Microsoft Defender for Endpoint Reviews

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.

We are using it as the antivirus as well as the malware protection.

We have not had any attacks, in terms of viruses, worms, or ransomware, in the last three years.

The impact of the solution has been minimal. Employees can work with any interruptions.

The folders and files protection are its most valuable features. These have been valuable because of the increase in ransomware attacks. With these two features, I can ensure that no changes have been made to our system or endpoint folders and files without the user being aware.

I wish they would extend the use of the Security Central portal, even for the free option of Defender. Because, as companies grow, it is labor intensive to manage the AV and detection part of it. For companies already subscribed to Office 365, I think this would be a good enhancement.

I have been using it for three years.

It is quite stable. We have not had any cases, i.e., viruses, that would require a reboot, etc. We have never had a situation where we needed to reinstall the tools as a result of the Defender application or a feature being corrupt.

Four IT support technicians are responsible for administrating Microsoft Defender in our organization. They make sure that upgrades and updates are done in a good timeframe.

Its scalability is good enough. As long as you deploy the OS, you will keep on deploying Microsoft Defender automatically. This is a good option.

We have about 375 endpoints.

I have never used their support.

Before Microsoft Defender, we were using Bitdefender. Before Bitdefender, we were using McAfee Symantec.

We switched to Microsoft Defender because there was a change of ownership for the company in 2017.

We went for Microsoft Defender once we were informed that it would be part of our Office 365 package. So, we combined the licensing for the OS with Office 365. Yeah. We thought it was a good bargain.

The initial setup was straightforward.

The deployment takes a maximum of half an hour.

We have seen ROI. Most of the other competing alternatives will cost up to around $30 per user device. We average 400 devices. Therefore, the amount that we save each year is 400 times $30.

We have been using the free version.

Microsoft Defender is good enough as long as you ensure the environment is well-patched and secure, then even the free option will be sufficient to take care of the entire ground.

We are not looking to increase usage at the moment because of the underlying economic situation.

I would rate this solution as nine out of 10.

I offer a Security Operation Center (SOC), which is like a person standing and going through the metal detector at the airport. We're like the staff standing there and watching people and then having them send stuff through the conveyor. It is real-time detection and response.

I don't use Microsoft Defender that much. If I come across a client who doesn't want to spend on a different endpoint solution, I just have them use Microsoft Defender that is built into their devices.

The ransomware and some of the other features that are built into it give you more telemetry now. From the security side, I don't look at what an endpoint solution does. I look at what it gives me. I need data. I don't want something to just say, "Oh, I stopped it." That's good, but I need to be able to figure out what did it stop. Was it a good thing or a bad thing that it stopped, and what is it doing. I need to be able to break that down and go deeper into that analysis to figure out what is being stopped. Microsoft Defender is doing that now and is giving more telemetry. It doesn't give nearly as much as Bitdefender does, but it is pretty good.

It is built into Windows 10. So, I don't really have to go out and get an extra or a separate endpoint security solution. It stands on its own. I have some clients who are using Microsoft Defender, and it is perfectly fine because my SOC can actually get the telemetry from Microsoft Defender and use that as well. Microsoft Defender does have the telemetry information, and I can get some of that out of it for my SOC. I can use what's built into it to stop and do more of a response layer. I can use Microsoft Defender to stop something right there.

I like the fact that it has the ransomware solution in there. I'm glad that the ransomware solution is built into it. That's probably the biggest thing that I see in Microsoft Defender.

It is useful when a client does not want to spend extra on getting a new endpoint solution or does not want to get something else installed on their devices.

The biggest thing that I would emphasize to Microsoft is that if they are confident in their solution, they should brag more about it. In other words, they should put more stuff out there to prove that they're just as good as the others. The biggest thing is that people still don't believe in it. When it comes to the IT world, they still don't believe in Microsoft Defender. It has been there for a while, and I know that I used to not trust it because it was free and I didn't know what it was doing and if I could trust it. If you go to comparison sites, you would hardly see it being compared to solutions like Norton, Bitdefender, Webroot, etc. Microsoft can do a better job of promoting it.

