Microsoft Defender for Office 365 Reviews

Our primary use case is for features like mail protection and preventing impersonation. It has extended the protection for the user.

What I don't like about Microsoft Defender for Office 365 is that many of the features should be default. They should be included, not optional, like other vendors provide.

I have been working with Defender for Office since the beginning. It's been evolving all the time.

I would rate the stability an eight out of ten. We noticed that from time to time, Microsoft does have problems. Sometimes the service goes up and down. Sometimes they change without prior notice. 

It is a scalable solution. Our organization has around a thousand users using Microsoft Defender for Office 365. 

Sometimes it's good. Sometimes it's bad. It's up and down.

The initial setup is straightforward. You just add the license, click it, and then you can set up the rules. It is quite simple. 

You can set it up in-house. 

The pricing has become expensive. 

Some customers want to use a monthly payment, but Microsoft recently changed its license policies. So we are encouraging most users to pay annually.

Overall, I would rate the solution a nine out of ten. I would definitely recommend using the solution. 

We have started using Defender on our endpoints, together with the basic Defender for email. We placed Defender on our endpoints through our XDR solution. It's connected to our SOC and the SIEM.

The fact that it's easy to integrate and implement has helped us to move forward with our project.

Also, on the clients, we have implemented automated identification and blocking, and these help our SOC team avoid doing manual work.

It gives us visibility into threats and, for endpoints, it helps us to prioritize threats. We used to have a lack of visibility, but now our time to detect and respond has decreased.

Also, in the beginning, Microsoft Defender for Office 365 saved us time because we had started a completely new company. Now that we are more established, we need another, more advanced solution with more machine learning and artificial intelligence related functionality.

About eight months ago, we started to measure the quantity of phishing and spam that we have been receiving, and it has been increasing a lot. That means that protection for our email is not as good as we were expecting.

Now that we have more visibility into threats, our orientation is to have a more top-market solution to give us more visibility and easier ways to respond to the threats that we find and also to identify threats better.

It is not really straightforward to get a lot of information from Microsoft Defender, so we have had to use Microsoft Graph to create some custom views to export custom information.

I have been using Microsoft Defender for Office 365 for four years.

The stability is really good. We have never had any problems related to Defender.

The scalability is also very good. It's easy to increase usage, but that's expected.

We are a multinational company, so we have multiple locations, including Brazil and several countries in Europe. We have about 470 end-users.

The technical support is really good. 

Positive

We used Symantec when we were part of a big company. We decided to use Microsoft because it is a fully integrated solution and was embedded in our licenses. We did not take into consideration all the features.

Our company was sold by that big company that we used to be part of and we then consolidated and created a new company about four years ago. We wanted to move forward, as fast as possible, with as much security as possible.

It was really straightforward to set up. We implemented it on our endpoint devices, and then we configured a lot of policies to manage and avoid threats, as well as policies for phishing and the cloud.

The maintenance is mostly related to fine-tuning phishing and other issues and is handled by one or two engineers, but it's not needed frequently.

It was done in-house, with two or three of our resources.

It is much more expensive than using another solution because we have had to include some options and upgrade our license. Be aware of the licensing model, because for certain features you need a different level of licensing.

We did not look at other options. The main reason we went with Microsoft was because of the complete integration.

If I were asked whether to go with a single vendor or multiple vendors for security, I would say use multiple vendors. We are using Microsoft for collaboration, email, chat, and security. It's like having the wolf secure your house. Having different vendors would help give you different visibility and data and different people managing different solutions.

We use Microsoft Defender for Office 365 for our external developers. 

The tool offers the best experience to meet international contractors. 

Microsoft Defender for Office 365 helps people to work remotely. It is a secure solution. We don't need to use our company's computers or get VPN connections to the networks. I can control how they share screens and what they send to the devices. It keeps our organizations confidential and sensitive information safe. 

Microsoft Defender for Office 365 is scalable. 

Microsoft Defender for Office 365's deployment is straightforward. 

The product is expensive. 

The flexible tool helps hide windows from people trying to control the PC's remote. I rate it a seven out of ten. 

We are resellers of this solution and Microsoft partners. 

