Microsoft Defender for Identity Reviews

We mainly use the solution to ensure our security and to increase our security score. We want to understand the threats or attacks to help prevent them. 

The product has given our security posture a very big score. It is very easy to integrate with other applications, other packages, and what we have. It helps to measure and block events. 

It gives us visibility into advanced behavior activities. It’ll show a history of logins or events.

It’s efficient, and it provides all of the investigation reports, which is an advantage for us. It also helps us prioritize threats across the company. It helps us detect the exact timing of incidents, and we’ll see them when they happen. It helps us adhere to our SLAs. We can see threats and if they are of higher or lower severity. We can find the types of malicious events, see what’s happening, see what actions are taken, and understand what is happening.

It integrates with other products, and these solutions work natively together to deliver coordinated detection and response across the environment. These are all work through Jira.

The comprehensiveness of the threat protection provided by Microsoft security products is good. It is giving better visibility to us. We can understand what the false positives are. That gives us more confidence in the security posture of the environment.

We use Microsoft Defender for the cloud, and we use its directional sync capabilities. It’s important to be able to see both in and outbound reporting. 

It automates routine testing and helps automate the finding of high-value alerts.

As we define policies and rules, automation makes it easier to do so.

The product helped eliminate having to look at multiple dashboards. It has a free single dashboard for us.

We’ve found that threat intelligence helps us prepare for potential threats before they even hit and we can take preventative steps. That is the beauty of it. It has good threat intelligence within the platform. We can prepare ourselves before we have an issue.

It continues to scan for threats on our devices. We’re always scanning.

We’ve been able to save time on security-related tasks. Right now, we’re saving two to three hours a day.

Microsoft Defender for Identity decreased our time to detect or our time to respond overall.

The tracking instance needs to be configured appropriately. They need to be able to identify more vulnerabilities in order to increase the efficiency of the solution. 

I've been using the solution for almost five years. 

The solution is stable. 

We have 600 people using the solution. It's in one location. 

It's a scalable solution. 

We did not previously use a different solution. 

The initial setup was very easy. I found it to be straightforward. The deployment only takes one day. Our implementation strategy was to ensure all threats and vulnerabilities were covered. 

We have two admins that cover the solution. However, it doesn't require maintenance. 

The enterprise pricing is reasonable. Our company has a good deal. 

We did look at another solution before choosing this product. It was a filter scanner. However, we have other Microsoft products, so we went with this solution. 

I'm a customer. 

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten. 

It's covering all of our major vulnerabilities and threats without giving an inch. It's a one-stop solution. It can detect any type of suspicious activity, whether internal or external, and provides historical logs. 

Our primary use for the solution is for user and entity behavior analytics. 

We use multiple Microsoft security products including Defender for Endpoint and Defender for Cloud.  

We use Defender for Cloud for our Azure VMs, but not for the multi-cloud environment, and we don't make use of its bi-directional sync capabilities.

We have integrated these products, and the integration was straightforward. 

These solutions work natively together to deliver coordinated detection and response across our environment, which is not the case for non-Microsoft tools. 

These multiple Microsoft security products provide comprehensive threat protection. 

Defender for Identity improved our organization; a major part of that is threat analytics. The user entity and behavior analytics, in particular, helps us a lot right now, as compromised user scenarios, such as phishing emails, are significant threats.

The solution reduced our time to detection and response. 

Almost all the features are valuable. 

The solution offers excellent visibility into threats. 

Defender for Identity helps prioritize threats across our enterprise, which is essential for any identity and access management product. 

The solution's threat intelligence helps us prepare for potential threats and take proactive steps before they hit. We've tested various scenarios over the past months, including our major security concerns, a valuable exercise that helps us to protect our system.   

Although the threat protection is comprehensive, the solution needs to be reevaluated when it comes to complex scenarios.

There is no publicly available roadmap regarding upcoming features and improvements to the product. 

