Microsoft Defender for Endpoint Reviews

I lead a delivery team. I have a team of about 20 technology specialists and we do the deployment for Microsoft Defender.

Instead of having a third-party antivirus, then you can have a Microsoft ecosystem for your entire endpoint protection. 

This solution has its own sensors, which is its best feature. It senses the behavior of your endpoints, whether it is logged in from a particular location or external of that location. 

It captures data through machine learning, which is built-in on the back-end. It also provides built-in analytics and a threat intelligence feature. It is a one-stop solution that doesn't require an antivirus because it comes prebuilt into Windows 10.

Sometimes, there are different skews. In a basic skew, they should have basic log analysis without the need to integrate with any third-party or SIEM solutions, like Sentinel. This would make it so much easier for users who don't have log collection or log analysis.

We have been using it for a year.

This solution is very much stable.

This solution is scalable. It is a cloud solution.

If you have the Microsoft Azure ecosystem, you can collect logs and view them through Sentinel. You can also onboard your devices within Intune. 

You can integrate Microsoft Defender for Endpoint with different Microsoft solutions, e.g., Defender for Cloud, Sentinel, Endpoint Manager for onboarding of Intune, and Defender for Office 365.

We have a large number of customers.

Premium support is okay. Professional support is not as good because it is free. You must wait because you are not paying.

The initial setup was straightforward. There was nothing rocket science to it. It didn't take much time as we just enrolled the device and assigned the licenses, then it was done.

You just prepare it, doing a license evaluation licensing and some network configuration, then you can onboard your device.

We do the implementation ourselves. We find it easy to deploy. We help customers adopt the solution and get better ROI.

They have to pay for the Defender license. There are different licenses and skews, such as Plan 1, Plan 2, or the trial.

You do not need to pay any additional costs for antivirus and anti-malware solutions for endpoint protection. 

Anyone on Windows 10 Enterprise should choose this solution.

It really depends on the volume. You need one senior architect who can just define the entire thing: the device, network configuration, etc. You will also need some Level 1 engineers who need to keep on monitoring the devices and do onboarding. If they are using the latest version of Windows 10, then you can do the onboarding via Intune, Endpoint, etc. 

My rating for this solution is an eight out of 10.

We call the solution MDATP - Microsoft Defender Advanced Persistent Threat Protection. At the same time, we're using it more from an EDR point of view, as an Endpoint Detection Response. It can detect any threats, malware, or processor, which are illegitimate and being executed by the end-users or malicious actors. When it sees this, it detects and reports to us. 

Not only that, at the same time, it's detection, prevention, and response. Mostly what we were working on is detection. When I refer to detection, I mean that it can, with pinpoint accuracy, detect something and expose the threat. It can also map those threats with a MITRE, which is one of the great things that I love about it, on top of the accuracy and the threat description it provides.

There are a few different use cases. We return with a query language, which is provided by Microsoft. We are able to create some threat hunting queries. We can pinpoint, accurately detect, and run pain testing. When there’s a threat or issue, I am able to find it and track it with great accuracy in MDATP. MDATP is able to tell me that, for example, in my organization, if there was a guy who was doing pain testing, which is black listed, and if there was an attempt to exploit something or install some malicious code or try to hack into the system. I am able to find this and pinpoint its occurrence. Not only that, I’m able to map them onto a MITRE framework and tell which stage of the attack it was, where the attacker came from, et cetera. I can see if it was something that was planned in the organization. 

I can both detect internally and externally. I have full faith that the MDATP will detect behaviors and warn us of issues.

When you go to do a deep-dive or investigation as a SOC analyst or any security analyst, it gives three structures or processes, as well as the execution that it performs. I am able to perform a very deep-level investigation with MDATP - more than I can with any other tool.

It did increase our security posture. While we had an antivirus before, it would only detect or prevent certain types of attacks. However, based on that capability, you cannot respond to the threat directly. For example, if there was ransomware on a system, the antivirus will be able to identify, detect, and mitigate it. However, at the same time, even if the antivirus detects that and tries to prevent it, you need to contain that machine, or you need to isolate that machine from the network. You don't want that machine to be talking to anybody in the network. Antivirus solutions can’t exactly do that.

With respect to prevention, it has an auto-remediation feature, which is a good feature that I love with respect to prevention. It does auto-remediation as well as manual remediation, which is pretty good.

With respect to response, we were able to contain, block, and respond to threats faster with MDATP. When we analyze the incidents or the threats it gives us a very good view of everything.

With this product, before containing or responding, we get the information and can see what exactly is happening and when that malicious file was installed. After that, we have an event timeline. The visibility is not that much when you only have an antivirus. Now, we see the full picture. When we adopted this tool, we got the detect, prevent, and response functionalities. Overall, our security posture looks much better and our attack surfaces are limited. Endpoints are also most vulnerable today and we can efficiently protect them now. Since we have reduced the attack surface our security posture has improved dramatically. On top of that, we have the capability to respond and to go deeper on a forensic level.