Defender for Office 365 helps in securing your users' email which is the number one method of compromise for most networks.

The solution does a thorough job of examining emails for malicious content and examines the URLs and potential malicious content in emails. It offers peace of mind with more real-time updates as far as what they're looking for as opposed to a signature-based solution. It's probably the most valuable feature in my mind. I've deployed it for a couple of clients in a 365 environment and it seems to be a pretty solid solution. 

This is not really a defined product. You have to go to a lot of different places to enable things so it would be nice if you could go to one tab that says 365 Defender for Office 365 or something similar. You would be able to make all the settings and changes there, rather than having to go to lots of different places in the admin center to get it configured.

Configuring Defender for Office 365 is not as easy as I would like but with some research and patience, you can tweak the solution to meet your needs. There are some pretty good articles online that assist in setting up Defender for Office 365 to meet your needs.

Creating a path for your Security Awareness Training (SAT) phishing tests to go around the Defender filtering is way too complex for our current solution KnowBe4. But I learned that is a KnowBe4 limitation. Phin SAT has a much easier method of injecting test phishing emails that do not require such acrobatics to configure.

I've been using this solution for two years. 

This is a stable solution. 

Defender is very scalable, it sits on the 365 environment so however big your 365 environment is, is how much you can expand. We've probably set up 300 or 400 users so far. There's no maintenance and you don't have to deploy updates. It's all taken care of in the background by Microsoft so it's pretty much set and forget it once you get it configured.

The support is mostly responsive, but I've had instances going for longer than a week that shouldn't have taken that long.

There's no specific solution I would relate to, Microsoft just seems like a cleaner solution as opposed to having a third party. We've used some other solutions in the past where we have to send the mail to that solution and then forward it from there to Microsoft. In this case, it all takes place in the Microsoft environment. 

Like most Microsoft products, it's not the easiest thing to get installed, but it seems to work once you have it deployed. You can easily do it in half a day, especially once you get familiar with it, but it's not particularly time-consuming. It's best to start out with more lenient definitions so you're not working on every mail, but we can tune it after that. Our in-house IT department deals with deployment. 

We haven't done any sort of analysis with regard to ROI, but in my mind, if you can stop one piece of ransomware or malware from getting onto your network, it's priceless.

The solution is not too expensive. 

This is the first option I tried. I'm considering looking into others to see if they are easier to set up and manage.

I'd highly recommend reading the documentation. It was pretty helpful in getting the solution set up.

I rate the solution an eight out of 10. 

Defender for Office 365 protects Office 365, which is the industry standard office software suite. It is the only Microsoft security solution we use. We don't use any specialized features. It's a standard deployment. 

Defender helps us prioritize threats across our organization. Defender for 365 is highly efficient and saves us time. We save about 35 percent compared to other solutions. 

The pre-sales cost calculations could be more transparent. 

I have used Defender for Office 365 for the last three years.

We mostly rely on internal support at my organization. They are not certified by Microsoft, but they have some experience with Microsoft solutions. We contact Microsoft if we need additional support. I would rate them highly. 

Setting up Defender for 365 is straightforward, and we did it ourselves following the standard Office 365 setup. 

I rate Microsoft Defender for Office 365 an eight out of ten. 

We use the solution to add and move staff when they leave to secure the laptops and other assets for the company. All our contractors work remotely.

The solution helps us prioritize threats across our entire enterprise. 

I found the prioritization to be effective for the amount I have used it.

The solution helps us automate routine tasks and find high-value alerts. We use automation to create printers in terms of notifications that notify us when a device is trying to gain access.

The solution saved us between 24 and 48 hours of time.

The solution saved us money.

We are a small Software as a Service company, so when we hire contractors for projects, we usually move on to a different contractor with the relevant expertise. This means we have a lot of contractors coming in and out of the company, and the solution helps to keep our platforms secure when they have finished working by removing their credentials.

The solution provides us with visibility into threats; however, there is room for improvement in the threat visibility, as it could be more granular, refined, and detailed.

The UI needs to be more user-friendly. Some of the dashboard views are hard to follow and make the reporting complicated.

I have been using the solution for two years.

