Microsoft Defender XDR Reviews

It is a universal security tool across our organization, catering to staff members using standard laptops and PCs. Currently, we employ an in-house solution built upon a smaller product from a Finnish company.

Although it integrates with Microsoft AD, our solution remains somewhat proprietary as we've independently implemented and tailored it to our specific needs.

We do not leverage the multi-tenant management capabilities of the solution. In our scenario, we operate as a single organization, allowing us to utilize a straightforward, single-setup approach.

The identity protection offered by the solution has proven highly effective for us because we developed it in-house. Crafting it ourselves has allowed us to seamlessly integrate all of our specifications with the solution within a relatively short timeframe. 

The significance of using the identity and access management integrated into Microsoft 365 Defender cannot be overstated, as it is vital for the proper functioning of the product. While it is crucial, the available functionality might not be entirely sufficient. We have opted for our in-house solution to complement and address the additional requirements.

It empowers us to phase out the use of other security products.

Its most significant advantage lies in its affordability. Being an integral part of the Microsoft Stack, it comes with a cost-effective package. Especially for higher education, there's an appealing pricing structure.

The management features could be improved, particularly in terms of better integration with Intune, Microsoft's cloud-based management solution. Enhanced integration would contribute to a smoother user experience, and ease of use is a key aspect that could benefit from such improvements.

We have been using it for approximately four years.

It has demonstrated exceptional stability, with no concerns or complaints on my end.

It exhibits sufficient scalability for our specific needs.

We utilize extended support for Microsoft's stability, and the quality is excellent.

Positive

Within our network, we incorporate Cisco products, utilizing various security features and functionalities offered by Cisco. For instance, our firewalls are implemented using Cisco technologies. This adds diversity to our security landscape, as Microsoft alone may not cover all our security needs.

It has been implemented across various locations, spanning our three campuses and multiple departments. Maintenance is handled by a team of four people.

It didn't contribute to cost reduction. Our expenditure has maintained a consistent level, with little change over the years, aside from factors like inflation.

Using it has resulted in time savings for our security team. Currently, the team comprises approximately four individuals working with these technologies, equating to a total of four times thirty-seven hours per week.

It has consistently offered highly appealing academic pricing, with distinct rates for higher education and general educational purposes. This differential pricing is a significant factor and it influenced our choice to use Microsoft products.

Overall, I would rate it nine out of ten.

We use Microsoft Defender XDR in our multi-tenant environment comprising Windows, Linux, and the Cloud.

We have Microsoft Defender deployed in a hybrid environment across AWS, Azure, and GCP.

Microsoft Defender XDR provides unified identity and access management. The identity protection the solution provides is good. 

If we had to use a separate solution for identity and access management I believe the performance would be clunky.

Microsoft Defender XDR extends beyond just Microsoft technologies, encompassing a wider range of platforms and services. This broad coverage is a key strength of the solution.

Since implementing Microsoft Defender XDR, the centralized view and management console have been beneficial.

Microsoft Defender XDR limits the lateral movement of advanced attacks.

It integrated seamlessly into our SIEM environment so there are no disruptions to our security operations.

The ability to adapt to evolving threats is critical as the landscape is expanding daily.

The multi-tenant management capabilities for investigating and responding to threats across tenants are good.

We are enabled us to discontinue the use of other vulnerability management tools.

The reduction in the number of vulnerability management tools we use has helped reduce manual operations.

Microsoft Defender XDR has helped reduce our costs by ten percent.

Microsoft Defender XDR has helped save our security team between five and ten percent of their time.

The unified view of the threat landscape on a central dashboard is the most valuable feature.

The naming convention keeps changing and has room for improvement.

The licensing is a nightmare and has room for improvement.

I have been using Microsoft Defender XDR for three years.

Microsoft Defender XDR is stable.

Microsoft Defender XDR is a SaaS product so it is scalable.

The technical support is good.

Positive

We previously used VMware Carbon Black and switched to Microsoft Defender for the multi-cloud environment support.

The initial deployment is straightforward. We identify the critical assets and just deploy for those initially and then slowly roll out for the rest. Around five people were involved in the deployment.

The implementation was completed in-house.

We have seen a return on investment.

I would rate Microsoft Defender XDR a nine out of ten.

Our main use cases include securing critical university services and establishing a research tenant for researchers to store and manage their findings across both everyday machines and dedicated research spaces. It involves dealing with malware and managing server security through tags. Additionally, a significant portion of our work involves exploring and investigating emails using the Explorer tool. It is well-suited for addressing these scenarios and ensuring robust security measures.

It enables us to respond to incidents more swiftly, pinpointing root causes with greater speed. Retrieving emails is now a much smoother process compared to the previous method using Power Shell. With Explorer, it's a more straightforward and visually intuitive approach, eliminating the previous concerns associated with Query Drive and reducing any associated anxieties. It allowed us to phase out the use of other security products entirely. Initially, we managed this transition through SXM, and later migrated it to the online version of Defender. It has had a notable impact on the operations of our security team. We've had to reshape our procedures, particularly focusing on alerting. There has been a significant upskilling effort, shifting from the previous model where Cisco admins primarily dealt with alerts within SSC or through email.