The product has significant limitations around acquiring device vulnerabilities, primarily because hunting queries are limited. 

The technical support needs significant improvement. Documentation for more minor issues in the form of guides or walkthroughs could help to resolve this issue. The number of tickets raised would decrease, removing some pressure from the support team and making it easier to clear the remaining tickets.

We've been using the solution for almost eight years.

We have around 16,000 end users and expect that to increase by 20% in the coming year.

The customer support is inferior as they lack technical ability; I rate them two out of ten.

Negative

In place of Sentinel, we previously used QRadar for reporting purposes, but it's a SIEM product, not SOAR. However, when we evaluate SOAR solutions like Sentinel, we find them expensive.

The complexity of the initial deployment depends on the scenario; it can be straightforward, but it can also be complex, especially if it involves removing the agents from a previous solution.

The setup typically takes 45 minutes to an hour if there are no issues, but if you run into problems, it can take a day or two. We implemented the solution using a team of five staff. We have another team of 15-20 employees working on customer projects.

It took six to eight months from the time of deployment to realize the benefits of the solution. From an endpoint and identity perspective, it took that long because the data needed to be recorded and captured.

We have seen an ROI with the solution. 

The product is costly, and we had multiple discussions with accounting to receive a discounted rate. However, on the open market, the tool is expensive.

You can purchase Defender for Identity as an add-on to an E3 license, and it comes included with an E5 license. I think those with the E3 and add-on aren't benefitting, and it's a better deal for those with E5 licenses; however, the price difference between E3 and E5 is significant. If we can get E5 at a discounted price, that's likely the most cost-effective way of accessing the product. We use a mix of E3 licenses and E5s for high-profile users.

I rate the solution seven out of ten. 

My advice to those considering the product is that it's great. We have yet to test complex scenarios in an open-source environment, but our findings and results have been promising so far. At the same time, the customer support is very poor, and the tool is expensive.

Whether Defender for Identity saves us time is still an open question. We need to conduct more testing, especially around complex scenarios, though I believe it will save us time. There was a greater level of complexity involved in the products we previously used. Our team members were less familiar with them, creating a need for education, training, and experience. However, many staff are already familiar with Microsoft and Windows, so for those people to work with Defender is a much simpler proposition.

We have yet to onboard services such as Salesforce running in different clouds, primarily GCP and AWS. When we onboard them into Defender for Cloud and Defender for Identity, we may discover some vulnerabilities or weaknesses there, but as of now, that is unclear. We intend to run tests and find any weaknesses if they are there.

We currently don't use the solution's automation. 

Defender for Identity provides intelligent authentication through conditional access policies and monitors user behavior. Defender looks at things like password changes and application use.

One of our users had the same password for every personal and company account. That was a problem because she started receiving phishing emails that could compromise all of her accounts. Defender told us that the user was not changing their password.

Microsoft should look at what competing vendors like CrowdStrike and Broadcom are doing and incorporate those features into Sentinel and Defender. At the same time, I think the intelligence inside the product is improving fast. They should incorporate more zero-trust and hybrid trust approaches. They need to build up threat intelligence based on threats and methods used in attacks on other companies.

I have used Defender for two years.

I rate Defender for Identity nine out of 10 for stability.

I rate Defender for Identity 10 out of 10 for scalability.

Defender is pretty solid, so we rarely call support. 

The implementation is fast and easy. You only need to buy a license and assign it to a user. 

We have seen a return on our investment.

I rate Microsoft Defender for Identity nine out of 10. My advice to new users is to learn the product. Microsft has courses you can take. They offer one that covers all their security solutions. It only takes a day and is the best way to learn how to use the product. 

The use cases are for dealing with situations where a user signs on with MFA from unusual locations or malicious files are detected.

The way it has improved our organization is that we're able to get the information across and easily pull it all together in one place, to help us be secure.

