Microsoft Defender XDR Reviews

Defender XDR is a solution that protects your enterprise systems and devices.

Defender XDR has helped a lot in terms of capturing all kinds of activities happening on the endpoints where it is. If you want to know what happened at a point in time, you can go to the history and search everything. This helps you investigate exactly what happened if you have a security breach. It doesn't take much time, but I don't have anything to compare it to because Defender is the only XDR we've used. 

Defender XDR has a feature called the timeline that lets you track all activities. It helps a lot with investigations. Microsoft has many identity management features and products that complement each other.

It covers the weaknesses and vulnerabilities of non-Microsoft solutions, but it will not help you to do the remediation. You need another third-party tool to do the remediation. 

Defender protects against advanced attacks like ransomware or email phishing. The protection Defender provides is excellent. It's a great product for preventing attacks and reducing risks for organizations. 

There are a few technical issues with Defender XDR that can be improved. Sometimes, the endpoint devices are not reporting properly to the Defender 365 portal. When you're getting all the information from the Microsoft portal, the devices are sometimes not in sync. We have hundreds of endpoint devices, some needing to be onboarded again. 

I have used Defender XDR for three years.

I rate Microsoft support nine out of ten. It's excellent. 

Positive

We did a POC for a McAfee product. There weren't many differences, but Microsoft Defender was included with our E5 license. The major difference is that we saved money by not purchasing another product. 

Defender XDR is a cloud-based solution. You can access it and see all the information you need inside the Microsoft portal. 

Defender XDR is not expensive. It's average compared to other products. 

I can get Defender bundled with the E5 package. We had considered replacing it, but after evaluating some competing products, we decided there was no significant difference between the third-party products and Defender. 

I rate Microsoft Defender XDR eight out of ten. I think there is room for improvement in terms of its coverage of non-Microsoft technologies. 

We use Microsoft Defender XDR for antivirus, threat intelligence, and email blocking.

Microsoft Defender's XDR platform provides unified identity and access management. It has improved significantly, although other products remain slightly ahead. I would rate it among the top four or five XDR platforms I've used, and Microsoft is continuously enhancing its capabilities. Overall, it's a fairly good solution.

Consolidating identity and access management under one umbrella within Defender 365 offers significant advantages. This unified approach simplifies control and visibility, eliminating the need to navigate through different screens from multiple vendors. With everything centralized, we gain a comprehensive overview of all IAM activities and can easily access specific details through subcategories. The main page provides a clear starting point, highlighting key information and granting quick access to deeper levels of detail when needed.

While Microsoft Defender can effectively impede the lateral movement of advanced ransomware, it cannot guarantee complete protection. No system is perfect, and vulnerabilities will always exist.

Defender's ability to stop attacks includes its adaptability to evolving threats. Microsoft has been steadily improving Defender over the past few years, and they continue to do so. Several updates in recent months have changed Defender's functionality, making it more effective. While technology advances and tools like Defender improve, the skills of hackers and their tools also evolve. This necessitates continuous improvement to keep pace.

Adaptability to evolving threats is crucial. A static system is vulnerable to attack. Its unchanging vulnerabilities can be readily identified and exploited, allowing unauthorized access and manipulation. Constant improvement is necessary to maintain security.

While we have reduced our reliance on other products, we haven't eliminated them at this time. We are actively reducing our use of other products as we progress. Once we have completed the configuration and setup process for Defender XDR, we can then fully transition to using it as our primary product.

Defender XDR has saved our security team approximately two hours per day. Automation is improving steadily, allowing us to automate audit file processing and scheduling. This provides us with continuous insight into our environment. The main page offers a high-level overview of current activity, enabling us to quickly identify any anomalies. Our security team can then address these anomalies promptly.

The threat intelligence is excellent. Email collaboration is very good. Device protection is useful. Overall, 90 percent of Microsoft Defender XDR is used weekly, primarily for email collaboration.

Advanced attacks could use an improvement.

I have been using Microsoft Defender XDR for almost four years.

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

Microsoft Defender XDR is scalable and we are planning to increase the usage.

The Microsoft technical support I used in the past was quite good. They were typically responsive and efficient, providing solutions quickly. However, I haven't needed their assistance in the last year, so I can't offer an updated assessment.