The most valuable aspect is undoubtedly the exploration capability. Given that we are consistently engaged in exploration, constantly seeking reasons for message delivery issues and searching for malicious attachments, the Explorer feature stands out as the primary and most beneficial tool for our needs.

I'd like to see more integration with various components. While the ecosystem is quite impressive, there's a noticeable back-and-forth between the Defender console and the Exchange console. It would be beneficial to have a more seamless experience with everything consolidated in one place, particularly when dealing with aspects related to the Exchange console. Currently, we rely on a third-party service for the majority of our IAM needs. The data center extension of security coverage has proven to be highly significant for us. Given our extensive use of Linux and third-party applications, having the capability to monitor these aspects within the Defender console would be immensely valuable.

I have been using it for four years.

The stability is quite high. Despite various outages, we've experienced consistent reliability.

Scalability is indeed very impressive. We can deploy resources globally with just a few clicks, and the use of Terraform to create VMs adds a fast and efficient dimension to the process. In terms of end-users, if we focus on mail and overall usage, we currently have around 105,000 users of VMs. Specifically in Azure, we're nearing the 100,000 mark with more migrations in progress, making the average user count approximately 100,000.

Microsoft support has been performing well, promptly addressing any conflicts that arise. Our account manager is quick to respond and provides additional resources when needed. The frequent check-ins, with calls every hour, contribute to a positive experience. I would rate it eight out of ten.

Positive

The initial deployment was quite straightforward.

The deployment process went smoothly, with check-ins and some policies to configure. Overall, it didn't feel cumbersome.

In the long term, there is potential for significant time savings for our security team. Although currently, many of us are investing time in upskilling and adapting to the new system, overall, I believe that as we become more familiar with it, there will be noticeable efficiency gains.

There has been a noticeable reduction in costs. We've managed to navigate it effectively through our enterprise agreement, and Microsoft's academic discounts have proven to be quite generous. The overall expense is significantly lower, approximately fifty percent less than what we would incur with a traditional enterprise license.

Especially with an enterprise license, the transition is relatively low-risk. If you're currently using the old-school Defender SCCM, moving to the new system is not a challenging shift. It's worth picking a few machines, testing them out, and seeing if it suits your preferences. Overall, I would rate it nine out of ten.

The summarization of emails is a valuable feature. I get more than 1000 emails a day. It is hard to read them all. Summarization makes it a lot easier. The solution also provides transcription features.

It doesn't work in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint consistently. We find it full of bugs. It doesn't work properly. The tool gives inconsistent answers and crashes a lot. I spoke with the Microsoft team regarding these issues. The person I spoke to said that our expectation was too high and that we should have expected that it would only operate at 70% accuracy, which was a bit of a shock.

I have been using the solution for four years.

We use most of E3 and E5. We're using 92% of the catalog. Everything runs in the cloud. In the past six months, there have been incidents where the cloud has had some issues. We've escalated them to Microsoft and have had a conversation about stability.

The tool is scalable.

The support is decent. It could be better in certain circumstances. Overall, it's acceptable for what we need it for.

We were using a Symantec tool before. We stopped using it because we were exiting a relationship with the Symantec tools. We chose Microsoft Defender for Office 365 because we had a relationship with Microsoft, and it did similar things to what we used the Symantec tool for. It was an easy choice.

The initial setup was complex. It doesn't work. Semantic Index takes 48 hours. Getting people to onboard is not as simple as turning it on and making it work.

We have to ensure that we are teaching people about these tools, their value, and the use cases to determine whether they will use them. If we turn it on and somebody is not trained to use the tool, they will abandon it. It's still not functioning properly. It's a bit of a risk for Microsoft to push out a tool that's not ready yet.

We did the implementation ourselves. We have a large enough internal team.

The solution is too expensive. Each license costs us $30.

Google is an alternative. The comparison is based on market share, penetration, usefulness of tools, and cost. Microsoft has the lead. It's embedded. We use it as a productivity suite for our company. Excel, Word, and PowerPoint are tools that people use on a daily basis.

The tool provides a little bit of unified identity and access management. It's not the most important thing for us. Security is a multi-layered strategy, and Defender is one aspect.

The product is one of the many tools we deploy to ensure that the lateral movement of advanced attacks does not occur. If it were the only tool we had, I wouldn't be as confident in saying that we have the proper levels of security, but it is one of the multiple tools we have. So, lateral movement is almost impossible.

The solution might be able to adapt to evolving threats in a smaller shop. However, it is not so in our organization.

We run a bank. We are testing out Copilot. We're about to roll it out to several thousand users. The tool hasn't yet helped improve things in our organization, but it has the potential. Copilot is new. It's difficult to determine the ROI and its value. It's hard to tell. We do get some value out of the product.