They should offer more telemetry or more information coming out of there for Syslog type of scenario so that a SOC could use the data that they have built into it. This would be useful.

It is not very scalable from the eyes of an MSP because there is no dashboard that you can use to see all of your devices that have Windows Defender unless you have your own dashboard or an RMM tool to actually look at it. So, you might not get to know that a particular computer of a client is doing something, and it might have got a virus. That person might know that, but unless you set it up to actually send you the information, you won't get to know that. That's one of the things that is hard with Microsoft Defender. It is not made for the MSP world where you have one pane of glass to see all of your clients with Microsoft Defender on it unless your RMM tool already has that built-in and it can see the telemetry from Microsoft Defender. 

I have been using it off and on for some time.

Its stability is fine. It is a built-in and legacy solution. It can stand up to any other endpoint security solution. 

It is not very scalable from the eyes of an MSP. There is no dashboard that you can use to see all of your devices that have Windows Defender unless you have your own dashboard or an RMM tool to actually look at it. Because it doesn't give you one pane of glass to look at everything, you have to have an RMM tool that can actually see the data coming from Microsoft Defender. If you don't have an RMM tool, you would need one, and that would be an extra cost.

I don't really use an RMM tool. We have a SOC, and I don't really deal with individual computers themselves. In the past, I have used RMM tools, and some of them do well with looking at Microsoft Defender, but my SOC has a really good dashboard that I can use to see what's going on with Microsoft Defender. I can actually control stuff on Microsoft Defender from my SOC.

I have not used their support for Microsoft Defender. Generally, their support is fine. They've definitely improved and gotten better.

I don't use Microsoft Defender that much. It is built into Windows 10, and if you put the antivirus or endpoint security on, it kind of turns itself off automatically. I've been using Bitdefender lately. I used to use Panda Security, but now I use Bitdefender.

I recommend it for clients who don't want to spend on a different endpoint solution, but I don't put all my eggs in one basket. I don't say that a particular antivirus or endpoint security solution is 10 times better than the other one. I just don't look at things that way because I know the process and what hackers actually go through to get past all of them. So, none of them are that much better. The only thing I tell others is to not use the free ones, but to that defense, they all have a level of reachability.

When it comes to performance, Microsoft Defender is much faster because it really doesn't look at all of the things that are Microsoft-focused. It has a better understanding of what Microsoft has made, whereas other solutions are going to look at anything as a potential threat. It is definitely a better option because it knows Windows. You install another antivirus on Windows, it has to try to figure out the software. Microsoft already knows how Word, OneNote, or their other solutions work. So, Microsoft Defender doesn't need to scan specific things, whereas Bitdefender or another solution doesn't know that, and it is going to scan everything, which can slow your system down. 

I offer a SOC, and we do real-time detection and response. I don't put all my eggs in one basket when it comes to endpoint security. I believe endpoint security needs to be there because it is a layer of security, but it is not everything. The reason I use Bitdefender is that it has more telemetry and more information coming out of it to put into my SOC than Microsoft Defender, which doesn't have as much telemetry coming out of it.

For telemetry or forensics, Microsoft Defender doesn't give you reports. It just does what it does. Microsoft Defender will give you information, but you got to go to the individual device. I can't pull much telemetry information into a SOC. So, if you want to see from where the hacker or the hacking software came in, how it got there, and how it moved unilaterally across the system or network, you may not get all of that with Microsoft Defender, but with the telemetry data that comes out of Bitdefender, you will get more of such information and you can follow its path.

It just comes on a device when you buy it. When you buy a laptop, it is built into Windows 10. They have Windows Security, and there are separate pieces of it. When you look into some of it, it is called Defender. They also have a standalone Windows Defender.