Our past experience includes Sophos, Check Point, and ESET. We briefly utilized SentinelOne as well, but ultimately opted for Microsoft Defender XDR. We had Defender included in our purchases but it wasn't being utilized fully until I fine-tuned and set it up to work more efficiently.

I would rate Microsoft Defender XDR an eight out of ten.

We require three people for maintenance.

We have Microsoft Defender XDR deployed across multiple locations, roles, and teams.

Before implementing Microsoft Defender XDR, ensure that all the features will be utilized otherwise it is more cost-effective to go with a smaller package that includes only the features needed by the organization.

We use 365 Defender with Outlook, Teams, and SharePoint. Our organization extensively uses these products as do the clients we serve. Our goal is to secure those email, SharePoint, and Teams environments.

Our Microsoft security solution has helped eliminate having to look at multiple dashboards. For a wholesale view over the entire infrastructure, Sentinel is the place to go. But M365 Defender alone only covers 30 to 40 percent of the infrastructure.

We have saved a lot of time compared to having to do tasks with other tools. With Microsoft, it's easier for us to manage and handle them. It saves us about 40 percent of the time it would have taken us. That includes the automating of detection and response.

The most valuable feature is the DLP because that's where we can have an added data protection layer and extend it not just to emails but to the documents that users are working on. We can make sure that sensitive data is tagged and flagged if unauthorized parties are using it.

The information that the solution provides is pretty clear because I have an overall picture from the compliance dashboard, which is now called the Azure Purview Compliance dashboard or manager. It has all the information, including the DLP information, sensitive data being shared, threat protection, and attacks. All of that is on a single dashboard where I see what the state of security is.

We use the entire suite of Purview features, including Sentinel, Defender for Cloud Apps, Defender for Endpoint, and even new features like Microsoft Defender for DevOps. Sentinel is the out-of-the-box SIEM tool that should definitely be used for more visibility on the M365 side. Of course, we have the compliance dashboard, but Sentinel acts as the single point of contact for visibility into all devices. That way we can see, if there are any threats or vulnerabilities, what the dependent resources are. Sentinel helps give us that bigger picture. We also use Defender for Identity and Defender for Cloud, with different features for the different aspects within the cloud, such as various servers and DNS, et cetera.

With its different connectors, Sentinel enables us to collect data from our entire ecosystem. All the logs are injected into a workspace in Sentinel where Sentinel can analyze them. If we unlock the Microsoft threat intelligence program, which is part of Sentinel, we can investigate threats and respond holistically from one.

Integrating these products is pretty simple. Microsoft Sentinel integrates really fast. Obviously, it's from the same stack so it's easy for us to integrate with just the click of a button. The connectors then help us integrate these services.

If we have all these products in use, we can achieve a 90 to 95 percent security maturity model, without requiring any other vendors' solutions to protect resources.

There are two areas where I feel there is no Microsoft solution. One is vulnerability management, where Microsoft is partnered with Qualys. The other is a penetration testing tool on the preventive side. That would be more for an ad hoc request and not for everyday functions. Apart from these, all the other areas can be covered with Microsoft solutions.

There is definitely scope for improvement in the automation area. Because the solution is a SaaS platform, we don't have the overall ability to automate stuff. By integrating Microsoft 365 Defender with Sentinel, we can definitely automate things. We can leverage playbooks, and execute Terraform scripts. But directly automating tasks in the 365 Defender is something we have to do with PowerShell, which is then connected to Exchange Online. There is no direct way to go ahead because it's a SaaS platform. But if you integrate it with Sentinel, where all the alerts are created and action needs to be taken, it is pretty comfortable for automation.

Also, I would like to see it be a lot less policy driven. On the M365 side, there are a lot of policies that we need to enable to achieve a certain task. There is no direct solution; rather, there are a lot of workarounds.

I understand that Microsoft is dealing with a lot of tools at once and having a direct solution is not viable. But I would hope that Microsoft can improve that side of it.

I have been using Microsoft 365 Defender for more than five years.

It's a pretty stable solution and in terms of the SLAs it is pretty good. When it comes to applying policies and the standard documentation that Microsoft provides, everything works according to that. I would rate the stability a nine out of 10.