Overall, I rate the product a seven out of ten.

In our organization, we are mainly using it for email security and SharePoint security.

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

It helps us to prioritize threats across our enterprise, which is very important. It has sorted many things.

We use Defender for Endpoint, and we also use Sentinel. In my organization, they are all integrated. Sentinel pulls the data from M365 Defender via connectors. The integration is very easy. There are no problems. These solutions work natively together to deliver coordinated detection and response across our environment, which is good. We rely a lot on Microsoft products. Together Defender for Endpoint and Sentinel give me a clear picture to defend against threats and investigate the threats.

Sentinel enables us to ingest data from our entire ecosystem. It's always good to get a centralized, holistic view of our security operations. We are using centralized Sentinel dashboards mainly to get all the threats and information in one place. It's good.

Microsoft security products provide comprehensive and deep threat protection. I'm pretty satisfied with that.

It has saved us time. It has saved more than 50% of our time. 

It has decreased our time to detect and time to respond. It has been helpful, and the time to detect is really fast. We don't have to do anything. We just have to rely on it. In terms of the time to respond, if something is under the radar or intelligence of Defender, the tool itself responds and gives us what happened. When it comes to something that is not on Defender's radar, Sentinel is generally where we go. So, it saved more than 50% time in terms of detection and response.

Email security and endpoint security are valuable.

It provides good visibility of Microsoft products but not for third-party products. It's a good product if we have Microsoft product lines to protect or defend, but it lags when it comes to a mixed environment or non-Microsoft products. The Defender agent itself is more compatible with Windows 10 and Windows 11. Other than these two lines, there are so many compatibility issues. Security is not only about Microsoft. The core technical aspects of it are quite good, but it would be good if they can better support non-Microsoft solutions in terms of putting the agents directly into VMware and other virtualization solutions. There should be more emphasis on RHEL and other operating systems that we use, other than Windows, in the server category.

On the Defender side, for custom detection queries, KQL and the dashboard are not that great, but we are not doing automation directly from the Defender side. We leave Defender intelligence as it is, and we collect everything from Defender to Sentinel and handle the response from the Sentinel side. So, all our automation is happening through Sentinel only. We don't have any extra customization on top of Defender.

The maturity of the portal or dashboard is missing. The dashboard is something that Microsoft is changing every month, and we are seriously not liking it. As a management person, I am not bothered about it, but my team is suffering because there are many versions. You are working on a version and then a new version comes and then the preview toggle button comes. Now, they are combining all the parts into a single console. It confuses technical teams a lot. I'm not happy with their approach or experiments when it comes to the Defender portal. They shouldn't change it again and again.

The SOAR side of Sentinel is zero. If any subscriber subscribes to Azure Sentinel, SOAR is zero. Microsoft says that Sentinel is a SOAR solution, but I don't agree because they are only exposing the existing Azure automation engine towards Sentinel. My automation ask is that when there are already so many detection rules and connectors, why is the SOAR capability not in-built? Why can't they make the Azure functions behind it available in a template form and let us modify and use them? It will save my team's time in preparing the automation of the response. If my team has to create the logic, they have to invest a lot of time.

Their support needs to be improved. I'm not happy with their support.

I have been using this solution for more than a year.

For stability, the product must be mature enough. It should not keep on changing every month.

It's scalable. Target points are in my capacity, and I can scale it without any problems. There is no limit to the agents for Defender, but on the server side, Microsoft would have the answer. 

Location-wise, we are spread in five locations within one country, and department-wise, we have around 11 departments.

Their support is bad. They weren't at all able to solve my problems. They buy the time but never get back. I have to follow up with them again and again. They just take the logs and sleep on them. I'm not happy with their support. I would rate them one out of ten.

Negative

We were using another solution. Our organization at the time was too much dependent on the on-premises infrastructure. We were using Symantec, but it was a very quick shift within one quarter or two toward the cloud products and services. We are now heavily reliant on Microsoft Cloud products. We have the Azure environment and a lot of cloud applications, and we have shifted to M365 and Sentinel.

We have a hybrid deployment. Within the cloud, it's straightforward, and when it comes to the target points, it's doable. 

Our biggest challenge was removing the old Symantec signatures from the registries, devices, and servers. That was what we mainly struggled with a lot. Otherwise, deployment was going very smoothly. We had around 46 virtual machines or servers. The problem was that the MDATP agent was not ready to protect them. We struggled a lot there. We went to Microsoft, and Microsoft said to go back to Symantec, and when we went to Symantec, they asked us to go back to Microsoft. That took a long time for us. Everything else was smooth. When the target point is Windows, it's very smooth.

It took around 20 to 25 working days. In terms of the staff, other than the infrastructure team, there were five people including me.

In terms of maintenance, we have to just work on the detection rules and nothing else. There is no other maintenance. It's a complete cloud solution.