The product doesn’t affect our end-users. I do not see any major issues. There are exceptions where approvals may be necessary. However, the user acceptance is good. This is something that organizations pre-plan and there is nothing the user really has to worry about or act on.

Defender’s GUI can be optimized. The console needs to be more refined. After you have been using it for some time, you get used to it, and it is manageable. However, it should be a little bit more refined.

They should come up with pre-built inner workflows. I would really like to see this. There need to be workflows with respect to notifications, remediations, or any actions that people want to take. They should come up with predefined or prebuilt hunting capabilities. Right now, we have to manually write queries. I would prefer if they could come up with something more automated.

This is with respect to a SOC analyst perspective. Other users, other administrators, other different roles might have different issues. For me, there are no major concerns. It is a good tool, out of the box.

I've used the solution for about a year and a half, and have also done training on it.

The stability is good. It's a stable platform. I don't see any issues right now. However, I did see something in the past. I can't quite remember the exact situation. It's resolved and right now there are no issues. 

The solution is highly scalable.

You can onboard as many end systems as you want. If you bring more, for example, 100 users or 100 endpoints, you can integrate them with no issue. It's not a problem with MDATP.

We have somewhere around 2,000 to 3,000 users who are using it. We have an endpoint team and they manage the antiviruses and security tools and all those things. We manage the product partially from a policies perspective, and the endpoint team manages the platform and maintenance of it, including any upgrades, as necessary.

I've dealt with technical support in the past. It's good, not excellent. That said, it's okay.

Before using this solution, the company mostly dealt with antivirus solutions.

We moved to this solution to strengthen and report, detect and prevent, et cetera, which antivirus solutions don't offer. We wanted forensics and capabilities that were missing. Antiviruses simply cannot protect you from advanced persistent threats, and they cannot protect you from ransomware and they don't respond to things faster. Response capabilities were something that was missing. Basically, we just needed more.

I'm usually not part of the entire setup, however, I do manage it. We have to do certain policies within our organization. However, from what I've seen, it's not a complex setup. It is pretty straightforward.

In terms of how long the deployment takes, I don't remember the length of time. If you have a CCM centralized, you can push the policies within hours. 

The licensing is something that management decides on. I don't deal with the pricing or licensing.

We didn't really evaluate other options. We provided support for one of our clients, and it was a decision they made. 

We're a consulting company. We are not partners with Microsoft.

We use the solution as a SaaS.

I'd advise other companies to use this solution. It's an ideal choice, however, I'm not sure about the pricing. Maybe it's on the higher end of other competitors' pricing. That said, if you have an opportunity to use it, it will solve a lot of problems with respect to pain point detecting and doing investigations. At the same time, with Microsoft, if 80% of your organization is using Windows systems, it's going to be compatible. Specifically, with its platform, Microsoft understands what is right and what is wrong. Therefore, if the money is not a concern, or the budget is not a concern, opt for this. At the same time, as a generic statement, if not this solution, go for an EDR tool that suits your organization's needs best.

I'd rate the solution at a seven out of ten simply due to the fact that I have not fully optimized it. 

We have a dedicated team that handles all security-related aspects of the solution, however, my understanding is that the solution helps guard the endpoints in our organization. 

Along with security, there are certain IT policies in terms of accessibility of different sites, which are there in the organization. With everything put together, there haven't been any instances where I have seen any kind of issues such as malware or other malicious event getting through on my laptop. From that perspective, everything is fine. 

The patch updates and version updates are very good. Those happen on an automated basis whenever I'm connecting to the organization network, either through LAN or through the VPN. I never have to worry about anything being out-of-date.

The solution scales well.

I have found the stability to be good.

From a general user perspective, I don't see any further improvements needed. 

The price, in general, could always be a little bit cheaper.

I've used the solution for two years or so. It's not much more than that.

The stability of the product is good. I have not dealt with bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. the performance is good. It's reliable. 

The solution scales well. If a company needs to expand it, it can.

We have 1,000 to 2,000 people on the solution currently.

I've never directly dealt with technical support for issues related to Defender. Many years ago I had reached out to Microsoft support for an issue related to Visio, a different product.

The initial setup is straightforward. There are certain automatic patches as well that keep on updating and those automatically install.

I don't recall how long the product took to deploy. When any new laptop or anything is assigned in an organization, all these things are installed prior to coming to us. Therefore, I wasn't actually a part of the installation process. 

We have a few contractors working with the in-house team. There may be around five to ten people. Any maintenance that is needed would be done by them.

The pricing could be lower. That said, I cannot speak to the exact costs involved as I do not directly deal with that aspect of the product. I'm unsure if the company is set up with a monthly or yearly subscription package. 

I'm just a customer and an end-user.

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten. I've been very pleased with how it has worked for me over the last two years. 

