We performed a comparison between Microsoft Defender for Cloud and VMware Aria Automation based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Features: Microsoft Defender for Cloud provides regulatory compliance, ransomware protection, access controls, real-time assessment, incident alerts, and UEBA features. On the other hand, VMware Aria Automation's strength lies in its extensive automation capabilities, which enable the deployment of virtual machines and the customization of various features. Microsoft Defender needs more consistency, customization, automation, integration, collaboration, and better documentation and intuitive features. VMware Aria Automation would benefit from simplification in multitenancy management, migration process, automation, and licensing models. It also lacks documentation and customization in reporting policies.
Service and Support: Microsoft Defender for Cloud's customer service has received mixed feedback, with some users satisfied and others having negative experiences with slow response times and outsourced support. In contrast, VMware Aria Automation's technical support has generally been rated higher, with some customers finding it helpful and giving it a rating of eight or nine out of ten.
Ease of Deployment: Microsoft Defender for Cloud has a simple setup that can be completed in 24 hours or less and minimal maintenance. However, knowledge prerequisites may be necessary. VMware Aria, on the other hand, has a more complex setup that can be and technical for some users, with varying deployment times.
Pricing: Microsoft Defender for Cloud has fair and cost-effective pricing compared to other solutions in the market. However, pricing for Microsoft Defender for Cloud varies based on licenses and metrics used. On the other hand, VMware Aria Automation is an expensive product with confusing licensing models. Some users rate VMware Aria Automation poorly due to its high licensing cost.
ROI: Microsoft Defender for Cloud offers basic security features that are user-friendly and cost-effective, while VMware Aria Automation allows users to manage more with a smaller team and save time through automation.
Comparison Results: Microsoft Defender for Cloud is the preferred choice over VMware Aria Automation due to its strong security features, regulatory compliance, ransomware protection, and access controls. VMware Aria Automation's most valuable feature is its extensive automation capabilities, but users have suggested improvements in multitenancy management, migration processes, and licensing models.
"Out of all the features, the one item that has been most valuable is the fact that Wiz puts into context all the pieces that create an issue, and applies a particular risk evaluation that helps us prioritize when we need to address a misconfiguration, vulnerability, or any issue that would put our environment into risk."
"I like Wiz's reporting, and it's easy to do queries. For example, it's pretty simple to find out how many servers we have and the applications installed on each. I like Wiz's security graph because you can use it to see the whole organization even if you have multiple accounts."
"The security baseline and vulnerability assessments is the valuable feature."
"The first thing that stood out was the ease of installation and the quick value we got out of the solution."
"The CSPM module has been the most effective. It was easy to deploy and covered all our accounts through APIs, requiring no agents. Wiz provides instant visibility into high-level risks that we need to address."
"The automation roles are essential because we ultimately want to do less work and automate more. The dashboards are easy to read and visually pleasing. You can understand things quickly, which makes it easy for our other teams. The network and infrastructure teams don't know as much about security as we do, so it helps to have a tool that's accessible and nice to look at."
"The product supports out-of-the-box reporting with context about the asset and allows us to perform complex custom queries on UI."
"Our most important features are those around entitlement, external exposure, vulnerabilities, and container security."
"It takes very little effort to integrate it. It also gives very good visibility into what exactly is happening."
"The dashboard is very good. It gives our clients a lot of information and allows them to have a complete overview of the system. Everything is visible in one glance."
"It's got a lot of great features."
"It helps you to identify the gaps in your solution and remediate them. It produces a compliance checklist against known standards such as ISO 27001, HIPAA, iTrust, etc."
"The technical support is very good."
"With respect to improving our security posture, it helps us to understand where we are in terms of compliance. We can easily know when we are below the standard because of the scores it calculates."
"The most valuable features are ransomware protection and access controls. The solution has helped us secure some folders on our systems from unauthorized modifications."
"The integration with Logic Apps allows for automated responses to incidents."
"usability; It's very user-friendly. It is not hard to go and find things. There is a one-click Help that you can use to find all the documentation you need to manage it."
"It's quite user friendly. Everyone can use it, even non-technical people. This is good, since we use it to build a self-service portal which even users with not a lot of technical background can use."
"I personally spend a lot of time in vRealize Orchestrator, so being able to directly tie into the back end on the APIs, I find that to be what really is the most advantageous thing for me."
"The most valuable feature is the consistency it delivers, at the end of the day. We know that we have consistent images based off consistent Blueprints, check-pointed or QA'ed in a consistent manner."
"Among the valuable features are the ease and speed of creating the VMs. Originally, we provisioned them manually and it would take us two days to do the provisioning... but with the automation, we are able to provision a VM with the click of a button, within seconds. It cut down on the time as well as cut down on the expense and employee cost in provisioning."
"Currently, the primary feature we're using in VMware Aria Automation is its ability to execute tasks quickly. However, we haven't explored other features like workload management or the full stack yet. So it's hard to make comparisons or fully utilize its potential until we expand our usage."
"One of the most valuable features is lifecycle management. It allows my teams to create, manage, and retire all of our infrastructure objects in the data center."