It's quite hard to measure the money saved from using this solution because we have not got any attacks that have resulted in any kind of ransom or monetary loss. It's defending us, and as of now, as per my report, there are no financial losses due to any attacks.

Microsoft's pricing differs geographically. We are based in India, and we have India-based licenses. Money-wise, it varies from product to product or OEM to OEM. We pay less for some, and we pay more for some. 

Microsoft has a lot of CSPs, indirect partners, and direct partners to deal with customers. There is so much difference in the price, which is something we are a little confused about. For Defender, they have Endpoint Plan 1 and Endpoint Plan 2, but I don't know on what basis they have classified Endpoint Plan 1 and Plan 2, but it has given me enough pain to pick and design Endpoint Plan 1 or Endpoint Plan 2 for my organization. In fact, we are still struggling with it. Too many SKUs are confusing. There should not be too many SKUs, and they shouldn't charge for every new feature.

We evaluated Okta products and QRadar.

To a security colleague who says it's better to go with a best-of-breed strategy rather than a single vendor’s security suite, I would say that a single vendor security suite is always better. It's simple. It saves the time to detect and respond and administer.

This product is best if you have mostly Microsoft solutions in your ecosystem. If more than 20% of your solutions are third-party solutions, you can also look at and compare other products.

Sentinel enables us to investigate threats from one place, but when it comes to response, we have to put a lot of effort into it because Microsoft is not giving anything ready-made on the SOAR side. We have to put a lot of effort into orchestration and automation. The SIEM of it in terms of the collection of security events and information is wonderful, but when it comes to the SOAR capabilities, there is nothing in-built. They are just the analytical rules for the detection purpose, not for the response. The response is something we have to sit and design. So, the defending capabilities of Defender are good. It has some intelligence, but on the response side, Sentinel is blank. We have to start from scratch. It's a circle, and we have to keep on evolving. When comparing the cost, I am not that exposed to other products' costs, but as per my understanding, the cost of Sentinel is a little bit on the higher side because Microsoft generally charges on a log ingestion basis. It also depends on the amount of log data we are ingesting in Sentinel.

Its threat intelligence hasn't helped to prepare us for potential threats before they hit and to take proactive steps because it depends on the type of attack, the type of payload exploits, and other things. However, as per my previous report, in the last six months especially, there have been quite impressive preventive features, especially related to the process memory injection attacks or attacks coming from emails and links. It's very good for those.

Overall, I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

Almost every use case is about security layers for messaging in Teams and for email. It especially used for phishing filters, spam filters, and composite authentication, as well as Zero-day advanced protection, and for protection within already received emails. Clients are also looking for link protection in Teams and in SharePoint.

The solution has improved the remediation steps we take for each threat. That has been the biggest impact on our organization because we need fewer human resources to deal with a bigger attack surface.

And for routine tasks and alerts on issues of high importance, the automation that the system provides has helped greatly. You can set up customized alerts and categorize trends to see a quick overview. As a result, our security officers can focus on the really important tasks, without noisy alerts. Previously, there was a procedure with a rule that was sending all emails that resulted from the SPF and DMARC controls failing to the phishing mailbox. Our security officers had to review every email and accept or decline. Now, using the automation tools within the Microsoft 365 Defender, they don't need to do that. They can check that the tool is working fine from time to time, but they don't need to do that task on a daily basis. It gives them a lot of time to do more important and creative stuff.

In addition, especially when it comes to Zero-day attacks, the solution's threat intelligence helps prepare you for potential threats before they hit. It identifies, for example, attachments containing something malicious and remediates by blocking additional delivery to other users. For example, an email may only be delivered to three users instead of 100 users. Even if somebody didn't open the email, the Zero-day attack protection has removed the email from their mailbox. This is a great remediation step for protecting that attack surface. Then I can observe how the tool is dealing with the attack instead of trying to figure out how to approach it, what to do, who I should contact, et cetera.

It also saves me time every day. It was taking me really long to review the message headers to identify what happened. It could take an hour or even more if it was a really complicated case. I needed to check the headers, the content, the links, the attachment. Using Microsoft 365 Defender, I can see in Explorer at a glance, or by clicking through one or two tabs, what is happening. It gives me a lot more time to do more interesting work and to close other cases. Instead of an hour, it takes five or 10 minutes now.

It's a lifesaver for me and keeps my clients from being threatened and attacked every day. It's not about the money, it's about the information. Attackers can use information to make money.

I can check the overviews and see trends where somebody wants to use some kind of open gate to gather my information. But the solution does the work on my behalf, so I don't need to observe the environment, traffic, and user behavior. And we don't have to invest a lot of money on repetitive training for users. Training is also good, but I don't need to invest so much money and effort in that process, and that results in savings.

For me, the email protection features are the most useful because I focus on that area.

I also really like the integration with the entire Microsoft 365 service because it's not really common to have a tool that is integrated well with Teams, SharePoint, and Exchange. 