I would recommend the solution to others, however, I'm just a passive end-users and not as technically involved as those deploying the solution in our company. However, from my perspective, there has never been an issue on my machine with malware and therefore it seems to be doing what it's designed to do.

I use it mostly to detect threats or viruses. I am using its latest version.

It is stable and easy to use. Everything is okay, and there are no performance issues.

Its detection is not as quick. There should also be more frequent updates.

I have been using this solution for maybe five years.

It is stable.

We have about 20 users.

I have not contacted Microsoft's technical support.

I didn't use or evaluate other solutions.

Its installation is very easy. It came with Windows.

I can install it myself. We have three teams for deployment and maintenance.

It came with Windows.

I would recommend this solution. I would rate it a seven out of 10.

Microsoft Defender for Endpoint can be used for protecting personal information and file in my organization.

The solution has saved us time by not having to install separate third-party antivirus solutions.

Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is beneficial because we are using Microsoft Windows and all the core solutions are made by Microsoft, such as the authentic platform, operating system, and antivirus protection. It is a heterogeneous environment. We had to use third-party solutions before and update everything separately. For example, the policy for antivirus. With Microsoft Defender for Endpoint, when Microsoft Windows receives updates it will update with it. This is one main advantage of this solution.

Microsoft Defender for Endpoint can improve by making the reporting faster. It takes some time to reflect back to the administration portal of what has been updated. For example, out of 100 Computers, approximately 90 computers received updates, but when you check the administration portal over one or two days, you will only see 75, even though 90 were updated.

I have been using Microsoft Defender for Endpoint for approximately one year.

The solution is stable.

Microsoft Defender for Endpoint has been scalable.

We have more than 200 users using this solution in my organization.

Previously we used McAfee and Symantec Endpoint. Every five years we change the solution. However, this time we changed to Microsoft Defender for Endpoint because we wanted a unified platform.

When you install Microsoft Windows 10, Microsoft Defender for Endpoint comes with it. There is no installation of the solution other than installing Windows 10. It saves time because you do not have to use any new kind of policy or deployment.

We have a team of three that do the management of the solution.

The solution comes free with Microsoft Windows 10.

I rate Microsoft Defender for Endpoint a ten out of ten.

We primarily used the solution as Endpoint Detection and protection (EDR, EPP) with secondary benefits of threats and vulnerability management, security incident response, automated query and real-time device monitoring, and with the capability of email security, identity management (DFI), and task automation (Power automate). We used respective licenses where required.

The solution was also used for an endpoint antivirus for workstations in a multi-OS environment, including Windows and Mac OS. We had file, device, and user trajectory monitoring for the security operations team.

The solution benefited the company via:

• OS-level/Tool compatibility for endpoints running Windows (since both are Microsoft products and Defender core files are included in Win10 or later delivery).
• Heuristic capability. Consistent usage of MDE indicates that the tools are continuously learning new prevention techniques by pulling real-time up-to-date cloud resources.

• Alert chaining. The solution makes security Incidents, events, and alerts less tedious from a Security Operation Center standpoint. This can result in false negatives or detriment for small to medium-scale firms running no or semi-automated threat response features.

The most valuable aspects of the solution include:

• Advanced hunting. The product offers flexibility, visibility, and automation capability using a user-friendly query language (KQL).
• Reporting. Clear and concisely plotted graphics show real-time data representation - which is valuable to upper management.

• Scalability/API. We are able to productively integrate with existing on-prem, hybrid, or cloud applications. 
• Great OOB features. The solution comes with SIEM-ingestion-ready features for extensive visibility, automation, and integration, including advanced hunting, threats and vulnerability management, embedded simulation for end-to-end testing, ransomware prevention (Controlled Folder Access), and Attack Surface Reduction (ASR) rules.

Improvements could be made via:

• Clicks. There's a poor user experience with lots of optimizable opportunities of user interface particularly on the newly improved portal (https://security.microsoft.com/). Features like device inventory continue to lack essential workstation drill-downs showing the entire device information with the least effort.

• De-centralized console features. Discrepancies with enabling core features at the click of a button within the MDE portal is mostly due to prerequisites that are tied to the functionality or partial enforcement requirements from other Microsoft tools (Group policy, Azure, Sentinel, SCCM, Intune). EDR in block mode requires Intune security baselines and tamper protection requires MAPS enabled. Web content filtering also has security baseline dependencies

• No single pane of glass. There are too many loose ends with tiny bits and pieces to enforce essential security policies compared to other EDR solutions within the same caliber. A typical example is having to create exclusions in different locations for entirely different functionalities, such as: automation folder exclusion, group policy exclusions (per tenant), Controlled Folder Access (ASR) Allowed application, and Attack Surface Reduction (ASR).

• Service Requests. Noncritical cases with MDE technical support teams tend to be queued for over a week before the first customer engagement. Most of these tickets also end up in the hands of temporary or contracted non-Microsoft employees who are scripted and offer little attention to unique incidents.

