We performed a comparison between Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps and Microsoft Entra ID 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."There are a lot of features with benefits, including discovery, investigation, and putting controls around things. You can't say that you like the investigation part but not the discovery. Everything is correlated; that's how the tool works."
"The general usability of the solution is very straightforward."
"The most valuable feature is the alerting system."
"Better logging allows us to find problems and take appropriate steps to lock them out."
"I like the alert policies because they are quite robust. It has some built-in templates that we can easily pick up. One of them is the alert for mass downloads, when a particular user is running a massive download on your SharePoint site."
"All of the features are valuable because all of the features are related."
"It is very easy to use, which is what we look for in these types of solutions."
"Shadow IT discovery is the feature I like the most."
"The ability to speed up ability is an asset."
"Syncing with our on-prem Active Directory is valuable because we do not have to keep multiple identities for each of our staff members. We can easily evaluate login risks and provide access for SSO via 365 into applications, such as Salesforce, and other things that we run our business on."
"It helps us with maintaining enterprise identities."
"It has given us the ability to be able to establish single sign-on identities in which we can establish credentials no matter where we are, whether it is on-premises or in the cloud, in a hybrid cloud, or in an additional connection from another cloud where we share equipment or host."
"The solution has come a long way. Now, with the Azure AD B2C offering integrated as well, we've got a full IAM-type solution for our customer-facing identity management. In addition, when it comes to user journeys we now can hook in custom flows for different credential checking and authorizations for specific conditional access."
"The security and infrastructure management features are the most valuable ones for us."
"It's definitely both stable and scalable."
"The most valuable components of the solution are provisioning and deprovisioning since both features work...Microsoft Entra Verified ID is a very stable solution."
"There could be more granular roles that are out of the box included in the product."
"Defender for Cloud apps is primarily useful for Azure apps. It has limited capabilities for applications based on other cloud platforms."
"I would like for it to be available on Mac and for it to support all of the features of Microsoft financing products. It is really for Windows."
"We sometimes get errors when we create policies, which is somewhat annoying because some policies stop working due to misconfigurations. We find this challenging because it limits our options for troubleshooting an issue."
"This service would be better if it had a separate license, only for this service, that could be used to track usage."
"In the future, I would like to see more plug-and-play capabilities that use AI to tell you what needs to be done. It would be helpful if it scanned our devices and made security suggestions, on a configuration basis."
"Currently, reporting is not very straightforward and it needs to be enhanced. Specific reports are not included and you need to run a query, drill down, and then export it and share it. I would love to have reports with more fine-tuning or granularity, and more predefined reports."
"Sometimes, we'll get false positive alarms. For example, when a SharePoint path has no file sharing, but there is an external user, it will trigger an alarm that the file has been shared with an external user... the alerting mechanism should be more precise when giving you an alert about what activity has been done with the file..."
"Tech support is inconsistent."
"The robustness of the conditional access feature of the zero trust strategy to verify users is adequate but not comprehensive."
"They can improve how people manage their accounts. They can simplify and provide more information about adding or updating a phone number or email id in the MSA account. A lot of time users do get confused about where to go. For example, if I've changed my mobile number, where do I go and change my mobile number in the MSA account? A lot of time, employees think if they change the phone number in the HR database, it'll automatically get changed on the MSA account, which is not the case. Microsoft can simplify that and add these questions in the FAQ documents as well."
"The product needs to improve its support."
"Everything should be in one package. There are so many different packages. They need to provide guidance because there are so many features and we don't know how to implement them in our organization."
"I think something that is key would be the group policies replication over the cloud, in order to prevent or to avoid relying on the on-premise Active Directory servers and to manage group policies."
"I would like it if Intune could manage MacOS or iOS directly. Right now, we have to use a third-party solution."
"Be aware that it may not work perfectly globally yet. There are still glitches with the solution in Africa."
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Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps is ranked 10th in Microsoft Security Suite with 30 reviews while Microsoft Entra ID is ranked 4th in Microsoft Security Suite with 190 reviews. Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps is rated 8.4, while Microsoft Entra ID is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps writes "Integrates well and helps us in protecting sensitive information, but takes time to scan and apply the policies and cannot detect everything we need". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Microsoft Entra ID writes "Allows users to authenticate from home and has excellent integrations in a simple, stable solution". Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps is most compared with Zscaler Internet Access, Cisco Umbrella, Netskope , Prisma Access by Palo Alto Networks and Qualys VMDR, whereas Microsoft Entra ID is most compared with Microsoft Intune, Google Cloud Identity, CyberArk Privileged Access Manager, Yubico YubiKey and Cisco Duo. See our Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps vs. Microsoft Entra ID report.
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