Another feature I like is that inside Explorer I can perform an investigation to check, for example, if any accounts have been breached or accessed by a malicious actor. I can also check the source of emails from which we are receiving something that was not expected by us, such as 

• XML attachments 
• meeting invitations with the malicious links
• JavaScript. 

And I really like that the tool checks attachments within the hash so that we can investigate who received the malicious file and where.

There is also one dashboard that shows us the status of many controls at once and the details I can get. Sometimes I'm on a call with somebody from the security team who is asking why we received something or how we can better protect our environment. I can even show them the analysis of a particular Excel file and a macro inside that file. That is something I really like. It gives me a lot of information and I can respond very quickly to a particular case.

It gives a great overview of many areas, such as files, emails, chats, and links. Even with the apps, it gives you a great overview. In one place you can see where you should look into things more deeply and get knowledge of the details, instead of browsing the details and looking for something that might be of interest.

And, of course, it helps prioritize threats across the enterprise. The solution identifies threats and categorizes them. I can assess which category is more important for me and react accordingly. This categorization is really important because it gives something like an SLA for each case. You always have limited resources to deal with cases. For example, in one of the companies which I support, over half of the email traffic is filtered by Microsoft 365 Defender's tools as malicious traffic, amounting to about 5,000 emails a day. I can use the tool to see an overall view of the threats, instead of just going through each one, one by one. It gives a great overview and the ability to see trends for a day or a month and I can adjust my focus according to the trends.

With Defender on end-user devices, we have the ability to monitor them without the need to have them connected to the same network. People are working from home and sometimes they are working on their own devices. We can use conditional access policies to ask them to provide the minimum security standards. That gives us a lot of peace of mind when using Microsoft Defender. We can create rules that look for users who are uploading malicious content to Teams, SharePoint, Android, et cetera.

There should be better information for experts on features in the solution. What I see when reading about features in Microsoft 365 Defender is that it is always general information.

If Microsoft could go deeper into details for the experts about how to use the tools, usage of it would be more familiar and it would be easier to use. Right now, I need to spend a lot of time using Defender to check the possibilities and how to connect them together to see things better. If I could read a more detailed article about it and see some use cases and how some threats are remediated, that would be great. Maybe I'm not looking deep enough or maybe there is some room for them to improve in this area.

And I would really like to see new features.

I'm a Microsoft 365 consultant and have been using Microsoft 365 Defender for about three or four years.

It is really stable.

Sometimes, when there is a problem with the Microsoft infrastructure, for example, in India, then it can be hard because it's not just that somebody may have a problem. It's not about only one business unit but all of Europe. But it's not that problematic for us because usually this kind of situation is very limited and the fix is delivered really quickly.

It is a scalable solution. I haven't had any problems with the scalability of Defender.

We have the solution deployed in 38 countries. People are connected to their local networks and they use the updates from Intune and SCCM.

I haven't had any situation in which I had to ask for support for Defender. 

But for Microsoft 365, overall, when we contact the exact, dedicated team, it's really good. But before that, when a ticket goes through the first and second lines of support, sometimes it's too repetitive. The first line asks the same things as the second line. I know that it's required because Microsoft is a huge company and it has a lot of customers, so some kind of triage is needed. But when an issue is well-known and there is already a solution or a workaround, the sharing of this knowledge should be better.

Neutral

I used regular filters on the email server, running on Linux, with some type of anti-exploit solution that checked for threats inside the files. I filtered the DMARC and SPF with regular controls. That was a nightmare and I'm really happy to now use Microsoft 365 Defender.

I don't deal much with the pricing aspect, but the companies I am supporting use an E5 license for Microsoft 365 because they want to include all the features and it's cheaper for them to use E5 than SE3.

Maybe the solution should be cheaper because I have heard that the licensing is pretty expensive. I can imagine why: The knowledge is expensive and the tests and infrastructure are expensive as well.

From time to time there is maintenance in reviewing the rules so that we can focus on how to use it better. But that's not "maintenance" in the standard meaning that you need to check if the processes are working properly. For example, our security department uses phishing attack simulations to check if users are aware of how the tool behaves when we receive a phishing attack and what actions are taken to remediate that attack.

When trying to decide between a best-of-breed strategy versus a single vendor for security, it depends on the approach, resources, and of course, money. You can have a single vendor and extensively use the solution and really invest time and effort into better understanding how it works. Or you can buy a few solutions but understand each of them less, because it's not possible to have deep knowledge of how every solution works. For me, it's better to use only Microsoft 365 Defender instead of having additional security providers. I can then go deeper into the details and ask the vendor to implement a feature that is useful, and that probably will not only be useful for me. We can build it together instead of blaming each about who should do better work.

My advice is to go deeper into the details to understand how remediation is utilized inside the solution. Notice that Microsoft 365 Defender is using data collected from every tenant that is using the solution, not only mine. If a company's controls have been attacked, the tool can already protect me because I'm not on the first line of fire. It's great to understand this fact and understand the idea behind it and what the benefits are.

