Microsoft 365 Defender pros and cons

There is also one dashboard that shows us the status of many controls at once and the details I can get... It gives a great overview of many areas, such as files, emails, chats, and links. Even with the apps, it gives you a great overview. In one place you can see where you should look into things more deeply...

The most valuable feature is the DLP because that's where we can have an added data protection layer and extend it not just to emails but to the documents that users are working on. We can make sure that sensitive data is tagged and flagged if unauthorized parties are using it.

It has been great for us. Previously, we didn't have a solution to protect us, especially from malware, whereas now, we are getting protection up front, especially from the malware attacks coming through emails or endpoints.

Many people don't realize that Microsoft Azure, Exchange Online, and the security and compliance portal all sync together. For instance, within the Azure portal you can set security restrictions and policies to help secure your tenants... The good part of it is that these products have already been integrated. When you sign on as an admin you have global admin rights and that gives you access to all these features.

The EDR features are valuable. By getting the EDR features, we have more control over the device. We have information about events in real-time and more protection against zero-day threats and zero-day vulnerabilities. We can monitor every event or action that a device is going through. We can get an idea if it is something malicious or if we have to take any actions.

I like the easy integration and advanced possibilities. We can implement it at customer sites in a few clicks, but we can also dive deep and drill down to extended features. There's a very good starting point to get into this product and all the features from Defender.

The Endpoint Manager is incredible; it has a very straightforward interface and is exceedingly easy to use. Pulling out and deploying different tags or resources is a simple task across various departments with different levels of security. The notifications are also simple and satisfying; it's great to see the bubble informing us which devices are compliant and which are waiting to update.

The most valuable feature of all is the full integration with the rest of the software in the operating system and Office 365, as well as Microsoft SCCM. It is quite easy for us to work with the whole instance of Microsoft products. This integration improves the benefits of the whole suite of products.

We can automate routine tasks and write scripts to carry out difficult tasks, which makes things easier for us.

It's a very scalable tool that can be used in a very small environment or in a very large environment. Everything can be managed from a simple dashboard and can be scaled up or down depending on the customer's environment.

There should be better information for experts on features in the solution. What I see when reading about features in Microsoft 365 Defender is that it is always general information. If Microsoft could go deeper into details for the experts about how to use the tools, usage of it would be more familiar and it would be easier to use.

There is definitely scope for improvement in the automation area. Because the solution is a SaaS platform, we don't have the overall ability to automate stuff.... There is no direct way to go ahead because it's a SaaS platform.

The Defender agent itself is more compatible with Windows 10 and Windows 11. Other than these two lines, there are so many compatibility issues. Security is not only about Microsoft. The core technical aspects of it are quite good, but it would be good if they can better support non-Microsoft solutions in terms of putting the agents directly into VMware and other virtualization solutions. There should be more emphasis on RHEL and other operating systems that we use, other than Windows, in the server category.

The message trace feature for investigating mail flow issues should add more detailed information to the summary report... if they could extend the summary report a little bit, make it more descriptive, ordinary administrators could understand what happened and that the emails failed at this or that point. That way they would know the location to go to try to correct it and to prevent it from occurring again.

The onboarding and offboarding need improvement. I work with other vendors as well, and they have an option to add a device or remove a device from the portal, whereas with Microsoft 365 Defender, we need to do that manually. However, once you do that, everything can be controlled through the portal, but getting the device onboarded and offboarded is currently manual. If we have an option to simply remove a device from the portal or get a device added from the portal, it would be more convenient. The rest of the features are similar. This is the only area where I found it different from others. I would also like to be able to simply filter with a few of the queries that are already there.

I would like more of the features in Defender for 365 to be included in the smaller licenses. Even if I buy a small license and don't need everything, security shouldn't be a question. Security is one of the main aspects of all projects from our side, so it would be nice to have more features in the smaller licenses.

Correctly updated records are the most significant area for improvement. There have been times when we were notified of a required fix; we would carry out the fix and confirm it but still get the same notification a week later. This seems to be a delay in records being updated and leads to false reporting, which is something that needs to be fixed.

I'd like to see a wider solution that includes not only desktop devices but also other devices, such as servers, storage cabinets, switching equipment, et cetera.

Microsoft tends to provide too many features, which makes the solution prone to bugs.

Offboarding latency should be reduced. Even after a device has been successfully offboarded using a particular offboarding script, it still shows up as onboarded.