Microsoft Defender for Cloud and Microsoft Sentinel compete in the Azure security management category, with Defender for Cloud having the upper hand in offering a comprehensive security posture for multi-cloud environments through policy compliance and recommendations, while Sentinel is strong in analytics and automation for complex security needs.
Features: Microsoft Defender for Cloud provides daily security recommendations, offers visibility across multi-cloud environments, and integrates with Microsoft services, focusing on proactive recommendations and policy compliance. Microsoft Sentinel delivers threat detection and response capabilities using AI and machine learning, offers automation through playbooks, and integrates data from various sources for advanced threat hunting.
Room for Improvement: Defender for Cloud could enhance agent capabilities and response times, particularly with third-party MFA solutions, and increase transparency in security score calculations. Sentinel needs to improve its SOAR capabilities, better integrate with third-party solutions, and enhance KQL documentation, with users noting its complex pricing model can be prohibitive.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Both Defender for Cloud and Sentinel are primarily deployed in public cloud environments, with hybrid deployments being common. While Microsoft claims ease of deployment, user experiences suggest customer service could be improved with faster initial contact and consistent expertise levels.
Pricing and ROI: Microsoft Defender for Cloud's straightforward licensing is considered fair, especially for in-cloud services, while promising positive ROI by improving security posture. Sentinel's more complex pricing with variances based on data ingestion can lead to higher costs, although its pay-as-you-go model offers scalability, justified by its comprehensive capabilities in cloud-native environments.
Defender proactively indexes and analyzes documents, identifying potential threats even when inactive, enhancing preventative security.
Identifying potential vulnerabilities has helped us avoid costly data losses.
The biggest return on investment is the rapid improvement of security posture.
If a customer is already using Microsoft’s ecosystem, the ROI can be positive due to seamless integration.
We attribute our growth to Sentinel.
From a risk perspective, it's about mitigating risk, and as mentioned earlier, we haven't missed many things since we've had the offering in market—only a couple of minor incidents.
Since security is critical, we prefer a quicker response time.
The support team was very responsive to queries.
They understand their product, but much like us, they struggle with the finer details, especially with new features.
Their solutions' integration simplifies resolving issues compared to those caused by third-party products.
Working with a Sentinel engineer helped us tune settings effectively.
When my team needs to escalate issues to Microsoft, especially for Microsoft Sentinel, the response is fast through their French entity.
We are using infrastructure as a code, so we do not have any scalability issues with Microsoft Defender for Cloud implementation because our cloud automatically does it.
It has multiple licenses and features, covering infrastructures from a hundred to five hundred virtual machines, without any issues.
Defender won't replace our endpoint XDR, but it will likely adapt and support any growth in the Microsoft Cloud space.
Office 365 and Exchange are running on it, covering about 35,000 users efficiently.
As our organization uses Microsoft Azure and Defender, everything grows together, and we can integrate various features seamlessly.
Being a SaaS solution, the scalability of Microsoft Sentinel is robust.
Defender's stability has been flawless for us.
Microsoft Defender for Cloud is very stable.
Microsoft sometimes changes settings or configurations without transparency.
So far, we have not experienced any issues, and it has been stable from the beginning.
In the past two years, our team hasn't encountered any issues with the stability of Microsoft Sentinel from an operations perspective.
I need to be aware of deprecated connectors as they may disconnect, but the data continues to be sent with a need for quick adaptation.
Microsoft, in general, could significantly improve its communication and support.
It would be beneficial to streamline recommendations to avoid unnecessary alerts and to refine the severity of alerts based on specific environments or environmental attributes.
The artificial intelligence features could be expanded to allow the system to autonomously manage security issues without needing intervention from admins.
We have some tools, such as our off-site Meraki firewalls, that have not fully integrated with Sentinel.
Currently, we are happy to have a way in the middle with not so much cost, but it would be nice to have the ability to enhance the automation of workflows based on learned incidents.
There are complexities in calculating the right pricing tier for different customers, which makes it difficult for me as a consultant during upfront pricing.
Every time we consider expanding usage, we carefully evaluate the necessity due to cost concerns.
We appreciate the licensing approach based on employee count rather than a big enterprise license.
Microsoft Defender for Cloud is pricey, especially for Kubernetes clusters.
Microsoft Sentinel offers more capabilities than Bastion, with a more intuitive experience.
Setting up the right cost model for customers is intricate, requiring careful consideration of various components and licensing tiers.
The ingestion costs for the data analytics is usually the highest cost.
The most valuable feature for me is the variety of APIs available.
This feature significantly aids in threat detection and enhances the user experience by streamlining security management.
The most valuable feature is the recommendations provided on how to improve security.
Microsoft Sentinel's ability to correlate data from multiple sources and its detection capabilities are essential.
Microsoft Sentinel has improved cost efficiency, which is one of the key areas we're able to win business against the ability to have threat intelligence.
Microsoft Sentinel's ability to correlate data from multiple sources enhances our threat detection capabilities beyond what is a simple data lake solution by filtering out the noise and consolidating the signal down to a meaningful level that is easier to investigate and see.
Microsoft Defender for Cloud is a comprehensive security solution that provides advanced threat protection for cloud workloads. It offers real-time visibility into the security posture of cloud environments, enabling organizations to quickly identify and respond to potential threats. With its advanced machine learning capabilities, Microsoft Defender for Cloud can detect and block sophisticated attacks, including zero-day exploits and fileless malware.
The solution also provides automated remediation capabilities, allowing security teams to quickly and easily respond to security incidents. With Microsoft Defender for Cloud, organizations can ensure the security and compliance of their cloud workloads, while reducing the burden on their security teams.
Microsoft Sentinel is a scalable, cloud-native, security information event management (SIEM) and security orchestration automated response (SOAR) solution that lets you see and stop threats before they cause harm. Microsoft Sentinel delivers intelligent security analytics and threat intelligence across the enterprise, providing a single solution for alert detection, threat visibility, proactive hunting, and threat response. Eliminate security infrastructure setup and maintenance, and elastically scale to meet your security needs—while reducing IT costs. With Microsoft Sentinel, you can:
- Collect data at cloud scale—across all users, devices, applications, and infrastructure, both on-premises and in multiple clouds
- Detect previously uncovered threats and minimize false positives using analytics and unparalleled threat intelligence from Microsoft
- Investigate threats with AI and hunt suspicious activities at scale, tapping into decades of cybersecurity work at Microsoft
- Respond to incidents rapidly with built-in orchestration and automation of common tasks
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