I've mainly used the EDR component within 365 Defender, which is Microsoft Defender for Endpoint. It does a good job of bringing the whole attack story together, so you can see email activity, endpoint activity, cloud app activity, and some sort of sign-in activity as well relating to Azure AD, but I've mainly dealt with it from the EDR aspect.

It definitely improved visibility when I dealt with this solution, but the main benefit is the advanced hunting because it allows you to uncover threats that you didn't realize were there, or they weren't alerted because you were looking for specific behavior. The custom detection and linking to that is something quite cool because if you know there's a behavior, you want to keep an eye out for it. For example, it might be linked to a recent threat, so you can set up that detection query, and as soon as it finds a result, it will flag an alert. That has definitely helped to be more proactive and a bit more ahead of the curve with attacks. So, it improves visibility and also helps with being proactive.

It helps to prioritize threats across the enterprise. It does assign severity to a threat, but it also gives you an overview at a glance. If you know that your organization is susceptible to certain major threats, those are the ones you probably want to pick up on. With the severity and alerts, it gives you an idea of which is the most pressing incident. If you've got one with just one alert, that's a medium, but if you've got one with five highs. You're probably going to focus on the high one. That helps to prioritize.

It helps automate routine tasks and the finding of high-value alerts to a degree. You can have certain actions where if an event starts on the endpoint, it automatically isolates that. If it occurs, for example, on the email, then you can automatically purge it. It helps with the routine tasks that people would have to manually do in the portal. With automation, it takes care of it automatically if an alert fires. It improves efficiency because, after hours, there might be no one there available to isolate a machine. This way, as soon as the alert fires, that machine is isolated, and the next morning or the next working day, an analyst can go in and see that this alert fired and the endpoint has been isolated. That definitely helps from a coverage perspective when people are unavailable because those actions occur without anyone being present.

It has absolutely helped eliminate having to look at multiple dashboards and have one XDR dashboard. I've got three years of experience. At the start, we had all the individual portals for cloud app security, endpoints, Office, etc. The whole point of 365 is to unify, and they've done a good job. The different components are broken out into sections on the left-hand side, and you can very easily click through them and navigate them. It eliminates the need for multiple tabs and dashboards. It has definitely helped with what they were aiming for, which is to have a single pane of glass view.

It has saved us time by not having multiple dashboards. We don't need to open multiple portals and sign in to them. It definitely saves time there and also in understanding the true story of an attack. It has definitely helped in terms of efficiency. It's hard to quantify the time savings because I'm not using it now, but from what I remember, it saved at least 20% to 25% time just because it does a good job of giving you the information. You can glance at the key information that you need, and then it gives some details, and then you go to other places externally to investigate further.

The threat analytics give you a report on what Microsoft has seen in the world. What I like about those is that they will show you if that's actively impacting your environment at the moment or likely to. For example, if there are vulnerabilities that are being exposed, it tells you whether you're vulnerable or not, so you can protect against them before they are here. One thing I do like is that they also give you advanced hunting queries, so you can look for the behavior associated with those threats and make sure that you've got your coverage in place. I wouldn't necessarily call it threat intelligence. It's more of threat analytics and reporting that they provide.

I'm not aware of whether it saved any money in any of my previous roles, but a lot of organizations have the E5 security license, and they don't realize it. They have third-party vendors doing their email security, endpoint security, and so on, but holistically, Microsoft's E5 license gives you all of those capabilities, and it would also be cheaper than paying multiple vendors.

It decreases your time to detect and time to respond. It does a good job. It has the auto investigation ability so it can automatically detect threats. When you build custom detections, you can have automated response actions. Those two together help you with the mean time to remediate and the mean time to resolve. The information at a glance easily lets you see if it's a false positive or something that you know in your environment, and it's gonna be non-malicious. You can glance over and dismiss those alerts, and you could potentially be setting up suppression so that you don't get notified about them in the future. All in all, it helps you to improve your remediation. The time reduction depends on the scenario. Sometimes, you can instantly see false positives that would decrease your time by 85%. On the whole, there is about 35% to 40% time savings because of the way it correlates with the signals and gives you quick ways to remediate them.

For me, the advanced hunting capabilities have been really great. It allowed querying the dataset with their own language, which is KQL or Kusto Query Language. That has allowed me to get much more insight into the events that have occurred. The whole power of 365 Defender is that you can get the whole story. It allows you to query an email-based activity and then correlate it with an endpoint-based activity. The advanced hunting capabilities have definitely been one of my favorite features.

The way the incidents are put together is also good. It can intelligently correlate activities from email to endpoint, and then you can visually see it in the timeline view or graph view. It does a good job of presenting that incident to you, and it's easy to navigate between it and then pivot to some actions as well.

