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Cisco Secure Cloud Analytics [EOL] vs Microsoft Defender for Endpoint comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Cisco Secure Cloud Analytic...
Average Rating
8.6
Number of Reviews
7
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Microsoft Defender for Endp...
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
210
Ranking in other categories
Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) (2nd), Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) (5th), Anti-Malware Tools (1st), Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) (3rd), Microsoft Security Suite (3rd)
 

Featured Reviews

SP
Security Analyst at Orange España
Efficiently generates alerts for suspicious activities and scales easily
There are two areas of improvement. Firstly, extend the log retrieval limit to at least three months. For example, there is a limit on the number of log messages that can be received. So, I would like to expand the log retrieval limit. And another thing, if we migrate these things to an event or send us an email if there is any critical event, I would like to configure these things on the initial launch. Because if a system is compromised, there will be a lot of data movement from one post to another post to the outside. Then, we should also get an alert on email as well. We have since we have integrated these things. But a direct email for critical alerts should be there. So, I would like to enhance the critical event configuration. If a new user wants to learn how it should work, how policies work, and where we can configure policies, there should be some learning material for this product.
Robert Arbuckle - PeerSpot reviewer
Security Analyst III at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees
Automatically isolates threats and integrates with logging to reduce response time
Overall, I would evaluate the Microsoft support level that I receive at probably about a seven, but that depends on the day. It has been spotty. We have had issues where the urgency level of the Microsoft support is not as high as ours, especially during a data breach or potential data breach situation. We have had issues with some of the offshore support being lackluster. One specific thing that comes to mind is we were on a support call with our CISO on the call, and the Microsoft agent, who did not actually work for Microsoft, is one of the vendors that Microsoft uses for support, said, "Just to set expectations, my lunch break is in an hour and I am going to go away then." For us, it was already ten o'clock at night and we had been working on this for a couple of hours, trying to get a security engineer on with us. For him to tell us that he was going to go away and have lunch, it was, "Okay, but go find somebody else if you need to." It was just the lackluster approach, and it seemed like he did not really care. We seem to get a lot of this when we get non-Microsoft support. I can identify areas for improvement with Microsoft Defender for Endpoint, as it is kind of a convoluted mess to try to take care of false positives. Especially when they have been identified as false positives but they keep going off over and over again. It is great for my pocketbook because it generates a lot of on-call action, but I would really prefer more sleep at two o'clock in the morning than dealing with false positives. I would say that the unified portal for managing Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is suitable for both teams as they are all in there. It would be great if they would stop moving things around and renaming things, which makes sense. The new XDR portal is pretty nice. Being able to have it central again inside of the regular Security Center without having to open up two windows is helpful. Overall, I think it is pretty good. There is always going to be something that could be improved, such as alerting and the ability to modify alerts would be a little bit helpful to have. Being able to add more data into the alerts and turn off alerts that are not as useful would be beneficial. It is hard to say what the quantitative impact the security exposure management feature has had on our company's security, because a lot of it is kind of subjective. I think we are sitting at around a fifty percent score still, and a lot of it is just kind of unusual circumstances that we cannot really implement without breaking the organization.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"Cisco Stealthwatch Cloud is scalable because it is on the cloud."
"When it comes to scalability, there's no size limit. It varies based on licenses and requirements."
"The tool's best feature is its ability to monitor network traffic. It will also inform users whether the traffic generated by a network is legitimate. The tool helps to capture and analyze the network traffic."
"It tells you if there is any communication going to command and control servers, or if there is any traffic that violates your internal policy, or if any data hoarding is happening where data is being dumped from your machine to outside of the environment. It provides all such meaningful reports to help you understand what's happening."
"The logs in Cisco Stealthwatch Cloud are very good when doing the API integration in the team. It is able to give you important information for the correlations."
"The product helps me to see malware."
"Monitoring the traffic, making sure you have the visibility."
"Defender for Endpoint allows us automatic resolutions if a unit is compromised or if a user clicks a malicious link."
"The solution has good performance, I have not seen a problem."
"It is a very advanced system based on AI. It has a very large database of places or sites on the internet where you should not go. It is continuously online."
"It integrates very well with all Windows workstations or other Microsoft Endpoint products. It also works quite well. So far, I have not had any issue that hasn't been sorted out. It doesn't use too many resources, so you don't have to install different things."
"The performance of Microsoft Defender for Endpoint has been good."
"We apply the DLP policies across a range of endpoints and it is very accurate when reporting vulnerabilities, including those in email attachments."
"It doesn't cause the slowness of the system, which is one of the reasons why I like it."
"It is easy to install and use requiring little maintenance but applying updates."
 