It surely is a scalable solution, being a service that Microsoft offers.

The technical support is not great. I have been working with these Microsoft products for quite some time, and I have raised issues and contacted them. Every support case I have raised has needed escalation. From my experience, the first-line support team doesn't have anything other than out-of-the-box solutions. Everything with that level of support is pretty standard, SOP-driven, and documentation driven. That is nice, but only to a certain point. When we are talking about the SOP that a level-one engineer does, that's when the support is very poor.

Negative

We previously had on-prem solutions. For Exchange and for endpoints, we used to have McAfee, but that was more than five years ago. Previously, Defender for M365 used to be ATP, Advanced Threat Protection, and that's when we started using it.

Previously, we had many things on-prem, such as Exchange Servers, SharePoint, and database servers. But as Microsoft drove toward cloud-native solutions and moved Exchange, SharePoint, and Dynamics 365 online, moving to M365 was a part of the move.

There is no straightforward solution with Microsoft. There are definitely a few restrictions and limitations. We should go ahead and call that out and there were definitely challenges.

The major challenge was moving the mailboxes from on-prem Exchange to Exchange Online. That was not straightforward because the goal was not to lose any emails, and that certain format-related issues be taken care of.

We followed a waterfall method with a proper plan of action. We performed a PoC first, to make sure that the test users were migrated successfully. Once that was done, we did a proper plan in terms of department hierarchy for migrating our departments and detailed a plan of action in case there were any failures. We then did a proper pilot where we chose about 25 mailboxes for migration, and then we went ahead and migrated everyone. 

One of the reasons it took six months was there were only five of us involved.

Because it is a SaaS service, Microsoft promises three nines of uptime. There is no maintenance on our side.

We are seeing a return on investment compared to the same types of solutions that we used to have five years ago. We would have spent more than what we are spending right now. It's not just about the licensing, it's also about the team that manages it and the operations side of it. But compared to how things were, the return on investment has been positive.

I doubt that we are saving money with this solution because all the features are only available with a Microsoft 365 E5 license, which is the highest. And that doesn't come cheap because it's on a per-user basis. If there are 1,000 users, you are investing a lot.

The pricing model of Sentinel is entirely different from any other standalone SIEM tool. Other tools work on a licensing model with a fixed price based on the different modules that are enabled. Sentinel is not a fixed price. It depends on how much data is injected into it. With Microsoft, if there are 100 GB per month, it's about $2.30 per GB, or around $2,000 on a monthly basis. Compared to a fixed licensing cost, where organizations know that there is a certain budget they need to put aside for the license, on the Microsoft side, we really can't anticipate the cost.

The pricing of Microsoft 365 Defender is definitely on the costly side, but with the features and services that Microsoft provides, such as the seamless integration of all the Defender tools, while the price is on the higher side, there is no alternative.

My advice would be to try out Microsoft and compare it with other vendors. If your vision for Microsoft includes needing customizations and a lot of use cases, I don't think Microsoft M365 would support that. Where Microsoft shines is the seamless integration and dealing with less configuration management. But at the same time, organizations are adopting other solutions, such as Linux, and they want customization and that is not possible on the Microsoft side.

Microsoft 365 Defender helps prioritize threats to the enterprise, but not alone. Rather, it is through combining it with other Defender products like Defender for Cloud Apps and Defender for Endpoint. All these, in combination, can provide really good security, visibility, and threat protection against any vulnerabilities or threats. But with just M365, our hands are tied with the scope, which is limited to emails, Teams, and SharePoint.

We can't 100 percent automate things, but we can automate about 80 percent of our tasks. It has made life easier. But, at the same time, if a scenario is not something that repeats, performing an activity automatically would reduce the time spent, but not by that much. We have automated a few areas for things that occur on a regular basis, but at the same time, we come across situations now and again that we think about automating, but we also think about the effort that we would have to put into doing so. Will it be a recurring solution or not?

There are also some advancements that Microsoft has launched to automate threat surface reduction, some features that we could try to help us analyze steps to be taken before an attack happens, but nothing that I have tried yet.