For some scenarios, it provides good visibility into threats, and for some scenarios, it doesn't. For example, sometimes the URLs within the emails have destinations, and you do get a screenshot and all further details, but it's not always the case. It would be good if they did a better job of enabling that for all the emails that they identified as malicious. When you get an email threat, you can go into the email and see more details, but the URL destination feature doesn't always show you a screenshot of the URL in that email. It also doesn't always give you the characteristics relating to that URL. It would be quite good if the information is complete where it says that we identified this URL, and this is what it looks like. There should be some threat intel about it. It should give you more details.

One other limitation is with cloud-based events. Sometimes, you don't get enough details in the alert. You have to go to other portals to then complete the story or do your own research, ask the user, etc. 

The other one is that with Defender for Endpoint, the attack story is quite good in terms of queries and things like that, but sometimes, multiple events for the same thing are captured, and it's not summarized in a good way. You have to open each entry to see what that partial syntax is. It'll be good if it said that this specific partial syntax was seen fifteen times, and maybe it's something to pay attention to. They could also do some sort of pattern matching. There could be some sort of pattern matching where it says that this is the attack trying to do some enumeration or reconnaissance activities. 

I've been using it for over three years.

There are some times when it does have downtime or service outages. They do a good job of updating the service status page to let you know about that, but there have also been misclassifications, for example, for Chrome updates, generating malicious alerts and things like that. On the whole, it's quite stable.

There are sometimes when it can freeze up or not present the data that you want. It gives you data unavailable or other errors, but, usually, these are quite quickly resolved. Sometimes, it's just to do with a particular instance, but sometimes, there can be wider outages. You just have to pay attention to the service status page or raise a support case and then be notified when that's resolved. On the whole, it's fairly stable.

Because it's built on the cloud and for the cloud, it does scale quite well. However, one area where it can be a challenge is when you use the Kusto Query Language for event hunting. Sometimes, if you do quite a generic search across, for example, thirty days of data, it gives you processing errors and limitations. I guess Microsoft does that for two reasons. One, to keep the cost down on their side, and two, from a performance standpoint. That is a bit of a limitation of scaling because if you want to do generic sessions across thirty days, you're not able to, but the idea is that you should be able to filter and granularly restrict conditions to get exactly the events you want. However, it would be nice if you were able to search more widely and if the solution could scale to support that, whereas, currently, it doesn't seem to, but that's not the use case they might have had in mind.

It depends. With some clients, we've had the fast-track option, whereas, with some clients, we just had to raise support cases. Usually, when you raise support cases, you're not going through an SME, so there is a bit of basic troubleshooting and things like that. With the fast-track option, you directly get through to someone who understands security, and you can explain the issue. They understand the issue, and you can get a much quicker response. So, the fast-track option is the one where I've had better success. The normal support can sometimes be a bit drawn. There could be a lot of back and forth about not relevant things just because they're not security trained, so they're trying to understand and then help you. 

It has been a mixed experience. Overall, I would rate them a seven out of ten because there have been some gaps, and there have been some successes, especially through the fast-track program.

Neutral

We didn't have anything that was overarching and correlated all the different signals. We had different products. We had a different product for email security or a different product for the endpoint. I might be wrong here, but I don't think there's another tool that brings those aspects together as well as 365 Defender does.

From what I went through in various roles, it was mostly in the cloud. Defender for Endpoint is a cloud-based solution. In fact, most Defender solutions are now based on the cloud. The only exception is if you've got Defender for Identity. For one of our engagements, I did deal with that, so it was a mixture. Apart from Defender for Identity, all the other solutions have been on the cloud.

In one of my roles prior to my current one, I was doing onboarding for a client with Defender for Endpoint. I was getting them onto it and migrating from McAfee. I was involved in the setup, coordinating the groups and the roles, and things like that. In all the other roles, the tool was already in place. It was just about maturing it and getting hands-on.

The setup was quite complex. Microsoft Docs guide you, but there were a few gaps that I had to fill in. One example is onboarding with group policy. Microsoft does lay all the steps on the docs page, but it doesn't give you screenshots. It doesn't give you things to look out for. It doesn't give you logs that would correlate to those events and things like that. I had to put things together using external sources, such as YouTube or just Google search. On the whole, it was very okay to follow, but it just didn't have that depth. What I produced for that client was a step-by-step coding guide with screenshots that they could give to the infrastructure team to get them on board. We had a good success rate that way, whereas if I had just sent them the Microsoft Docs link, I'm sure they would have had a few more questions.

That was the only use case I had experienced initial-setup-wise. The onboarding for group policy took maybe a month or two just because we had quite a big setup. We had different groups to roll it out to. We rolled it out to pilot devices, then 10 or 20 devices, then 100, and so on. It took about a month or two.