The technical support is good and quick to resolve issues.

Positive

I give the solution a six out of ten.

We use it to monitor user behavior and activity. It also gives us analytics to protect the user identities and extensions stored in Active Directory. For one of the instances that we are managing, we have to sync it with Active Directory and protect user identity.

It is a basic SecOps tool. It has not increased or improved anything specifically for our organization, but I see it as a must-have for security ops.

It can help automate routine tasks and finding of high-value alerts. Our security operations are not very high-volume, but from the angle of process efficiency, it is definitely a very beneficial product.

Defender for Office 365 has helped eliminate having to look at multiple dashboards and that is the aspect I like most about it. It is simpler, effective, and convenient. The users like the process efficiency.

And there are a couple of aspects, time-wise. One is that the documentation makes everything so easy that we were able to understand it without much external support. The second is how it automates the process and gives everything in one console. It is helping us with process efficiency. I would estimate it is saving us 10 to 15 man-hours per month. But it is more an issue of process efficiency and having the right process in place. It is not for time-savings, primarily.

And it is likely to help us with our time to detect and respond, although we haven't faced one threat yet.

It's a little early to tell which features are most valuable, but by default, it gives analytics on user behavior. We have not been able to leverage it fully, but that is one of the interesting features. It's also very simple to use. The documentation has made it quite easy to implement and our team has been able to understand it.

And while we haven't had even one threat incident yet, functionality-wise, Defender for Office 365 can proactively detect threats and prevent them. It is not just a reactive mechanism.

One area for improvement is integration. For example, when it comes to external SaaS platforms, we were not able to get a lot of information on integrations with such apps for security and authentication. The awareness of ecosystem information that is provided needs to be better.

We implemented Microsoft Defender for Office 365 over the last month.

The stability of Defender for Office 365 is competitive.

It is very scalable. I've seen implementations in organizations with thousands of employees.

For us, it is being used across endpoints for all the users in our organization, and it is multi-geographic as well. We are a small organization with only 10 users.

Microsoft technical support is very good. For this particular product we have not reached out to them, but otherwise, we find Microsoft support to be quite good. 

The product itself is so good that we rarely have to raise a support ticket. The product and documentation are self-explanatory and we are able to troubleshoot things ourselves.

Positive

If we had compared it with other vendors, then I would have more to say about the cost, but we didn't. However, standalone, the cost is convenient.

We did not explore other vendors. This was a default choice for us.

We have not faced any incidents so we are not able to comment on how well it handles them. But in our organization, we are using basic antivirus software and that aspect is covered in that solution as well. It also has functionality for prioritizing threats but we have not implemented it.

The solution does not require much maintenance. There is the setup and it is mainly a matter of monitoring after that.

When you consider a best-of-breed strategy versus a single vendor's security suite, I prefer a single vendor because of the failure points. If there are interconnected failure points, there is a single vendor to work with to fix them and identify the gaps. And when it is within the same ecosystem, the product releases are compatible with each other and, together, give us more value. While a multi-vendor strategy has its benefits, if we stick to a single vendor for the entire stack, it is a better scenario in which to manage and monitor.

If you're using Office 365, Defender for Office 365 is the default primary choice. There are no shortcomings in it, that I have seen, that should make someone look for an alternate solution. It is the default choice for this particular use case and it serves its purpose.

We use Microsoft Defender for Office 365 for email security. We are partners of Microsoft and I'm the company's chief operation security officer. 

The deployment capability is a great feature. We're able to activate this feature throughout France with a click.

I'd like to see fewer false positives and potentially have an accurate capability to detect malicious SharePoint sites. There could also be an improvement in some of the features related to training. In a phishing test campaign, for example, it should be more user-friendly and include the capability to evaluate and assess users' understanding of the content provided. 

I've been using this solution for several years. 

The customer support could be more advanced at the technical level and more responsive. There should also be more communication on updates.

We previously had some reinforced email security features with Microsoft; this is just an improvement on what we had.

This is quite an expensive solution and understanding the pricing model and features is quite complicated and it can, in fact, be a nightmare when dealing with Microsoft.