Hypothetically, when looking at whether a single vendor or a best-of-breed strategy is best, being an architect the last couple of years, what I've seen is that having a multi-vendor system is definitely a good approach rather than going with a single vendor solution. Even though Microsoft has all these tools, we can't achieve 100 percent security. There are the areas for improvement that I mentioned, where Microsoft doesn't have a single solution, like pen testing and vulnerability management. My suggestion is always to go with a multi-vendor solution. Microsoft might reach a level where, at a certain point, they will have 100 percent coverage, but my approach would still be multi-vendor.

Our primary use case for Microsoft Defender XDR is to serve as our email security solution, offering file protection, scanning, alerts, and incident management. It is a part of every Microsoft 365 deployment we do.

The integration of Microsoft products simplifies management, reporting, and investigations. It offers capabilities that other solutions don't offer.

The feature I find most valuable is Defender for Endpoint. It's because endpoint management is my primary focus, and this feature integrates well with my other skills.

The licensing process needs improvement and clarification, as it is currently difficult to understand which features are licensed to which users.

I've been using Microsoft Defender XDR for about ten years since it was known as Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection.

I have no concerns about the stability of Microsoft Defender XDR.

We are only a small organization, and our operations don't even challenge Microsoft Defender XDR's capabilities.

The customer service and support have been good. Whenever it is needed, they are fast to respond.

Positive

We used various solutions over the years, but since then, we've been using the Defender variants.

The initial deployment was straightforward.

We implemented Microsoft Defender XDR ourselves in-house.

There are no issues with pricing, but sometimes, the clarity in licensing is a concern. I still need to verify what's included with each license occasionally.

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

We use Microsoft Defender XDR for our Microsoft 365 email service.

It helps protect us against ransomware. We were a victim of a malware attack in 2018 before implementation.

Email protection is the most valuable feature of Microsoft Defender XDR.

The price has room for improvement. The price should be adjustable by region.

I have been using Microsoft Defender XDR for almost 5 years.

Microsoft Defender XDR is stable.

Microsoft Defender XDR is scalable.

The technical support is good.

Positive

Microsoft Defender XDR is priced high.

I would rate Microsoft Defender XDR 8 out of 10.

No maintenance is required from our end because it updates with the OS.

We typically use Defender's default settings and are implementing MITRE ATT&CK use cases on Microsoft Defender this year. We do manual threat hunting and check to see if there is a trending attack. We have the latest IOCs and sweep across the organization looking for them. 

When implementing Defender, we usually use its advanced hunting features to determine particular techniques used across the whole environment. We use multiple Microsoft security products, including Defender for Endpoint, Defender for Cloud Apps, Sentinel, email and collaboration, data loss prevention, and Microsoft Purview.

Defender XDR enables us to prioritize threats according to the algorithm or our custom rules. We can prioritize threats and have the option to automate the response. For instance, let's say we are facing a sticky key hijack. When you press shift several times at the login screen, you can open the command prompt of that particular host. That is a vulnerability of Microsoft Windows. When this happens, we can automate a priority alert and also isolate that endpoint from the network immediately. 

The solution reduces our remediation time by enabling our security analyst to respond quickly, make some automations, and edit the rules to detect any potential threats. The extent to which the solution reduces the remediation time depends on the analyst's skill. If the security analyst is good, Defender XDR will help them.

XDR saves money if you are using Microsoft products. XDR is more inclined toward Active Directory, a Microsoft product. No other XDR can integrate with Active Directory so seamlessly and use it to its fullest potential. Microsoft also offers multiple sub-products. If we purchased third-party solutions for email, endpoint, XDR, cloud applications, etc., and managed them on a single platform, it would be more expensive than Microsoft solutions. When we do a cost-benefit analysis, Microsoft Defender XDR offers a better value. 

I like Defender XDR's automation capabilities. XDR isn't automated by default, but you can automate it to respond. If an attack is performed anywhere within the organization, you can isolate that instance from the network. This is what I can figure out for it. When integrated with Sentinel, you can set up playbooks to automate all the alerts gathered on Sentinel from different Microsoft solutions. Sentinel has a wider range of capabilities than XDR. 

