trust policy of keeping an organization’s application workloads safe and secure throughout the entire on-premise and cloud data center ecosystems.

    Cisco Secure Workload will consistently provide protection by discovering workload process anomalies, stopping threats immediately, minimizing the risk threat surface, and aborting any lateral movement.

    Today’s ecosystems are very elastic, and in the application-focused dynamic of today’s aggressive marketplace, Cisco Secure Workload delivers a robust security solution that works effectively with today’s most popular applications. The solution uniquely surrounds each and every workload to ensure organizations are able to keep their data, network, and applications safe and secure at all times. Cisco Secure Workload ensures that enterprise organizations can maintain secure applications by consistently building firewalls around every workload level throughout the entire ecosystem. The solution can manage applications that are deployed on containers, virtual machines, or bare-metal servers.

    Cisco Secure workload is able to meet an organization's busy needs and offers flexible options such as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and on-premises options. Using the Secure Workload SaaS options, users receive all the benefits of Cisco Secure Workload protection without the hassle of having to deploy and maintain the platform on premises. Users are responsible for acquiring the necessary software licensing and deploying software agents. Using SaaS, Secure Workload runs in the cloud and is operated and maintained by Cisco. This option offers the ability to scale easily and is a popular choice for SaaS-first and SaaS-only clients. Many organizations find they get the best TCO and achieve the best productivity and profitability using the SaaS options.

    When choosing on-premises options, organizations choose between hardware-based appliance models (large or small form factors). Platform selection is dependent on scalability goals, the desired fidelity level of flow telemetry, and the actual number of workloads. When a user chooses to configure Cisco Secure Workload for a conversation-only flow telemetry for all workloads, each platform has the capability to scale up vertically twice the default platform scale. Additionally, with Secure Workload, it is possible for the platform to be scaled horizontally in order to satisfy the demands of extra large widely distributed enterprise environments using federation capabilities.

    Cisco Secure Workload also provides a robust disaster recovery (DR) tool, which helps to make it a complete, comprehensive solution. The DR allows for continuous restore and backup capabilities that enable users to quickly remediate operations and data to a standby cluster in the event of a drastic failure or disaster.

    Reviews from Real Users

    The solution offers 100% telemetry coverage. The telemetry you collect is not sampled, it's not intermittent. It's complete. You see everything in it, including full visibility of all activities on your endpoints and in your network. Other valuable features include vast support for annotations, flexible user applications, machine learning, automatic classification, and hierarchical policies.” - CTO at a tech vendor

    Microsoft Defender for Cloud protects your Azure and hybrid resources. Microsoft uses a wide variety of physical, infrastructure, and operational controls to help secure Azure—but there are additional actions you need to take to help safeguard your workloads. Turn on Azure Security Center to strengthen your cloud security posture. Within Azure Security Center, use Azure Defender to protect your hybrid cloud workloads. With Azure Security Center, you can:

    - Assess and visualize the security state of your resources in Azure, on-premises, and in other clouds with Azure Secure Score

    - Simplify enterprise compliance and view your compliance against regulatory requirements

    - Protect all your hybrid cloud workloads with Azure Defender, which is integrated with Security Center

    - Use AI and automation to cut through false alarms, quickly identify threats, and streamline threat investigation

    To learn more about our solution, ask questions, and share feedback, join our Microsoft Security, Compliance and Identity Community.

    Offer
    Learn more about Cisco Secure Workload
    Learn more about Microsoft Defender for Cloud
    Sample Customers
    ADP, University of North Carolina Charlotte (UNCC)
    Microsoft Defender for Cloud is trusted by companies such as ASOS, Vatenfall, SWC Technology Partners, and more.
    Top Industries
    REVIEWERS
    Comms Service Provider57%
    Media Company14%
    Energy/Utilities Company14%
    Computer Software Company14%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company18%
    Comms Service Provider15%
    Financial Services Firm13%
    Government7%
    REVIEWERS
    Computer Software Company22%
    Agriculture11%
    Consumer Goods Company11%
    Real Estate/Law Firm6%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company20%
    Financial Services Firm12%
    Government7%
    Comms Service Provider6%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business18%
    Midsize Enterprise18%
    Large Enterprise64%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business17%
    Midsize Enterprise11%
    Large Enterprise72%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business26%
    Midsize Enterprise13%
    Large Enterprise62%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business19%
    Midsize Enterprise13%
    Large Enterprise67%
    Buyer's Guide
    Cisco Secure Workload vs. Microsoft Defender for Cloud
    March 2023
    Find out what your peers are saying about Cisco Secure Workload vs. Microsoft Defender for Cloud and other solutions. Updated: March 2023.
    687,256 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    Cisco Secure Workload is ranked 15th in CWPP (Cloud Workload Protection Platforms) with 3 reviews while Microsoft Defender for Cloud is ranked 2nd in CWPP (Cloud Workload Protection Platforms) with 32 reviews. Cisco Secure Workload is rated 7.6, while Microsoft Defender for Cloud is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of Cisco Secure Workload writes "User-friendly with a good UI and helpful support". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Microsoft Defender for Cloud writes "Provides good recommendations and makes policy administration easy". Cisco Secure Workload is most compared with VMware NSX, Guardicore Centra, Illumio Zero Trust Segmentation, Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks and Check Point Harmony Email & Collaboration, whereas Microsoft Defender for Cloud is most compared with Microsoft 365 Defender, Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks, AWS GuardDuty and Trend Micro Cloud One Workload Security. See our Cisco Secure Workload vs. Microsoft Defender for Cloud report.

    See our list of best CWPP (Cloud Workload Protection Platforms) vendors.

    We monitor all CWPP (Cloud Workload Protection Platforms) 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.