We reviewed several on-premise solutions such as Forcepoint that could be integrated with other components within our infrastructure. The reason we didn't go with them is that we have to respond quickly to threats and at an international level. Given the complexity of our situation in terms of architecture, we decided to go with a ready-to-use solution.

We haven't had a review recently, so I can't say that this is the best solution on the market. Things are evolving all the time with new features constantly being added to all solutions. For now, I would rate this solution seven out of 10. 

We are using Defender to protect different kinds of attachments, emails, and safe links, and things like that.

The basic features are okay and I'm satisfied with the Defender.

The initial setup is pretty simple. It's easy to configure.

Microsoft products are always easy to use.

The solution has been stable and reliable. 

I was looking for some advanced features, like if I would receive an email that contains a legitimate file type, but the content is malicious, how I can protect against that? Normally, we are dealing with so many phishing and spam emails. I'd like some additional features any product can give me to protect our environment in a better way. 

There is always a chance to continue to improve the product in some way.

We've been using the solution since 2015. It's been a few years now. 

Microsoft so far and been good. We haven't faced any kind of disruption or anything else. It's a good product and good platform, I must say. Overall, it's a good product and good service and we haven't dealt with bugs or glitches.

It's scalable. It's software as a service, so it's always scalable. You have to just purchase the additional licenses and you can increase your database. It's nothing that would be considered too difficult.

They offer different kinds of support levels. If you have the Premier Support contract with Microsoft you're good. If you have purchased a good support level agreement with Microsoft, then their support is very fantastic. We never faced any kind of issue. The engineer is always available when we create the ticket and the support is good. Due to the fact that we are a big organization, we have a support level agreement with the Microsoft.

Earlier, we were using the on-prem solution of Exchange, then we migrated to the cloud, so we cannot just compare the feature set and the price of Defender with any other security software, email security software.

The initial implementation is not very difficult. Microsoft products are always very easy to configure and use. It's not a big deal. It's the philosophy of Microsoft to make it easy for the users. That's why they always attract the users and users happily migrate to them as compared to using any other product or any other service.

I haven't actually evaluated the cost against other products. For example, it's bundled with the licenses that we have procured, so everything is included in that. We haven't purchased the Defender separately. 

We cannot just say that it's a product which is costly as compared to the other products available in the market or not, as it's a bundled offer. We can calculate the price of one license or an Office 365 license with any other cloud service partner's license cost, however, we cannot just compare the price of any specific feature with the services available in the market.

We are not using any other product, so we are not actually in a position to compare it with other security products.

While the deployment is a hybrid model, we have migrated all the mailboxes to Office 365. We are completely running the services from the cloud.

I'd rate the solution at a seven out of ten. there's always room for improvement. 

It's a bundled offer. When we procured the licenses of Office 365, it came up under those licenses. We are not using any other product, so I cannot say or I'm not in a position to say that any other product is good or Defender is not good, as I am not using any other product. 

Our primary use case of Defender is to protect customers' emails. We use this solution for the servers being hosted on Azure. We use it mostly for the emails of Office 365 users, to secure their emails. Some customers already have other email security, complementing Office 365, but smaller customers prefer using a single solution to protect their emails. 

This solution is cloud-based. 

The most valuable feature is the integration. It's a single console, so we don't have to switch around between multiple products. Another valuable feature is the ease of operations and maintenance. 

This product's effectiveness could be improved, in terms of detecting unwanted spam or even malware between the emails, compared to other products. 

We have been using this solution for almost a year, just in 2021. 

The technical support's response is very good. If you have Premier Support, they can respond within 15 minutes. In terms of their technical team, it's very good as well. 

The installation is a key feature, since it's a single product within Microsoft. It's integrated with Office 365, so it's very easy to install. You only need one person for deployment and maintenance—the administrator, which is usually either from the security team or email administrator team. 

We implemented this solution ourselves. 

For licensing, it's usually a yearly package for customers who are subscribed to Office 365, but they can also pay on a monthly basis. 

Some of our customers have IronPort or Trend Micro and prefer to use these solutions, complementing Office 365. 

I rate Defender a seven out of ten because it's easy to operate and maintain, but it could be improved by spam and phishing detection.