Suggested additional features that should be included in the next release include:

• Digestible interface/filter for crown-jewel capabilities like ASR, CFA and Exploit mitigation occurrences.
• Restoration of an always visible search bar from the previous console view (https://securitycenter.windows.com).
• A definitive action plan for Secure Score recommendations and deduplicate of controls.

We were using Microsoft Defender for Endpoint prior to its change of name from Defender ATP. We experienced a plethora of GA changes including, but not limited to, IOS/multiple OS support, device discovery, web content filtering, API updates, and continuous integrations with existing security tools.

Usually, the solution is used in relation to keys management. We implemented a program for it, for the lifecycle of the keys. We've also used it for certificate management.

The initial setup is very straightforward.

The stability is very good.

Technical support is good.

The solution is in good condition and offers good functionality.

There are likely some technical improvements or features that could be added, however, I cannot say, off the top of my head, what they would be.

I used the solution in relation to scoping a project. I was doing business analysis.

The solution was very stable.

The solution is scalable.

The technical support for Microsoft is very good.

The initial setup is not difficult or complex. It's very simple and straightforward. 

I do not know how much it costs per month. I cannot say how it compares against the rates of the competition.

We are a Microsoft Customer.

I'm not sure if I would recommend the solution to others. It depends on their requirements. It needs to fit a company's use cases.

I would rate the solution at an eight out of ten.

We use it for endpoint security.

When looking at the ecosystem as a whole, security-wise, Microsoft provides a complete solution with the E5 Security suite. Microsoft has a big advantage because Defender knows how to interact with the CASB and all the other security components that you have. Overall, that makes the management of the environment much easier. It's easier to understand what's going on, to become aware of risks, and to take action.

• Defender has very little impact on the end-user.
• The agent works quite well with a minimal impact on the client and server.
• It's very easy to deploy it.

We did a trial of Microsoft Defender for Endpoint for about three months, and now we are in the process of rolling it out.

We have about 4,300 users of Defender and it took two days to have it fully deployed. With Cortex it took some time. With Cortex, we had some 500 clients that we had to investigate because for some reason they did not get the agent immediately and we had to do some tweaking to get it to all the end-users.

We used consultants for the deployment of both Cortex and Defender.

We gave Palo Alto Cortex XDR a try and we are now in the process of removing it and going to Microsoft Defender for Endpoint. I have experience with both of them.

Cortex has quite good management capabilities that give IT organizations quite a good picture of attempted cyber attacks. It has good investigation capabilities, out-of-the-box, in case there is an event that you'd like to investigate. It's quite convenient. Microsoft has those capabilities as well, but you need a bit more training on the product to get the basic information that you can get out-of-the-box with Cortex.

The onboarding process with Defender is much easier. In two days we were able to deploy it to our whole organization. Cortex is much more cumbersome. But the onboarding process is not the issue. A more important difference is that once you have security risks that you would like to mitigate, Cortex more easily gives you information regarding the threats. Microsoft gives you exactly the same information, but you have to know how to dig a bit more and do some manual steps that, with Cortex, are more straightforward.

The main issue that we had with Cortex, and the reason we decided to roll back and go to Defender, is that Cortex has a horrible impact on the performance of the system. For an enterprise-level organization, it kills the system. Users were complaining that when moving between emails in Outlook it would take a lot of time, creating a lot of delays and timeouts. Web browsing and every action on their computers took much more time than usual with Cortex.

I would rate Defender a nine out of 10, while Cortex XDR is a five out of 10.

Our use cases, and the way we deploy it, depend on the different situations we encounter.

There may be a company that is already using the Endpoint Protection solution and we have to do a migration.

Another scenario is that a company may be migrating away from another endpoint threat protection solution.

And there are some companies that are already using SCCM, and we may have to go through one of two scenarios. One is to co-manage with what they call Microsoft Endpoint Manager and Configuration Manager. If they are already using SCCM, and only SCCM, we will typically have to go through a process where we integrate SCCM into Endpoint Manager and then they'll usually bring some endpoints into Intune and they'll do a PLC. They have to Azure AD-join or register a device into that so it can be managed through Intune. They may even co-manage it for a while until they fully onboard into Intune only. A lot of people are looking to get away from co-management and managing through Endpoint Manager. But there are some prerequisites to accomplish that.

The endgame for most companies is they want to manage things from Intune only. There are different paths to get there, depending on what they already have in place.

Overall, Defender for Endpoint has created a better security posture, particularly in these COVID times where no one is on-premises anymore and they're working remotely.

More than anything, what I find most valuable is the holistic integration with all Defender products and MCAS. You can not deploy this in a vacuum. It's like most Microsoft technology. If you want to do a Zero Trust model and framework, you have to deploy things in a holistic solution.

Among the new features I like is that you can ingest your Defender events directly into your SIEM/SOAR product, particularly Azure Sentinel, although not a lot of people are using that and you don't have to be using it. You can ingest them into any SIEM/SOAR product directly.

