HPE Ezmeral Container Platform vs Microsoft Defender for Cloud comparison

"If customers focus on primary apps or if they are using them for data science, this is a good solution."

"The stability of the HPE Ezmeral Container Platform is good, and I rate it an eight out of ten."

"It offers virus management and addresses threats such as viruses, worms, spyware, and other critical security concerns."

"The solution is used for risks, vulnerabilities, and compliance."

"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."

"The most valuable feature is the hunting feature, which integrates well into the entire Microsoft ecosystem."

"The scalability of Microsoft Defender for Cloud is very good."

"Microsoft Defender for Cloud has improved our security poster by at least 100 percent."

"Microsoft Defender for Cloud has significantly enhanced our overall security posture by approximately 20 to 25 percent."

"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."

"HPE Ezmeral Container Platform is not user-friendly and has many parts that are more difficult than Cloudera. It is also a complex solution and has low features for data management."

"The modernization in Ezmeral could be improved."

"However, some Copilot features aren't available in the GCP environment. This is something we hope will be addressed in the future."

"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."

"I would suggest building a single product that addresses endpoint server protection, attack surface, and everything else in one solution. That is the main disadvantage with the product. If we are incorporating some features, we end up in a situation where this solution is for the server, and that one is for the client, or this is for identity, and that is for our application. They're not bundling it. Commercially, we can charge for different licenses, but on the implementation side, it's tough to help our end-customer understand which product they're getting."

"Defender could improve how data is represented. It can be unstructured or slow to load. The recent update allowing policy grouping into control groups is beneficial, but further enhancements for speed and clarity are needed."

"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."

"Microsoft Defender for Cloud is pricey, especially for Kubernetes clusters. It could be cheaper."

"Customizing some of the compliance requirements based on individual needs seems like the biggest area of improvement. There should be an option to turn specific controls on and off based on how your solution is configured."

"The solution's portal is very easy to use, but there's one key component that is missing when it comes to managing policies. For example, if I've onboarded my server and I need to specify antivirus policies, there's no option to do that on the portal. I will have to go to Intune to deploy them. That is one main aspect that is missing and it's worrisome."

"I rate Microsoft Defender a three out of ten for affordability. The price could be a little lower."

"It has global licensing. It comes with multiple licenses since there are around 50,000 people (in our organization) who look at it."

"I am not involved much with the pricing but the bundle offering is good."

"It is bundled with our enterprise subscription, which makes it easy to go for it. It is available by default, and there is no extra cost for using the standard features."

"Microsoft's licensing and pricing are sometimes complicated. If someone is new to Microsoft's licensing, they might have difficulty with it."

"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."

"The price of the solution is good for the features we receive and there is an additional cost for Microsoft premier support. However, some of my potential customers have found it to be expensive and have gone on to choose another solution."

"Understanding the costs of cloud services can be complicated at first. As with a lot of things in the cloud, it can be quite hard to understand the end cost, but it becomes clearer over time. Early on, the lack of transparency is a challenge. Microsoft does not tell you the cost when they launch something. It is clever marketing, and there is room for improvement there. There should be clarity from the start."