It is a full endpoint security solution, and they have a firewall in there. You can go in there and set different things up for your firewall. When it comes to security, not everything is turned on. You actually have to go in and turn the ransomware part on. There are things about ransomware that you got to turn on, and they really depend on what you need in your practice or business. You have to make sure you go in there and look at it. You can't just set it and forget it. It does come automatically, but you got to go in there and set things up because they know that some things can stop certain aspects of your business from running. So, they don't want to turn everything on. They leave it up to you.

The configuration of those extra parts can get complex, but I do believe it is pretty straightforward. It involves more yes or no type of questions. It is just flipping a switch on each individual part that you want to use. It is just like everything else. You have to test and see if it is going to work in your environment.

In terms of maintenance, all the updates come with Microsoft. Every time they update Windows 10, they also update Microsoft Defender. It is pretty simple.

It doesn't really affect my business because the cost goes out to my client either way. If they have 200 devices and they are charged $2 per endpoint for each one of them, that's an extra $400 a month. If they are just using Microsoft Defender built into their systems, that cost goes away for them. My clients are definitely saving money with Microsoft Defender.

It doesn't affect my business because I'm looking at telemetry regardless of the solution. So, it doesn't matter if it is coming from Microsoft Defender or Bitdefender.

It is built into Windows 10. If our clients are using Microsoft Defender, the cost goes away for them.

It is just like anything. You should definitely do your homework and see if it is going to give you the information that you need. You should focus on forensics and the kind of information you are going to get out of Microsoft Defender. Will you get the reporting that you need? Will you get the telemetry and all the data that you need to be able to follow the path of an attack? You need to be able to see that. You need to know this information for your clients because they may need it for the FBI or something else. So, you need as much information as you can. You need to make sure that that you're going to get the information out of there and you have the right setup to be able to see everything with all of your clients. You should have an RMM tool or whatever you're using to be able to see all of your clients, and you need to make sure that you have the setup for that.

Microsoft Defender has been around for many years, and since Windows 10, they've really ramped it up, and it has gotten a lot better. I've seen some of the statistics on it, and it stands up against some of the other solutions out there, such as Norton. They've added things that make it more of an EDR, which is the endpoint detection and response layer. The ransomware was one of the big add-ons, and it is good that they've put that in there. It can stand on its own now.

It has not affected our organization's security posture a lot, but it has given me more options to lower costs for my clients. It has helped my clients and in turn, my business. It has not affected our end-user experience in a negative or a positive way. It is just a tool. I do the monitoring, stopping, blocking, and everything else for clients. 

It can be a good solution, and I hope that they grow with it and do more with it. They can make it simpler for the security and MSP world. If their solution just gets better for the MSP world, it would help everyone.

I would rate Microsoft Defender a seven out of 10 because of its lack of usability for an MSP and its lack of telemetry information, but it is useful, and it does stop ransomware.

It is a comprehensive monitoring solution for all user activities and their associated details within our tenant. All data flows seamlessly through Sentinel, streamlining the process and ensuring thorough oversight of our environment.

It enhances our security posture. It seamlessly integrates with all our systems, particularly across our Microsoft infrastructure. It offers insights into threats, furnishing information about potential security risks within our environment. It effectively sets up alerts to notify us of any suspicious or unusual activities. The prioritization of threats holds significant importance. It concentrates on the most crucial threats rather than overwhelming us with all potential risks. It excels at organizing and highlighting those critical threats, providing a level of efficiency beyond what I've observed elsewhere. It has proven to be a cost-effective solution, saving both time and money, as the adage goes—time is money. Specifically, it has significantly reduced our time to detect and respond to incidents. Its real-time threat detection and blocking capabilities contribute to these improvements.

The most valuable aspect lies in its automation capabilities, particularly within security automation. It contributes to more efficient time management for us and it provides an efficient way to keep track of user actions and maintain a secure and well-monitored system.

In terms of improvements for their technical support, a focus on enhancing response times could be beneficial.

I have been using it for approximately five years.

The stability is excellent and I've never encountered any issues; it has consistently performed well.