There are features that have helped improve a company's security posture, now that remote work has come into play. Microsoft had to come up with a solution because identity is the new security plan. The largest attack surface is going to be your endpoints, so you have to be able to control your endpoints. There is malware that can collect IDs and it doesn't have to be from privileged accounts, it could be from any account. Once they get in, then they can start looking around to see if there are any security holes, move laterally, and get a hold of a privileged account. And if they get a hold of a privileged then they can just turn off all your security controls and get to your data and you've got a ransomware attack. With Defender for Endpoint, it's the combination. Every one of the features in it is equally important, but the most important thing is integrating it with the other Defender products, to create a holistic solution.

The best feature is the fact that for certain mobiles you can control your corporate profiles versus your personal profiles. That is amazingly important. Apple just supported the separation of corporate and personal profiles, whereas Android has been doing that for quite some time. You are better off as an organization, when it comes to BYOD—because Apple just now started supporting separation of corporate and personal profiles—to start with the version that supports that feature. If you go below that level, you don't get that feature, and it makes it very difficult to separate corporate and personal profiles. Because Android supports that, if an Android phone is lost or stolen, I can wipe out all the corporate-related information from that phone and not touch the personal side. I can separate the apps and I can separate the ability to cut and paste between apps. I can cut the ability from sharing files between apps between the personal and corporate profiles. From a data loss prevention standpoint, I can completely segment corporate apps and data from personal apps and data.

Another feature is that it is now supported across multiple platforms, where it was regulated at one time for just Microsoft-supported operating systems. That development is very important.

There are a few caveats, things we have run into. It's not easy to create special allowances for certain groups of users. It can be a little heavy-handed in some areas where Microsoft has decided to lock a feature out, meaning they make it hard to make an exception. I'll give you two examples. One company we work with needed to use about 20 different thumb drives for about 20 users. To make that exception for them was very difficult. In fact, you can't really make an exception. But what you can do is allow them to use it and, while it will still alert, you can actually suppress those alerts. Another example was where a group needed to be able to go in and manipulate their PC ERP settings. To make an exception for them was also a difficult process. A lot of people have suggested that Microsoft should not, by default, make it so difficult by locking your ability to make exceptions.

Another issue is that when you implement this it is not a single solution in and of itself. You have to implement what are called security baselines for each platform. But Microsoft does not have security baselines, other than for its own products. That means that when you want to do a security baseline for say, iOS or Android, you have to depend on other security organizations' recommendations and set the security controls to create those security baselines for other platforms. You would typically use CIS. But when it comes to iOS, it's a real pain. iOS requires you to create a security baseline for every version of iOS. Android does not.

I've been using Microsoft Defender for Endpoint since it first came out. They bundled it into M365 licenses, particularly E5 licenses or the equivalent, around 2019.

Like every other security product out there, the stability of Defender for Endpoint is a work in progress. The solution is trying to address a tough problem and anybody will tell you that cyber security is not a fair fight. It's just incredibly hard to defend against the bad actors. Everybody is scurrying right now to come up with different ways to stop the problem and it's just not there yet.

In terms of scalability, we have run into organizations that are very large and that have said it doesn't scale well. I'm part of MISA, the Microsoft Intelligence Security Association, and we did a review of all their products and they all had scaling problems, including SIEM/SOAR, MCAS, Endpoint Manager, et cetera.

There are two "fronts" for anybody who is using a SIEM/SOAR: one is how fast they can ingest, and the other one is how fast they can make decisions. You want to do this in real-time, or near real-time.

The ingestion problem is that you're ingesting a bunch of stuff from everywhere: from the network, from identity, from all your services, and your apps. It's a crazy amount of data. Some organizations are doing on the order of 5 billion events daily. How do you ingest all that in a timely manner and correlate it? You have to do it in a distributed way. There will be a top-level SIEM/SOAR and several underneath it that are collecting data for a particular location or a set of users. You trim that down and eventually ingest stuff to the top so that you can see things from the holistic viewpoint. Or you decentralize it, where office A and all its users have their own, and office B has its own, and you don't necessarily roll it up into a single, corporate-wide solution.

There are products out there that are addressing this by not storing the events directly onto disk, but into flash drives, so they're super-fast. They never put it on a disk and save it. You can have the option of saving it to disk for long-term retention. But the immediate ingestion of events is happening through flash drives. It sits in fast memory, never gets written to disks, and that's how they're speeding things up. And there are AI/ML engines pulling that stuff in and they can act much faster.

In addition, some AI/ML engines are more mature than others. There is a lot of work being done on that front. When it comes to Endpoint Manager there are a bunch of events coming from a ton of endpoints. It's no different than ingesting events from a thousand database servers. Or they could be from your whole application reference architectures, and your data analytics reference architectures. Everybody sees the problem coming, the problem of big data. That's what we are really talking about. There is a whole lot of stuff coming in and we have to make sense of it, figure out what's relevant, have a scoring system and prioritization system to make decisions fast. For example, the bad guys are able to get into your systems and, within 20 minutes, they've already done an assessment. Usually, if you're lucky, you can respond to that in 30 minutes. And if you're a huge enterprise, you may not even be able to respond that fast.