It is very good to have all the threat locations that the threat actors are coming from on one dashboard. That has enabled us to run a lot more efficiently. We're able to put more time into taking action on alerts instead of setting up dashboards and having to find the relevant information.

Our Microsoft solution has saved us time because we have been able to field the alerts and see what level of urgency they have, with all the information in one spot. It has made it a lot easier to find relevant alerts and threats and take action. It has decreased our time to respond, allowing us to provide a five- to 10-minute response time for most alerts.

And with the playbooks, were able to find additional alerts, like unfamiliar sign-ons, and automate the closing of sign-ons from certain locations so that we don't get a full feed of useless data.

The most valuable aspect is its connection to Microsoft Sentinel and Defender for Endpoint, and giving exact timelines for incidents and when certain events occured during an incident. It's good to know when a sign-on occurred, especially if it was outside the usual time, and whether the sign-on was from Australia, because our users don't usually sign on from outside Australia.

And for prioritizing threats, we get alerts that are low or high severity and that tells us what need to do within our SLA, and what we prioritize in terms of further escalation down the pipeline. We get the alerts in real time, thanks to Sentinel. That's very important because when we get an alert from Sentinel, we can click through on the link to find out what happened, see further details about the user and the malicious event, and what files were there. It has all those details and actions.

Sentinel enables us to ingest data from our client's ecosystem so that all the endpoints and users are in Sentinel. That is critical for operational success. When alerts come in you need all those details. If you don't have those details it's hard to follow up with further investigations and you can't tell it was a legitimate threat or not, which isn't good.

And with Sentinel, we have one spot to respond across the board. That's another very important factor because you don't want to spend all your time trying to figure out where the data and information are, which is very difficult to do. Being able to run KQL queries within Sentinel and get the details from Defender for Identity, and the other solutions, is pretty cool.

In addition to Defender for Identity, we use Defender for Endpoint, Defender for Cloud Apps, Sentinel, and Azure ID. They're all integrated because we run it as an MSP for a client and we get their endpoints connected to Azure to get the alerts feed. They all work very well together. It's good to be able to investigate across the different products. They work seamlessly. That integration has been a very important factor, considering that we have a set timeline for alerts. Being able to switch seamlessly from one solution to the other solution to further investigate is very important for the job.

Defender for Identity gives us visibility, but we often get false positives from Azure that take us down the garden path. We go through 30 incidents each day and most of those are false positives or benign positive alerts. Occasionally, we get true positive alerts.

Also, while the threat protection from Microsoft is very comprehensive for certain threat alerts, for new things we sometimes have to create new alerts to try to get them into the pipeline and we've had mixed results with that.

There is also room for improvement in how the threat intelligence comes through. Sometimes, the user data is not all there and we have to confirm things across multiple solutions to get the full data for one alert.

I've been using Microsoft Defender for Identity for one year and seven months.

I rate the stability at a six or seven out of 10. Sometimes there is downtime with the system.

It's very scalable. We've had it across a small environment and a large environment. Our client has about 10,000 endpoints connected. They have a total of about 100,000 endpoints but we're having some issues with connectivity, so the number is fluctuating. We've deployed it both across our company and our client's base. We ingest their data and manage our company's data.

The technical support has been very good. Whenever we have had issues they have been resolved very quickly.

Positive

We didn't have a previous solution. Because we're mostly using Microsoft software and applications, it makes more sense to stick with a Microsoft solution.

We've been able to better satisfy our client's needs.

It is very affordable considering that other SIEM solutions are much more expensive and have many more licensing restrictions and fees.

There isn't really any maintenance involved on our side. It's on the client to keep the endpoints connected. Sometimes they don't get updated and sometimes they don't have it set up on their devices to connect.

I would recommend a single-vendor suite because if you run into issues across multiple solutions, it's going to be quite a headache for the engineering and DevOps teams to sort out all those issues, communicate with each other, and provide data to each other.