"The automation function itself and how to group and publish those groupings is quite easy for customers to learn with Aria."
"The only small pain point has been around some of the logging integrations. Some of the complexities of the script integrations aren't supported with some of the more automated infrastructure components. So, it's not as universal. For example, they have great support for cloud formation and other services, but if you're using another type of management utility or governance language for your infrastructure-as-code automation components, it becomes a little bit trickier to navigate that."
"One significant issue is that the searches are case-sensitive, so finding a misconfigured resource can become very challenging."
"We would like to see improvements to executive-level reporting and data reporting in general, which we understand is being rolled out to the platform."
"We wish there were a way, beyond providing visibility and automated remediation, to wait on a given remediation, due to a critical aspect, such as the cost associated with a particular upgrade... We would like to see preventive controls that can be applied through Wiz to protect against vulnerabilities that we're not going to be able to remediate immediately."
"The reporting isn't that great. They have executive summaries, but it's only a compliance report that maps all current issues to specific controls. Whether you look at one subscription or project, regardless of the size, you will get a multipage report on how the issues in that account map to that control. Our CSO isn't going to read through that. He won't filter that out or show that to his leadership and say, "Here's what we're doing." It isn't a helpful report. They're working on it, but it's a poor executive summary."
"Given the level of visibility into all the cloud environments Wiz provides, it would be nice if they could integrate some kind of mechanism to better manage tenants on multiple platforms. For example, let's say that some servers don't have an application they need, such as an antivirus. Wiz could include an API or something to push those applications out to the servers. It would be great if you could remedy these issues directly from the Wiz platform."
"Wiz's reporting capabilities could be refined a bit. They are making headway on that, but more executive-style dashboards would be nice. They just implemented a community aspect where you can share documents and feedback. This was something users had been requesting for a while. They are listening to customer feedback and making changes."
"The only thing that needs to be improved is the number of scans per day."
"Another thing that could be improved was that they could recommend processes on how to react to alerts, or recommend best practices based on how other organizations do things if they receive an alert about XYZ."
"Microsoft Defender could be more centralized. For example, I still need to go to another console to do policy management."
"I felt that there was disconnection in terms of understanding the UI. The communication for moving from the old UI to the new UI could be improved. It was a bit awkward."
"Most of the time, when we log into the support, we don't get a chance to interact with Microsoft employees directly, except having it go to outsource employees of Microsoft. The initial interaction has not been that great because outsourced companies cannot provide the kind of quality or technical expertise that we look for. We have a technical manager from Microsoft, but they are kind of average unless we make noise and ask them to escalate. We then can get the right people and the right solution, but it definitely takes time."
"From a compliance standpoint, they can include some more metrics and some specific compliances such as GDPR."
"No possibility to write or edit any capability."
"As an analyst, there is no way to configure or create a playbook to automate the process of flagging suspicious domains."
"Azure's system could be more on point like AWS support. For example, if I have an issue with AWS, I create a support ticket, then I get a call or a message. With Azure support, you raise a ticket, and somebody calls back depending on their availability and the priority, which might not align with your business priority."
"The most important thing that we missed in vRanger was the possibility to mount several images instantaneously and present it so we can run it immediately."
"With the workflow aspect, which has manual intervention, a policy needs to be approved by somebody. There could be better management of that piece with better templates. It is like a workflow engine, but does not have enough example templates to do certain things. A lot of people waste a lot of time trying to figure out the same thing, and everybody is trying to figure out the same thing, e.g., how to make a MySQL cluster in a Windows environment?"
"I don't find it to be entirely user-friendly. There are a lot of complicated menus within menus within menus. Things move around from version to version."
"Normally, on the first call to technical support, you don't get the right person. The log analysis takes a long time. This is something which should be improved."
"It needs to be more dynamic with variable customization to make new workloads more reliable. It also needs to be faster. We are exploring vRA version 8 right now and maybe what I'm requesting is available in the new version, but we haven't yet explored it fully."
"It would be nice if, at the director level, the manager level, there was a pretty graphic. They don't like to see numbers and line items, they want to see graphs and scales and real world pictures. That would support better reporting."
"It has some limitations for scalability, especially for remote data center management. For some components, everything need to be centralized."
"Upgrades are always a pain."
Microsoft Defender for Cloud is ranked 3rd in Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) with 46 reviews while VMware Aria Automation is ranked 15th in Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) with 133 reviews. Microsoft Defender for Cloud is rated 8.0, while VMware Aria Automation is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of Microsoft Defender for Cloud writes "Provides multi-cloud capability, is plug-and-play, and improves our security posture". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VMware Aria Automation writes "Allows for a lot of orchestration or customization within our environment to suit our customers". Microsoft Defender for Cloud is most compared with AWS GuardDuty, Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks, Microsoft Defender XDR, Microsoft Defender for Endpoint and Microsoft Sentinel, whereas VMware Aria Automation is most compared with Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, VMware Aria Operations, vCloud Director, Morpheus and vCenter Orchestrator. See our Microsoft Defender for Cloud vs. VMware Aria Automation report.
See our list of best Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) vendors.
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