That's the reason everybody says it's not a fair fight. We don't have the tools right now to react fast enough.

As for how extensively it's being used by our clients, anyone who is going to use it plans to use it as a one-stop solution. They won't be using multiple solutions and they will roll it out to every endpoint. It makes perfect sense to do so because you don't want to have multiple products and require your staff to have knowledge of multiple products.

For big corporations, it takes a little while to get there. It's something that has been evolving for 30 years now. Organizations want to settle on a standard desktop and want to be able to do configuration control that allows them to control the apps and the usability from a security standpoint. It used to be, "Let's make it easily usable." But now the industry is flipping that over to, "It has to be secure." The vendors have finally come to the point where the balance between usability and security is leveling out.

I've used multiple solutions in the past. We switched based on our customers' requests. Some do it for solution architecture reasons and some of them do it for enterprise.

The enterprise customers say, "Oh, we know we need Endpoint Manager, but we need to align a solution with our business requirements first. Before you even select a solution we are going to look at our business requirements, then do a bake-off possibly, and then select a solution." Or they'll just look at industry ratings of the solutions and say, "Oh, this is the best one," not knowing that those ratings don't necessarily look at every new solution out there. There are so many. We are a VAR and we resell hundreds of security and regulatory compliance products. Usually, unless they bring us in at the early stages of the process, our clients have already picked a solution.

The initial setup is very complex. To me, it's one of the more complex solutions because it touches so much. I have to know every platform and every platform version, when I create security baselines. As I mentioned, certain versions of iOS don't support the separation of corporate and personal profiles, and then you run into the scenario where they're already using some other endpoint protection and they want to migrate it to Microsoft Defender for Endpoint.

Or there is the scenario where they are using SCCM and to then use Microsoft Defender for Endpoint you should really require Endpoint Manager, meaning that you have to transition to that. And as I noted, making exceptions is hard. 

And when you integrate it across all the Defender products, and are managing a project like that, you have to get to a point where they're ready to be integrated, which is an issue of timing. So it's one of the more complicated things to roll out, compared to Defender for Identity. Defender for Office 365 is pretty large too, but Endpoint is the hardest of the three.

It even touches identity, because there are Azure Active Directory conditional access policies, and those are connected with Endpoint Manager. You've literally got to look at what policies and what setup within Endpoint Manager can apply to different versions of iOS. You have to dissect so that if you're going to do BYOD, for example, and allow a version of iOS from some early version and up, you have to understand that there may be some options that you can use with one version that you can't with others. It's much easier to do with Android than it is with iOS.

When you start heading down that path, it's a maturation process. You have to roll things out in phases. It's a very complicated product. Like with SIEM/SOAR products, when you start getting events, you could be flooded with them. You have to learn to tune it, so that you can differentiate the trees from the forest. You have to correlate things and automate your responses. That type of tuning process is a long process one to get the clutter out.

A product like Sentinel is pretty cool because it has predetermined workbooks, and predetermined manual and automated responses. It has playlists. They are making it very much easier to trim that clutter and to get to the nitty-gritty, and they have done so with Defender for Endpoint.

The deployment time, with fine-tuning, depends on the size of the organization. If it's a small or medium business, it could take three months to deploy and tune, and it could take longer; up to six months. It depends on many factors that I've mentioned, such as if they're migrating, or if they have an integration between SCCM and Intune. It also depends on the expertise level of the organization, its maturation level, and skill sets. All of that comes into play.

It also depends on their starting point in terms of some of the prerequisite services. You don't generally roll out Defender for Endpoint until you've got identity governance and protection. That's the first thing you do because everything is dependent upon that. After that, the prerequisite is rolling out Endpoint Manager, and then Defender for Endpoint. If it's a hybrid situation, you may roll out Defender for Identity so you can cover your Active Directory controllers and provide threat protection for them, although you can do all the "Defenders" in parallel; you just have to time them correctly so that when you integrate them together they're ready to go.

For large organizations, it could take a year or two. For example, if there are half a million endpoint devices—and that's possible if you have an organization with 200,000 employees and contractors, and each has a laptop and a mobile—it can take some time.

In terms of an implementation strategy, I have developed work-breakdown structures for just about every Azure service and almost every Azure M365 service. They look at working with them holistically, but they are broken down into each individual service and mention the other services within the work-breakdown schedule, and how you integrate them. The first thing I do is a current-state assessment and that gives me an indication of the readiness for deployment. The next steps are plan, design, deploy, manage, secure. There are strict sets of security controls and I have to gather every single one of those per platform. It's quite a long process. It follows the saying, "If you fail to plan you plan to fail."