Defender XDR has good threat visibility, but it could be better in some areas, like when we are hunting for a specific host. For example, let's say we are investigating email services, and want to trace an email account to its host PCs and investigate the emails in its inbox. We want more visibility into the email side of investigations. It would be better if these features could be more integrated into the console like you could have a tab for Cloud Apps to see the cloud applications a user had communicated with. 

Microsoft's threat analytics are somewhat helpful for anything related to Microsoft products. For instance, it can update us about any single sign-on vulnerabilities or something along those lines. However, Microsoft was very late in terms of the recent LockBit attacks. LockBit compromised some significant organizations, and Microsoft didn't provide the report fast enough. It was reported on my normal cybersecurity information websites first. The site analytics are a bit weak when it comes to non-Microsoft clouds.

Defender XDR is capable of providing intelligence reports about threats specific to Microsoft components, but if we are implementing a Microsoft solution across an organization, many other products and side factors must be considered. I feel like Microsoft falls behind some other vendors in threat intelligence.

When we do investigations, it would be better if Microsoft could populate the host dashboard more. When we open any host for investigation, we want the entire timeline of what is happening on the host, including all the users logging in, their hardware, Windows version, etc. 

I have used Defender XDR for nearly 2 years. 

We haven't faced issues with stability. XDR doesn't lag during investigations. We've seen a few minor bugs in the XDR console but not often. There have been no major issues that disrupted our operation. 

Defender XDR has good scalability. If you want more endpoint visibility, you don't need to scale your organization much. You only need to integrate that particular endpoint by running a script and deploying an agent to it. 

I haven't contacted Microsoft support about XDR, but my client has. One of the alerts was triggering incorrectly based on a default setting. We asked their team to investigate why the solution was excessively triggering. I just disabled the default rules and made custom policies. Now, everything is working fine.

I previously used CrowdStrike EDR. It's hard to compare the two products because CrowdStrike EDR was focused on endpoint detection, so it cannot investigate emails or have any other XDR capabilities. One is an XDR and the other an EDR. 

We compared Microsoft Defender XDR to Trend Micro's Vision One. Defender's advantage over Vision One is ease of use. Managing and enabling policies is much easier on Microsoft Defender. There's a considerable difference between their default rules. In some cases, alerts will trigger in Defender, but not Vision One. Overall, Microsoft Defender XDR is preferable over Vision One.

I rate Microsoft Defender XDR 7 out of 10. It's a useful product for a professional security analyst who knows how to increase the visibility. You only need to make some front-end changes and put the data on host names into XDR. 

If someone asked me whether a best-of-breed or single-vendor approach is better, I would support mixing different products. Each security vendor has its own intelligence base. By including other vendors, I am gaining visibility into more indicators of compromise. Nevertheless, I would still pick Microsoft Defender XDR and Sentinel together because they are well integrated. All the big companies and banks use Microsoft. Windows is a popular operating system across the world. Defender and Sentinel are better integrated with Microsoft systems. 

One of my largest customers deployed Defender for Endpoint, but they also wanted Defender XDR to get a specific feature. Defender XDR is included in the E5 license, but it's a bit too expensive. Our customer wanted Defender XDR's file integrity monitor tools for compliance. My client is using Defender with Sentinel, but I'm unsure how much they use it. 

My clients like Defender's file integrity monitoring. They're monitoring Windows and Linux system files.

My client would like the solution to be more customizable without using code. You can only build on the default console, but we're not allowed to change it. 

We have a similar tool to Defender's file integrity monitoring. Under the VMware VM properties, there is a change-checking tool, and it will tell us if the extension is in a different location. You can configure checking and do the monitoring. When I log into Defender's file integrity portal, I cannot see that this machine was enabled.  It's the same agent and extension. 

It's confusing because I don't know how to tell the customer they don't need to pay $15 per month because you already can enable the extension in VMware. Under the Defender account, it all seems like it's high code, and we cannot change it. Every customer has requirements for us to customize those things. 

I have used Defender XDR for about a year. 

Defender XDR is an enterprise-scale solution. 

I rate Microsoft support 4 out of 10. 

Neutral

I rate Defender XDR 3 out of 10. I don't think Defender XDR is ready to deploy in its current state. It has too many solutions inside, and they're not fully integrated. 

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.