Give Defender for Identity a shot if you're running a very Microsoft-centric environment. Test it out and see how you find it. It's very efficient at picking up alerts from endpoints and ingests all the information efficiently without too many hang-ups.

Defender for Identity is mainly a monitoring tool for Active Directory activity. Active Directory logs are fixed into Defender for Identity and it has its own core rules. Based on those rules, it gives us an alert if any suspicious activity is going on in Active Directory.

Many organizations are using the Microsoft Windows operating system. Whenever users log in to their systems, all the login activity, the credentials et cetera, are managed by Active Directory. If suspicious login activity happens in that system, everything is logged and the logs are saved by the Defender for Identity. Based on the correlation rules and AI technology, it gives us alerts, such as brute-force and honey-token-related alerts, or login activity after office hours, or successful login after three consecutive login failures.

It helps our organization protect employee access and prevent anyone from outside of the organization from accessing our systems. It is very important for securing our organization's endpoints, our laptops and servers. No unauthorized person can access an endpoint or enter our assets. It is also very helpful for preventing DDoS alerts, brute-force alerts, and other Active Directory-related threats.

The feature I like most is that you can create your own customized detection rules. It has a lot of default alerts and rules, but you can customize them according to your business needs. For example, we have a prevention mechanism through a policy where, if anyone tries to access something and gives the wrong credentials three times, that account will automatically be deactivated for the next half hour.

Also, you can integrate Defender for Identity with any SIEM platform, like Splunk, QRadar, and all top SIEMs, and create your own dashboards and reports to identify any suspicious activity. It's also very user-friendly, UI-wise. Anyone can understand it. We integrated it with Splunk, which is a big analytics tool.

Visibility-wise, it's also quite useful. And if you want to enhance something based on your requirements, you can raise a ticket with the Microsoft team and they will review and implement it. That flexibility makes Microsoft very helpful to its clients.

In addition, there is only one dashboard where we get the alerts. They come in as low, medium, or high priority.

We observe a lot of false positives. Sometimes, when we go for a coffee break, we lock our screens. Locking the screen has a separate Windows event ID and sometimes I see it is detected as a failed login. The number of false positives needs to be improved. With the separate event ID for a locked screen, we have to segregate the event ID and correlate everything properly so that we can identify it as a false positive.

I have been working with Microsoft Defender for Identity for the last four years.

It has never failed and it's never down. It's very stable.

The scalability is very good. In our organization we have almost 10,000 associates and that means we have about 10,000 endpoints, including 3,000 servers.

We have contacted their support several times, not only for Defender for Identity, due to false positives, but also for some other solutions. There is some delay in response, it's not an immediate reply. They will take one or two days to reply, based on the priority.

Neutral

It's not very complicated to deploy, although we were not involved. It was deployed by Microsoft. We just provided the Active Directory server details and they integrated it. It took about one week to fully deploy it, and there were three people involved.

There is no maintenance required on our side. Everything is done by the vendor, including all the security patches. It is a cloud-based security solution, it's not on-premises, so we don't need to manage anything on our side. Everything, all the patches and all the application upgrades, happen automatically.

You need to understand why this product is important and why it is required in your organization. What are the benefits? You have to identify that first. If you don't understand the requirements or the benefits, you will not get the proper answers. You have to evaluate your security design and identify the importance of Active Directory logs and Active Directory protection.

You also have to ensure your Active Directory policies are well maintained and monitor your Active Directory logs as well.

If I could choose between a single security vendor or having multiple vendors, I would always prefer a multi-vendor approach. A single vendor only has a single source of threat intelligence, but if you want to protect your organization, and the budget permits, you should have multiple security sources.

No one can say they are 100 percent secure, even after you put a lot of security devices in place and have done everything. Security devices are based on predefined rules or behavioral-based analysis or IOC-based. They have the intelligence to detect possible threats, but there are limitations. There are known and unknown threats. But with Defender for Identity, over the last five years, I have not observed any vulnerabilities. Several breaches have happened in our organization, but there have been no major breaches. There have been no ransomware or security events in that time. Everything has been detected. Sometimes we get false positives, but we notify Microsoft that those are not malicious files and they can be whitelisted. Defender is very good at detecting any abnormal behavior or malicious files.