As for staff required to maintain Defender for Endpoint, once you get it set up and tuned it's not too bad. It depends on the size of the organization again. If a business has 100 people, one person can do it easily. If there are a few thousand people, you may need two or three people. It often depends on your getting all the features rolled out. In IT it often happens that we roll stuff out and we always intend to get to that other piece but we just never get the time to do it. Many organizations are going to a lean staff and bringing in consultants to help roll things out. For us, as a contractor, it's great. Our business is booming.

Most organizations that we have come to want to replace their current endpoint protection solution for Defender. A reason many of them do that is that they aren't pleased with whatever they have. They may not know what features are relevant and just don't know how to roll them out. They realize, "Oh, I bought M365/E5 licenses, and Defender comes with them already. Why not use it?" 

Most people don't realize M365/E5 licenses are an amazing deal. They think "Oh, it's expensive," and I'll ask, "Compared to what?" If you don't have it you will have to buy licenses for multiple products to fill the same security space that you would have gotten with the Microsoft product. Go figure out how much it costs you per product, per user, and then come back and tell me how things add up financially.

If our client brings us into the process at the right time, we evaluate products for them, since we're evaluating products constantly. That's part of what we do. We have to know, through a deep-dive, the pros and cons of each. We are constantly being updated by our vendors about how they're addressing a particular security area.

Is Defender for Endpoint the best product out there? No, it's not. I can think of several others that are pretty amazing. It's still a product that's evolving, but it does a really good job for the most part. It does the best job when it is integrated with the whole Microsoft holistic solution. If you look at Microsoft's site, you will see what capabilities Microsoft has. They will show you how these products integrate and work together to give you a holistic solution to develop a Zero Trust model framework.

And while it's not the best solution overall, some of the pieces are. There are several areas where Microsoft is good or better than most, and then there are some weaknesses when you do Zero Trust. They don't have a secure web gateway product. Their MCAS or CASB product leaves a little bit to be desired. There are other solutions, in those two components of a Zero Trust model, that do a much better job. Zscaler probably has the bulk of the business but I'm a big fan of Netskope. There is Crowdstrike, and Forcepoint may be making some inroads because they just developed a new anti-malware technology. But none of them are going to be perfect because malware is a hard problem to solve.

There is also a new product I just reviewed for M365 Security that is pretty amazing on paper. Although I haven't actually kicked the tires on it yet, it looks really good and it's from one of the fastest-growing companies out there.

Think of it like this: If you don't buy E5 licenses or the equivalent with M365, you don't get Defender for Office 365. People don't realize that product is a kind of a split product. It's a multi-function product. It has some DLP pieces that work with MIP and it has some pieces that work with the Office 365 outlying suite. It's a little bit of a funky product.

But one of the things it has is a part of your Exchange Online protection. Without it, you don't get the features like anti-spam, anti-virus, safe links, and safe attachments. That combination addresses what is called a combined attack. You get an attachment and the attachment may have a link in it, or you get an email that has a link in it. They all look legitimate. If someone clicks on it, it takes them to a malware site, and bam! You just downloaded it into your computer and now endpoint protection comes into play.

Eighty percent of malware is still spread via email today. That's how they attack you. They're trying to penetrate your apps and they're even trying to penetrate your M365 online apps. This product works inline and they've already proven that, even with Defender for Office 365, there are still malicious messages getting through. The bad actors figure out how. They actually buy the product and figure out where its weaknesses are and they attack it. Because it's such a popular product it's the one they're going to target. It has the biggest attack surface. They've been attacking the weaknesses of M365, particularly the Exchange Online protection and all the weaknesses in Defender for Office 365. They've just been clobbering it. We're having a lot of people say to us, "Do a security assessment on our M365". All I can tell them is that it's not their problem as much as it's the product's problem right now.

Microsoft is trying to address things as fast as it can, but it's going to take months to get there. But here is another product you can add on that can help you fill those flaws. What this other company has done is that they've said, "We'll fix those flaws for you and we'll make it an easy process to do so." Usually, the circumstances in which you need an email security gateway is when you don't have an E5 license. But now they're even attacking that. And when that happens you have to change the MX record. With this new product that I've read about, you don't have to do that. It just supplements the weakness of M365, not only in Exchange Online protection but throughout all the other apps, like Sharepoint, Teams, and OneDrive. That's pretty impressive. And it works with all those products easily, without change in administration or training. It installs in minutes. I was floored when I saw that.

The organizations I have worked with that are using Microsoft Defender for Endpoint are mostly small- and medium-sized businesses. Our larger customers are generally not using it.

There was a service built within our organization, a service that is very much hooked in with CrowdStrike. If you've ever seen the CrowdStrike products, you'll understand why. They are pretty impressive products. They do some things that help them see malicious activity in near real-time. Can they react to it in near real-time? No. But like everybody, they are trying to find a way to be able to react faster. They just bought a company called Humio, which is a SIEM/SOAR product I referred to earlier that does not store events directly to disk, so it can act on things much faster.