The scalability is impressive, especially since we use it in the cloud. It works seamlessly without any issues.

Microsoft's technical support is commendable. I would rate it eight out of ten.

Positive

Overall, I would rate it nine out of ten.

We use it to prevent malware attacks.

The automatic report is very good, and it is easy to see which user or device has a problem. The benefit we were able to realize immediately was protection.

I like the simplicity of the portal and the integration with Microsoft Intune. Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is easy to use and implement.

It has helped automate routine tasks and the finding of high-value alerts. However, we have a small IT team, and we have not automated many tasks.

It has also helped us save a little time, but we have saved more time with email protection. We have saved money as well because of ransomware protection.

Microsoft Defender for Endpoint's threat intelligence has helped us prepare for potential threats before they hit and take proactive steps. We have a scoreboard of each device and can quickly see which device needs an upgrade.

This solution has made our threat detection and response time faster by a few hours.

Right now, there's a portal for Azure, portals for Microsoft Office, and portals for endpoints. It would be good to have only one portal and integrate everything.

I've been using this solution for five years.

Because it is in the cloud, the stability is good.

It is easy to scale and increase capacity.

We are at one location with multiple departments such as IT, marketing, sales, invoicing, etc. We are a small company and have 53 users of Microsoft Defender for Endpoint.

I have contacted Microsoft technical support a few times a year, and they have responded quickly. I'd give them a rating of nine out of ten.

Positive

We used a different solution and switched to Microsoft Defender for Endpoint because the integration and alignment with Microsoft was great. The previous solution was heavy, and it took a long time to update. 

The initial deployment was easy and took a few hours.

It is deployed to the cloud, and I don't have to spend time on maintenance.

I deployed it myself.

The ROI is very difficult to calculate, but it may be 20% ROI. We don't have any problems with ransomware or malware.

It is an expensive solution. It would be nice if it could be included with the Microsoft Office package.

In theory, the best-of-breed strategy is not secure, and practically, a single vendor's suite is better because there is only one contact.

I would recommend trying Microsoft Defender for Endpoint and would give it an overall rating of nine on a scale from one to ten.

We use it for security purposes. It provides important security for some critical systems, such as network devices.

For securing access, USB security helps us block our USB ports and that ensures that users do not plug USB drives into their computers.

In addition, our efficiency in the way we handle our processes has been improved because the solution automates routine tasks and helps find high-value alerts.

It has also saved us a good amount of time, something like 15 percent, while decreasing our time to detect and our time to respond, each, by 5 percent.

It automatically detects intrusion and malware.

It's also easy to use. The interface is user-friendly and the navigation is 
not difficult. It is very easy to move from one hyperlink to another, to move from one solution within the platform to another solution.

And in terms of categorizing the info and the actions that need to be done, it helps you to prioritize threats. That is very important.

The time it takes to restore the application could be improved. It has a lot of dependencies. It's not like the Microsoft security that comes with the OS. Updating through the command prompt, most of the time, it takes some time to download some of these dependencies. They need to make the download of the dependencies more efficient.

I have been using Microsoft Defender for Endpoint for more than five years.

The stability is okay.

It is scalable. We use it for multiple departments, teams, and locations. We have over 5,000 users.

I would rate Microsoft's technical support at seven out of 10, because of the time it takes them to respond. But when they finally respond, they give us complete attention and things are resolved within the SLA.

Neutral

Before Microsoft Defender for Endpoint, we were using McAfee.

We constantly get updates from Microsoft that are light and they don't really affect us while we're working. The updates have been very helpful.

I would recommend Microsoft Defender for Endpoint.

We're using it for endpoint security.

We are able to get quite a lot of details about the laptops that we have across the organization. I would rate it pretty high in terms of visibility into our environment.

We are better able to see or get alerts on things that we might not have been able to see before. With Norton, for example, we didn't have a centrally managed system. All we could see was that a node had some threat on it, and we had to manually log into that node and work with the user to figure out what that threat was. With Defender, we are able to see all of that through the console instead of having to reach out to the user, which speeds up the process of figuring out what type of vulnerability we're looking at, and we are able to run scans and do other things remotely without having to interact with the user anything. It speeds up our process of detecting vulnerabilities and threats.