The solution is primarily used for detecting user anomalies, sign-in anomalies, user behavior analytics, and identifying business compromises.

The solution’s alerting is fairly efficient.

The solution should provide more detailed data regarding anomaly detections. You get information occasionally, but it doesn't always correlate the different anomalies accurately. It takes quite a lot of effort to look at sign-in logs and security alert logs.

It would be nice to consolidate all that information into a more centralized view instead of going through different platforms in the Azure Stack to investigate.

I have been using the solution for two to three years.

The agent deployed on domain controllers and servers isn't very stable. In some instances, agents needed to be redeployed. In other cases, we had to involve Microsoft engineers to fix the issues.

Microsoft's first-level support is extremely pathetic. They take an extremely long time to escalate a call to a tier two or tier three analyst for extra in-depth investigations. We've had calls open for a month that weren't escalated to the correct people to solve them.

We have different channels to contact Microsoft support instead of the normal help center channels.

Neutral

We haven't used anything besides Cisco Identity Services Engine (ISE), but that's just for identity protection for your on-premise networks. It's not cloud-integrated. In contrast, Microsoft Defender for Identity works for both on-premise and cloud environments.

The solution’s initial setup was fairly straightforward. It probably took about a month to get it fully implemented.

The solution was implemented through an in-house team.

Microsoft's licensing model is very complex to understand. Microsoft Defender for Identity comes as part of the Microsoft E5 licensing stack. We do not have to pay additional costs for technical support.

The solution uses machine learning to detect if a user has never used a certain service provider or public IP address. The tool picks that up as an anomaly. Then, the user gets flagged that it's a potentially risky sign-in. You get alerted about that, and then you need to investigate.

From a business perspective and brand image, the solution helps quite a lot by responding to incidents quickly. The solution’s alerting is fairly efficient. The solution has built-in automation that can automatically disrupt attacks and block or disable accounts. The solution's cost savings are probably hard to gauge as we haven't used another product in the past.

The solution integrates seamlessly with the other Microsoft tools we have. Microsoft Copilot for Security is an additional product that Microsoft has released for enhanced AI capabilities over the Microsoft Defender stack. It comes with additional licensing. I would recommend the solution to other users.

Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

We use the solution for PIM management, access detection, and synchronization with Intra.

It has the ability to block access, monitor, and log in.

It integrates with on-premises Active Directory environments. It is designed to enhance security by providing advanced threat detection and response capabilities for both Azure Active Directory and on-premises Active Directory. This integration allows for comprehensive monitoring and protection of identity-related activities across both environments.

It focuses on protecting the on-premises Active Directory infrastructure and does not directly link both identity repositories. For users operating in mixed environments, while Defender for Identity offers robust protection for on-premises AD, additional solutions or configurations might be necessary to ensure seamless security management across Azure and on-premises AD systems.

It is stable. 

I rate the solution’s stability a nine out of ten.

It is scalable. It is suitable for large enterprises.

I rate the solution’s scalability a ten out of ten.

Support varies depending on your subscription level. For corporate enterprise and premium plans, you can expect more comprehensive support. However, if you have a basic or standard subscription, you might experience lower-priority support. Generally, the support provided is good, but response times may be longer for lower-tier plans. The support team is often overwhelmed due to high demand.

Positive

The initial setup is not very complex, but it could be easier. They are very easy to configure and set up.  Two people—one a security consultant and another infra—are required for deployment.

I rate the initial setup an eight-point five out of ten, where one is difficult, and ten is easy.

It provides time-saving. 

It has a fair price.

I recommend the solution.

Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

The use case is securing identity on your on-premises Active Directory.