Used alone, I would rate Defender for Endpoint a seven out of 10. When integrated with other Microsoft products, I would give it an eight. It really depends on other pieces of the solution for Zero trust to work properly. It won't work well if you deploy it by itself. If you're going to use Defender for Endpoint, you should also use Defender for Identity, Defender for Office 365, and the full gamut, including MCAS and MIP, and then you will need your SIEM/SOAR. It's a long journey. And you had better have done your identity very well. If you haven't, it won't really matter what you throw in place, once they breach your identity plane. That's the most important one. I can put every possible safeguard in place, but if someone gets the keys to the kingdom, I might as well just turn them off.

The area that I focus on the most is Endpoint Protection. We use Intune to build custom devices and configurations, to push out group policies, and do quite a bit with Azure Log Analytics.  

I'm writing a script from a multi-home deployment of the MMA Agent. The use case varies a lot, depending on the clients' needs. Our clients tend to be pretty big companies. The smallest client I have is about 600 people. Our biggest client is about 50,000.

DFE organizational security posture has been a positive experience. We're a Microsoft house. It works. Once it's deployed and once it's configured, it works and our clients tend to be happy with it. I haven't really experienced anyone who has been so unsatisfied with the platform that they wanted to go a couple of different directions, that has never happened to me.

It's Microsoft native. Microsoft is the corporate default, so it makes sense to use security platforms that are baked into the Microsoft platform. That's probably the most valuable aspect of it.

It has specific features that improve our customer's security posture. It makes the monitoring a lot easier and minimizes on-prem administration. A lot of the administrative stuff is all folded into Azure. It makes things easier.

The platform just makes things easier compared to on-prem or hybrid solutions because if you start working in an on-prem solution, most of the time it's going to be a battlefield. 

DFE affects the end-user experience when it's deployed. The more freedom a user has on the device, the more they're used to doing things their own way. By locking things down, by having device configurations, you disrupt the workflow. You need a lot of user education where you have to explain why you're doing these things. I'm a part of security. It's twofold, in that users have to get used to the new configurations. And the reason why we might take a little bit longer with pilot phases is that we have to identify how it'll affect the users and how the differences of different business units will be affected. Developers need a more open environment than other solutions.

Everything can always be improved. Improvements would depend on the client. 

Monitoring can always be better, onboarding can be a little bit faster, log collection could be easier, they could streamline the dashboard. They could maybe split it up into different workspaces and have the ability to segment groups a little bit more.

I have been using Microsoft Defender for Endpoint on and off for about three or four years. 

It's only the last two and a half years that it's been a big part of my job.

Microsoft has some creative accounting when they promise an SLA of 99.99%. But it is generally good. There's always going to be a problem with the cloud. If it works 99% of the time, that's great.

The frustrating thing is, you're not sure if there's a problem with your configuration or if the service itself is down because Microsoft tends to only report that the service is down much later than when you started experiencing things. So sometimes I have to jump onto a private forum or a Slack channel and ask other consultants if they experienced something similar. But when it works, it works. There's never going to be a cloud solution that has 100% uptime.

Scalability is fine. I mainly work with implementation, so I haven't really had to mess around with the scalability. I'm responsible for setting up security policies, and then if they want to do scalability, that's another team. I sit in security.

I haven't worked with support. I generally don't use Microsoft Support.

We were Microsoft partners last year. We're gold partners where we won security partners of the year, so we have an account manager. If it really hits the fan, then I would just talk to him. 

I've been an IaaS specialist since I began my career. I've done Apple MDM solutions and I've done Google Workspace, but when it comes to actual IaaS, I can't really compare. Because we're a Microsoft house, we generally don't use third parties or competitors.

The complexity of the setup depends on the environment. If it's Greenfield, it's super easy. I've been doing this for two to three years now. Most of the time it's easy. The larger companies have more complex networks and systems. The smaller the company, the easier it is to deploy.

The beginning of the project, like scoping, implementation, the entire process, or just the actual deployment depends on the size of the company. For smaller companies, we'll push some policies out. We'll do a week or two of a pilot phase where we identify different stakeholders and different business units. We collect feedback from them, keep an eye out on the audit logs and if that goes well, then we go into phase two, which takes another week or two where we slowly push out, if it's an accounting department with 60 people, then we'll do batches of 20. We'll have a pilot group of five and then we'll push it out to 20 people at a time.

The project managers worry about the licenses. I get my scope, I know the limitations I have to work with, and then I just make a solution based on that. I'm a very technical consultant and I don't really care about licenses, that doesn't really have anything to do with me.

My advice would be to start small, don't start a project thinking that it's the best solution, and bowl it out straight away. Take your time. Don't think that you'll be able to incorporate the platform within a month, although that would depend on the size of your business. Take your time, there's no rush, be patient. Because there will always be some problems.

I would rate it an eight out of ten.