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Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps vs Veritas Alta SaaS Protection comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 1, 2024

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

Microsoft Defender for Clou...
Ranking in Advanced Threat Protection (ATP)
14th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
39
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Access Security Brokers (CASB) (4th), Microsoft Security Suite (12th)
Veritas Alta SaaS Protection
Ranking in Advanced Threat Protection (ATP)
26th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
14
Ranking in other categories
SaaS Backup (16th), SaaS Management Platforms (15th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2025, in the Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) category, the mindshare of Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps is 1.8%, up from 1.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Veritas Alta SaaS Protection is 0.5%, up from 0.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Advanced Threat Protection (ATP)
 

Featured Reviews

Jagadeesh Gunasekaran - PeerSpot reviewer
Saves us time, has good visibility, and a single dashboard
The solution is user-friendly and provides great visibility into threats. There are easy options available for specific workflow inspections. We can also get support by going through the Microsoft documentation, which is straightforward. Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps helps us prioritize threats across our enterprise. It covers us from a compliance perspective and protects our organization's data. Data protection is a very important aspect of any new organization, as we need to protect our data from both external attacks and insider threats. Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps helps us monitor for abnormal activity by insiders, which is one of the most important access points for attackers today. Additionally, the different cloud apps that Defender for Cloud Apps supports provide us with much more visibility into potential threats and activities on the internet. We have integrated Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps alerts with Sentinel. The integration is straightforward. We can find the configuration details on Microsoft's official documentation website. If we are familiar with how Microsoft products work, we will be able to follow the instructions clearly. Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps and Sentinel work natively together to deliver coordinated detection and response across our environment. Our integrated Microsoft solutions provide comprehensive threat protection, covering most of the tactics and techniques relevant to the MITRE ATT&CK framework. Sentinel allows us to ingest data from our entire ecosystem. When implementing an SIEM solution, there are always prerequisites such as Active Directory logs, security logs, firewall logs, and DNS logs. These are important logs that need to be ingested into the environment. Sentinel has many third-party connectors available that make integrations straightforward. Microsoft provides the configuration details in the Sentinel platform. It is important to integrate all relevant log sources into the SIEM solution so that we can detect and be alerted to any type of threat factor, whether it is from an internal or external source. Integrating third-party solutions into the platform requires a separate configuration, but Microsoft provides the necessary information. However, we need to have the appropriate permissions to execute these setups. Sentinel provides a centralized dashboard that covers threat management and configuration. It gives us complete insight into what entities are accessing, as well as full details for investigation. We can see how the alerts and threats are relevant to suspicious activities, whether they are related to malicious IP addresses, suspicious ASHAs, or any other indicators of compromise. All of this relevant data can be seen in a single pane. Recently, Microsoft introduced a new investigation experience in a single pane. This means that we can now get a lot of details in a single pane, without having to go there and execute a query. There are a lot of new insights being developed in the Sentinel platform these days. It has software intelligence. They recently introduced Microsoft Defender Threat Intelligence, which covers almost all IOCs. This protects organizational assets from threats and suspicious traffic associated with IOCs. If a match is found, alerts are generated. This is a very interesting feature. Another great feature is automation and logic apps. We can create a number of operations, such as posting in a team's channel if a severe incident occurs or sending an email notification. There are many operations available, so we can automate a lot of tasks. Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps helps us stay compliant. It has predefined mechanisms in place to prevent attacks. For example, if an external user tries to access our SharePoint folders or files, an attack will be blocked. This is why it is important to give appropriate access to guest users. Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps has many features and benefits. It provides a number of policies that can be configured to meet the specific needs of our security team. These policies can be used to customize cloud applications so that only authorized users can access them and perform operations that benefit the organization. In terms of safety and security, Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps is top-notch. Using the solution's automation features, we can suppress false positive alerts. We can also close alerts, lower their severity from "high" to "low" or "informational," or close them immediately with the appropriate commands. This will depend on the configuration automation rule and the perspective from which we are testing. Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps provides a single console. We are also provided with Microsoft templates to enable workbooks instantly. Alternatively, we can build our own customized workbooks to provide better insights and improve our SOC efficiency and overall performance. Consolidating all of our security data into one dashboard has saved our security operations team a significant amount of time. From an analyst's perspective, it is now much easier to correlate events, investigate alerts, and visualize specific entities. For example, an analyst can quickly see all of the alerts associated with a particular IP address, or they can view all of the activity for a specific entity over the past 24 hours or 7 days. This level of detail and insight would not be possible if our data were siloed in multiple dashboards. The single dashboard saves our operations approximately 20 hours per week by eliminating the need to access multiple consoles and tabs. Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps threat intelligence can help us prepare for potential threats before they happen. However, it depends on how we develop the policies for the database to block or ignore things in our environment.
Daniel Ogola - PeerSpot reviewer
The appliance is ready to integrate with the cloud in cases where the customers have a hybrid or cloud environment.
The go-between is a Veritas partner, so the customer support was not that good. The solution is fine except when there is a purchasing crisis where you have to remake the ecosystem. It causes a lot of issues. The support was a problem, but we're okay with it as long as we have someone to communicate with.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The most effective features for data protection are data loss prevention (DLP) and data classification."
"Defender for Cloud Apps has given us good visibility regarding what we've allowed in our environment until now. It helps us to know our inventory, understand what our customers are using, and steer them toward safer practices."
"If your business requirements are relatively simple, it can get the job done."
"All of the features are valuable because all of the features are related."
"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 most valuable features of Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps include live, up-to-date information, which provided real-time alerts, and the ability to delve into detailed metadata information."
"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."
"The general usability of the solution is very straightforward."
"The automated recovery feature of Veritas Alta SaaS Protection makes the recovery much easier, as opposed to earlier methods where we were using scripts to do the restore."
"It's very comprehensive. It's one of the first brands to appear in its field."
"I think the most important feature is the ability of SaaS Backup to cover all modules proposed by Office 365, because competing solutions don't cover the total scope."
"The solution's hardware appliance is very scalable and very useful."
"The solution is stable; I haven't experienced any bugs or glitches on it."
"Veritas is loaded with features because the appliance is ready to integrate with the cloud in cases where the customers have a hybrid or cloud environment."
"The duplication is the solution's most valuable feature."
"It's a good solution. It's pretty stable."
 