It has significantly reduced the amount of time to respond to threats and manage threats.

It has definitely improved our security, and it also helped us in reducing management costs.

We had Norton Antivirus before, and with Norton, we didn't have a way to centrally manage a lot of features. Defender allowed us to deploy it from our Office 365 admin console. That is probably the biggest thing that made us go with Defender.

Since we moved to Defender, we have more visibility into our security posture for our devices across the organization. We can not only see how the devices are doing as far as AV is concerned; we can also see any threats that might come up. We get alerts on those as well, which is very useful for us.

One thing that was lacking in Defender was web filtering. Its web filtering wasn't as comprehensive. Sophos was a little bit better than Defender for blocking URLs or installing programs. 

In terms of additional features, we have more features than we use. We haven't really had a chance to dig too deep into it. 

We've been using this solution for about a year.

So far, so good. We haven't had any issues related to the service not being available or anything like that.

It is highly scalable. We were able to deploy it across the organization fairly quickly. It is also pretty straightforward to add users or remove users.

We use Office 365 and Azure AD. We have somewhere around 400 users dispersed across the USA.

When we reached out for support, there were times when it took a little bit longer than we liked, but once we were able to engage with their support, we were able to get the resolution fairly quickly.

Positive

We were using Norton as our endpoint antivirus solution. We switched so that we are able to centrally manage endpoint security.

My team implemented it, and I was in charge of overseeing the deployment.

We're a small team managing about 400 users across the organization. A lot of them are remote, especially since the pandemic. We have a couple of administrators who are responsible for checking Defender and just keeping on top of our security.

We have definitely seen improvements in terms of quickly being able to manage threats and being able to centrally manage everything.

We mostly use Microsoft products. We use Office 365, and we use Azure. We're also a Microsoft partner. So, the licensing was much cheaper for us, and at the same time, a lot of the features that we were looking for were included in Defender.

We were trying to get our firm the security certification for government contracting. One of the requirements was to upgrade our Microsoft licensing to a level to be able to use the government cloud. We found out that the required licensing already included Defender. So, it helped us kill two birds with one stone. It was much easier for us to convince the executives to go with it.

We did evaluate other options. CrowdStrike was one of the solutions we looked at. It was a pretty good option, and then there was Trend Micro. Symantec was another one, and then there was also Sophos. Those were the options that we were looking at.

Some of them were priced prohibitive for us. Sophos was a pretty good solution, but it was pretty expensive as compared to some of the other options. Trend Micro was good, but the management interface was lacking for us. It didn't have some of the features that we were looking for. Symantec was just expensive, and their centralized management was also not that great. So, both Trend Micro and Symantec didn't have good management interfaces. Sophos had probably the best one, but it was very expensive. Sophos was also better than Microsoft Defender in terms of web filtering. Web filtering was something for which Microsoft Defender didn't have as good features.

I would advise comparing it with others. If your environment is mostly Microsoft, it makes sense to use Microsoft Defender as part of your deployment.

I would rate it a nine out of ten.

We use a package of Microsoft security products, including Defender for Endpoint, 365 Defender, Sentinel, and Defender for Identity. You can integrate them with a few clicks. They work together natively, and Sentinel provides advanced monitoring, so you know everything happening in your environment.

It's essential to have one space where you can manage all these solutions together because security can be complicated. It makes it that much more complex to have to navigate to a different portal for identity, email, etc. It's crucial to have a single place to manage all your security operations, so you don't have to move around. 

We started with endpoint protection, where you install an agent on your client with a sensor already built in. Once you have that agent installed, the endpoint can report to the Microsoft security portal. You'll be able to see the device onboarded on the portal using some scripts, and you can monitor most of the vulnerabilities. You can also detect, respond and remedy security vulnerabilities from the portal.