In terms of maintenance, from the service side, you rely on Microsoft to make sure it's available, secure, and things like that. Sometimes, you get downtime, and sometimes, you get bugs. For example, last year, a Chrome update was misclassified as malicious, which caused all the alerts. You then have to raise support cases to find out what happened. Eventually, Microsoft releases a fix, so in terms of maintenance, it's more on them. The only thing from your side is making sure, for example, the roles are still relevant. If someone who has access leaves, you need to make sure that their role is revoked. You need to make sure that you've got your role set up for the least privilege and things like that on an ongoing basis because there may be certain new features in the portal that have a corresponding role assignment. If you don't have that enabled or configured, then you're not going to get that benefit. That's the only thing needed from the maintenance perspective. You just need to make sure your roles are regularly reviewed and optimized when needed.

All I can say again is the E5 gives you all the capabilities that it offers. It also gives Office 365 and one terabyte of storage. All in all, the E5 license model makes sense. There are some people who say it's quite costly, but rather than paying different vendors, it makes sense to go all in with Microsoft if you've got that licensing. From that perspective, it's cost-effective, but I can't comment much on that.

To a security colleague who says it’s better to go with a best-of-breed strategy rather than a single vendor’s security suite, I would say that I'm slightly biased because I'm such a fan of the Microsoft suite. Some people do say that you shouldn't put eggs into one basket, and you're giving a lot of control to Microsoft and things like that. I would advise evaluating based on your needs. For example, for your endpoints, you might see much better value in CrowdStrike, Tanium, or something like that as compared to Defender for Endpoint.

You can do PoCs. Microsoft makes it quite easy. You can have the trials and things like that. You can play around and see which one supports your environment. I wouldn't say Microsoft is necessarily the option for all organizations, but I do think it's a very compelling offer. They're constantly evolving the product. They pay a lot of attention to consumer feedback. They've enterprise feedback as well to improve the product. I wouldn't completely rule out either option. If you've got one that's tried and tested for your enterprise, and that's a third party, you can see what Microsoft can offer. If it just doesn't match up, then stick to what you have even if it costs more because all in all, you may have tried and tested processes. You may have an investment in that product, and it may just have capabilities that the Microsoft one doesn't have. I would also encourage you to add a feature request for the Microsoft one, and then they'll be more on the equal side.

I would advise doing a PoC. If you are using Carbon Black, CrowdStrike, or Titanium, evaluate it. Have a sample host or spin up some VMs or onboard them to Defender. Do some simulations and do some attacks that you think are likely going to be. See how the logs look, see the investigation processes, and do a gap analysis with your current solution. If it brings you any value, then potentially look to deploy it further. Don't just go all in without understanding what it does. If you don't have any security solution right now, and you are a small business or a local business, it's worth doing the trial and seeing what value you get from the trial because, in that situation, you don't have anything to compare to. You are an easy customer to onboard from Microsoft's perspective because you wouldn't be that complex. So, do a trial and then go from there.

I would rate it an eight out of ten overall. I do really like the product. I do like the fact that it combines all the alerts into one. I remember when I was a security analyst back in 2019, I had to open multiple tabs and close alerts in one portal and then the other portal. They've done a good job of bi-directional syncing of alerts. If you're closing in 365 Defender, it'll close in the MCAS portal or cloud apps. Overall, the biggest thing for me was just advanced hunting capability because previously, it wasn't possible to get those cloud app events or Defender for Office events to do hunting. Endpoint was the first one to have that hunting capability, and I'm glad that they've extended that to the other stacks. So, overall, I would give it an eight, and I'm really impressed.

I'm using the solution for security.

Previously, we weren't using anything and now we can configure privileged access and rules. We now operate in a more secure environment. 

It's great that it's a cloud solution. You don't need to worry about physical hardware.

You can configure the product very easily. It's simple to implement and easy to run.

The XDR platform provides unified identity and access management.

We only use it to cover Microsoft products; it works really well. 

365 Defender stops lateral movement of advanced attacks, like ransomware or business email compromise. It protects us from spam and ransomware. 

So far, we haven't had any attacks. It also allows us to adapt to evolving threats. 

We use the solution's multi-tenant management capabilities. It's easy to access and helps with investigating and responding to threats across tenants. 

With Microsoft, we get multiple services under one platform.

With Defender, we've been able to reduce costs. We've likely saved around 25% in costs so far. We've also been able to save time - around 10% to 20%.

You can customize the product based on your requirements - and everything is available under one platform.

The solution can improve the rules and privileges it offers. They need to be more transparent with changes. Often, changes come too rapidly.

I've been using the solution for seven months. 

The solution is a stable product. I'd rate it nine out of ten.

It's scalable. I'd rate the ability to scale nine out of ten. You can scale according to your needs. 

Support is very good. 

Positive

I also use SentinelOne and Splunk. Microsoft Defender is easy to implement and is user-friendly. Splunk, however, is not user-friendly.

The deployment is easy.

We have 20 to 30 people working on the solution. 

There isn't really any maintenance needed. 

The pricing is reasonable. It's cheaper than other options. 

I'm a Microsoft customer. 

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten. 

I would recommend the solution to others.