Cons

"The initial setup is a bit complex in terms of deployment and configuration"
"Cisco Stealthwatch Cloud could improve the graphical user interface. It could be a more user-friendly graphical user interface. so that. Not everybody's a cyber security professional, most of the customers that I deal with are not very skilled. The terms that they use in the solution are quite understandable for a normal CIO."
"The product's price is high."
"When I used to work on it, I just didn't see anything new happening for about a year and a half. Providing newer data and newer reports constantly would help. There should be more classifications and more interesting data."
"The product needs to improve its user-friendliness. It is very tricky and you need to study it before using the standard functionalities."
"The initial setup of Cisco Stealthwatch Cloud is complex."
"If we migrate these things to an event or send us an email if there is any critical event, I would like to configure these things on the initial launch. Because if a system is compromised, there will be a lot of data movement from one post to another post to the outside. Then, we should also get an alert on email as well. We have since we have integrated these things. But a direct email for critical alerts should be there. So, I would like to enhance the critical event configuration."
"Its interface can be improved a little bit. We would like to have some sort of centralization. It should have something like a central server that is managing all the other clients. There are solutions from Kaspersky or ESET NOD32 that are really doing this kind of thing currently. We would like to see something similar from Microsoft."
"There is a lot of information to take in, and the portals tend to change quickly due to the fast-paced nature of the industry."
"Notifications are always popping up — I hate that."
"Right now, the solution provides some recommendations on the dashboard but we don't have any priorities. It's a mix of all the vulnerabilities and all the security recommendations. I would like to see some priority or categorization of high, medium, and low so that we can fix the high ones first."
"It would be helpful if they offered video tutorial guides."
"Threat intelligence has the potential for improvement, particularly by integrating more sources."
"If they integrate with the EDR then it will benefit this solution."
"Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is not as robust, and you cannot customize it much, so that's a challenge."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price of Cisco Stealthwatch Cloud is expensive."
"Cisco Stealthwatch Cloud is an expensive enterprise solution."
"The solution is quite expensive."
"The normal, standalone model, is not expensive, but the enterprise model that includes the bundle with email and some web protection, is a bit more expensive."
"It is an expensive solution. It would be nice if it could be included with the Microsoft Office package."
"If we are acquiring everything in a single place, the front end becomes cost-effective."
"The cost is competitive and reasonable because most of the expense is log analytics, storage, and data consumption and ingestion. These things can be throttled and controlled, so they are highly flexible. Defender has a lot of advantages over competing products."
"Its price is fair. It has approximately the same price as the other products such as Kaspersky. It is much cheaper than Malwarebytes."
"It is so expensive. It isn't cheaper than McAfee or other solutions."
"We mostly use Microsoft products. We use Office 365, and we use Azure. We're also a Microsoft partner. So, the licensing was much cheaper for us, and at the same time, a lot of the features that we were looking for were included in Defender."
"There is an annual license required."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
15%
Manufacturing Company
13%
University
10%
Performing Arts
10%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Government
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business1
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise6
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business80
Midsize Enterprise40
Large Enterprise92
 

Questions from the Community

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We use Symantec because we do not use MS Enterprise products, but in my opinion, Microsoft Defender is a superior solution. Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is a cloud-delivered endpoint security s...
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The CrowdStrike solution delivers a lot of information about incidents. It has a very light sensor that will never push your machine hardware to "test", you don't have the usual "scan now" feature ...
 

Also Known As

Cisco Stealthwatch Cloud, Observable Networks
Microsoft Defender ATP, Microsoft Defender Advanced Threat Protection, MS Defender for Endpoint, Microsoft Defender Antivirus
 

Interactive Demo

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Overview

 

Sample Customers

Options, Schneider Electric, Washington University in St Louis, Gotcha, Kraft Kennedy, PartnerRe, Sumologic, Veterans United, AFGE, Agraform, Artesys, Dynamic Ideas Financials, Department of Agriculture and Commerce
Petrofrac, Metro CSG, Christus Health
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