We added email protection by setting policies that will analyze our email. It analyzes our links and attachments to see if there's malware attached. We move ahead to use Defender for Office 365. We also moved forward with Defender for Cloud, and the solution for our workloads, like VM, our network security group, etc. There is another one called Defender for Identity that lets us manage our on-premises and cloud identity from a single portal.

Many of our users are on older operating systems and browsers with vulnerabilities that harm the environment. An attacker can take advantage of those old browsers to access the infrastructure. Defender for Endpoint lets us identify those browsers with vulnerabilities and resolve the issues. We can also find processes that we didn't initiate and stop them right away.

Defender helps us prioritize threats from the security portal. It shows us the dangers that matter the most to our own organization and which threats we should address first to achieve the most significant improvement in our security posture. 

We can manage Defender for Endpoint and Defender for 365 from the same integrated security portal, and it's user-friendly. Microsoft is much more user-friendly than Sophos. 

Microsoft covers every aspect of security and the global challenges we face. The biggest threat today is identity and access management. If someone has access to your identity, they can access much of your technology. They have solid solutions for identity, email, and cloud. I don't think there's anything Microsoft left out. Microsoft has your security environment protected. 

Sentinel enables you to ingest data from your entire ecosystem from on-premise to the cloud. It has single sign-on technology, so you can use your account from your on-prem to sign on to the cloud and vice versa. A user doesn't have to remember a lot of passwords.

Sentinel's data ingestion is essential. Security tasks can be tedious. It's great to have technology that lets you integrate all your data from different sources. You can also incorporate data from other clouds, not just Azure. You can have data from Azure and on-premise. 

So far, Sentinel is one of the most comprehensive SIEMs I've seen. They have even added this XDR. Sentinel doesn't just do SIEM and SOAR. It also covers XDR. The automation is there, so you don't have to do much work. The automation helps you look at the activities behind all this data and correlate them to see the relationships. It gives you information at a glance to see if there is a relationship between these various data sources. 

Defender saves us time. A task takes typically three days and could be accomplished in one day using Microsoft technology. With an on-premise network, you need to switch between portals on all your network devices, but you can achieve that from one portal. You can set policies that will block traffic to your infrastructure, so it saves time. The advanced threat protection using AI has also reduced our detection time. 

We've also saved money. We previously managed the technologies on-premise, so we had to maintain the solutions ourselves. We spend less using Microsoft cloud technology because we don't need to pay for those extra features. We only need to pay for operational expenses. 

We don't have to go to the affected devices when we see a security vulnerability from the portal. We can respond to those issues and resolve them using an endpoint management solution, like Intune. When we resolve a security issue, it takes a week to see the score, but we see the results immediately.

I like the security score that you can see from the portal. You can see the list of the vulnerabilities, and the security score tells you how well your organization is managing those vulnerabilities. It's a strong feature that helps improve your security operations.

Another helpful feature is the recommendations. The portal will guide you on how you can resolve those issues from your own endpoint. This feature is great if you don't have that kind of experience. It will help you understand the technology better and improve your security posture. 

Defender provides useful alerts and groups them. It sends an alert to your portal if it detects any malicious activity, and you can group multiple alerts to form an incident. 

I would like to see Sentinel better integrated with the rest of the security technology within one portal. 

I've been using Defender for more than a year.

I rate Microsoft support seven out of ten. I had some cases a while back and told an agent my issue. When I called the next day, I had to explain everything again to a different person, so I found it annoying to repeat myself all over. 

It would be helpful if they had some coordination between their support, so we don't have to repeat ourselves. They should be able to transfer your details from one agent to another. 

We previously used Sophos.

Defender doesn't cost that much. When you use Microsoft technology, you can start with the free version and see how much the technology helps your organization solve security problems before you use the subscription. They also do this pay-as-you-go model, so you only pay when you use it. 

I rate Defender for Endpoint nine out of ten. It's great. I don't have anything negative to say about those technologies. They are serving their purpose.