It helps identify insider leaks. If any of your users want to use their permissions to implement leaks or perform malicious actions, it alerts you. 

It also performs reconnaissance. If someone has succeeded in gaining access to your Active Directory, it monitors anomalous behaviors, such as moving laterally.

Microsoft has also identified vulnerabilities globally and Defender for Identity prevents such security incidents from occurring in your domain controllers.

Another benefit is that Defender for Identity saves us time because it is automated and proactive. I don't have to monitor the environment, just the feedback and alerts from the solution. It also helps save us money because it prevents potential breaches that would cost money.

In addition, the solution has decreased our time to detection.

The feature I like the most about Defender for Identity is the entity tags. They give you the ability to identify sensitive accounts, devices, and groups. You also have honeytoken entities, which are devices that are identified as "bait" for fraudulent actors. Once these devices have been tagged, they give you alerts about when a malicious actor tries to explore the vulnerability that you created. You can monitor what the attacker is going after. Entity tagging is a big win for Defender for Identity.

There is a connection between the cloud, Defender for Endpoint, and Defender for Cloud Apps, in addition to Defender for Identity, so that you get feedback about activity on the cloud regarding a user if he tries to move laterally in the on-premises Active Directory.

It gives you visibility into threats. On the cloud, you already have Azure AD Identity Protection to secure your cloud identity. But the security of Defender for Endpoints requires certain protections for your on-premises identity. It's helpful for organizations that have quite a few on-premises entities. There aren't a lot of organizations like that now, as quite a few have already moved to the cloud, but for those that are still on-prem need that security.

We also use Microsoft Defender for Endpoint and Intune. The beauty of Microsoft is that, with just a few clicks, it integrates all the security features. Signals from Defender for Identity can move to Defender for Endpoint, Defender for Cloud Apps, and Intune. That ensures that it eliminates false positives and gives you a comprehensive overview, like a map, of what a malicious actor has done. It tells you how a user moved from this device to that device, which is very good.

When it comes to comprehensiveness, Microsoft has done a good job of making Defender for Identity pretty straightforward and easy to use. There are detection rules that help you identify potential attacks. Your role, as a security professional using Defender for Identity, is basically to monitor and implement a few configurations, after the initial deployment.

Defender for Identity is automated, in that you can specify specific alerts or incidents to defend against.

Defender for Identity, Defender for Endpoints, Defender for Office 365, and Defender for Cloud Apps all point to the Microsoft Defender Security Center. That gives you a one-stop-shop dashboard where you can see the activity for these four solutions.

An area for improvement is the administrative interface. It's basic compared to other administrative centers. They could make it more user-friendly and easier to navigate.

I have been using Microsoft Defender for Identity for over a year.

So far, so good, when it comes to stability.

You can add it to more servers. It has been developed in such a way that, if you have 20 servers in an enterprise, you can install it on all the servers in your environment, and it has a dashboard that tells you if the Defender for Identity sensor has stopped.

Our environment has about 700 end-users.

I haven't had to contact their technical support.

We did not have a solution before using Defender for Identity.

The initial deployment of the solution, overall, is pretty straightforward. You install the sensor on-premises, on the virtual machine that is running Active Directory.

I did it myself. I'm a security expert, working for a Microsoft managed-services provider. There were three to four people involved.

It's very tricky to identify a return on investment. A return on investment for a solution like this can only be quantified when you can measure its effects. Of course, it identifies and eliminates breaches, and since we have not had any breaches, the return on investment has been good. It's protecting the environment.

I would always recommend a single-vendor security suite over multiple suppliers because you get a comprehensive overview of the handshake between all the security offerings in the Microsoft solution. In this case, they include Defender for Identity, which is integrated with Defender for Endpoint, Defender for Cloud Apps, and Defender for Office 365. A holistic, single security solution is better than having multiple solutions where you have to monitor different platforms, and where you can get conflicting reports.