Cons

"An area of Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps that needs to be improved or enhanced is the reporting function. In the beginning, there was a good reporting function which gave us a sort of monthly overview report. But that has gone away."
"This service would be better if it had a separate license, only for this service, that could be used to track usage."
"I believe it's only set to be integrated with Microsoft Defender for identity and identity protection. I would like to see it available for use with something like Office 365 Defender. I don't think it's integrated with that yet."
"Defender could integrate better with multi-cloud and hybrid environments. It requires some additional configuration to ingest data from non-Azure environments and integrate it with Sentinel."
"It takes some time to scan and apply the policies when there is some sensitive information. After it applies the policies, it works, but there is a delay. This is something for which we are working with Microsoft."
"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."
"They should continue integration with all other Microsoft security-related products. The integration with all the other products is still ongoing."
"Generally, the pricing can always be improved along with the management system."
"Currently, it isn't possible to use anything other than Veritas cloud to back up to. I think today it's important to cover the three major cloud provider: GCP, Azure and AWS."
"The solution does lack a lot of features, and we're considering switching."
"Licensing has been a struggle. It went from bronze, silver to gold. Licensing needs more sophistication. It has features that are sold as separate add-ons."
"The tool can be improved in terms of maintainability and flexibility, especially as companies grow larger. In these aspects, I feel Veeam is better for cloud and operational purposes."
"The usability of the solution isn't the best."
"The go-between is a Veritas partner, so the customer support was not that good. The solution is fine except when there is a purchasing crisis where you have to remake the ecosystem. It causes a lot of issues. The support was a problem, but we're okay with it as long as we have someone to communicate with."
"When you finish a project, the client should have the opportunity to browse the files rather than simply ending the contract. Also, it's not possible to recover earlier versions. It should be possible to have a database for recovering files after you finish a contract. There's no solution for this from Veritas."
"The backup reports and the dashboard need improvement."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Its pricing is on the higher side. Its price is definitely very high for a small-scale company. As an enterprise client, we do get benefits from Microsoft. We get a discounted price because of the number of users we have in our company. We have a premier package, and with that, we do get a lot of discounts. There are no additional costs. It only comes in the top-tier packages. Generally, the top-tier license is the best license that you can get for your organization. If you want, you can buy it separately, but that's not a good idea."
"The E5 license offers everything bundled. People are moving to Microsoft because you buy one license and it gives you everything."
"It has fair pricing. You pay for what you get. As far as I know, there are no costs in addition to the standard licensing fee."
"The price could be better and should be reconsidered."
"The pricing is a little bit high but right now, we are okay with it because of the compatibility with Office 365, Teams, and Azure AD."
"The cost could be improved when you need to pay for anything. For example, refreshing files takes time to load, though it may be my Internet. To improve the refresh time, Microsoft says that we need to pay for a Premium license, and I don't like paying for things that help make a solution better."
"It is a little bit expensive. When you want to have the complete package with Office 365, Defender, and everything else, it is expensive."
"The pricing is fair."
"SaaS Backup isn't the most expensive solution."
"The program is quite expensive."
"The tool is expensive compared to Veeam."
"This solution is not cheap and not expensive but priced in the mid-range."
"I would rate this solution's pricing as five out of five."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
7%
Manufacturing Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Computer Software Company
10%
Healthcare Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

Which is the better security solution - Cisco Umbrella or Microsoft Cloud App Security?
Cisco Umbrella is an integral component of the Cisco SASE architecture. It integrates security in a single, cloud-native solution, unifying multiple features like DNS-layer security, threat intelli...
What do you like most about Microsoft Cloud App Security?
It does a great job of monitoring and maintaining a security baseline. For us, that is a key element. The notifications are pretty good.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Microsoft Cloud App Security?
My impression on the pricing, setup costs, and licensing of Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps is that it's fair. I don't know by heart the exact pricing, but it's part of the E5 license which we al...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Veritas Alto SaaS Protection?
Veritas Alta SaaS Protection is slightly expensive, but they can do more on it. The exact figure for Veritas Alta SaaS Protection depends on the size of data being stored, the region, and the type ...
What needs improvement with Veritas Alto SaaS Protection?
For Veritas Alta SaaS Protection, the only challenge is downtime and the impact of time synchronization whereby different customers are on different time zones, and Veritas Alta SaaS Protection is ...
What is your primary use case for Veritas Alto SaaS Protection?
For the customers that I'm dealing with, they are using Veritas Alta SaaS Protection for long-term retention and offline backups. This means they don't have to constrain their on-premise resources....
 

Also Known As

MS Cloud App Security, Microsoft Cloud App Security
SaaS Backup
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Customers for Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps include Accenture, St. Luke’s University Health Network, Ansell, and Nakilat.
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Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps vs. Veritas Alta SaaS Protection and other solutions. Updated: July 2025.
865,384 professionals have used our research since 2012.