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Check Point CloudGuard CNAPP vs Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps comparison

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 5, 2025

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Zafran Security
Sponsored
Average Rating
9.6
Reviews Sentiment
8.1
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
Vulnerability Management (27th), Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM) (6th)
Check Point CloudGuard CNAPP
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
71
Ranking in other categories
Vulnerability Management (9th), Cloud and Data Center Security (9th), Container Security (7th), Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) (6th), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (5th), Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPP) (5th), Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) (4th), Compliance Management (6th)
Microsoft Defender for Clou...
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
37
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Access Security Brokers (CASB) (5th), Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) (12th), Microsoft Security Suite (13th)
 

Mindshare comparison

Vulnerability Management
Cloud Access Security Brokers (CASB)
 

Featured Reviews

Israel Cavazos Landini - PeerSpot reviewer
Weekly insights and risk analysis facilitate informed security decisions
I appreciate the weekly insights Zafran provides, which include critical topics for networks and IT security, allowing us to evaluate which insights apply to our environment. The organization score feature is valuable to keep the leadership team updated on how our infrastructure fares security-wise. The applicable risk level versus base risk level feature is beneficial because prior to Zafran, we only used the base risk level, but now understand that risk depends on the asset itself. Zafran is an excellent tool.
Bart Coddens - PeerSpot reviewer
Evolved cloud security with active monitoring but needs interface consistency
The user interface needs work. Sometimes, it is a transition from the old tool to the new CNAPP Two that I currently have, and remnants of the old environment can still be detected. I require consistency in the user interface to ensure everything is streamlined into the same look and feel. More work is needed in fine-tuning the threat data towards your CSPM and activity logs, aligning them with business intelligence, which requires a cohesive console interface. My assessment of CloudGuard CDRs in intrusion detection and threat hunting capabilities is that it still needs some work. All the threat data that comes in, you need to fine tune it a bit.
Jagadeesh Gunasekaran - PeerSpot reviewer
Saves us time, has good visibility, and a single dashboard
The solution is user-friendly and provides great visibility into threats. There are easy options available for specific workflow inspections. We can also get support by going through the Microsoft documentation, which is straightforward. Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps helps us prioritize threats across our enterprise. It covers us from a compliance perspective and protects our organization's data. Data protection is a very important aspect of any new organization, as we need to protect our data from both external attacks and insider threats. Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps helps us monitor for abnormal activity by insiders, which is one of the most important access points for attackers today. Additionally, the different cloud apps that Defender for Cloud Apps supports provide us with much more visibility into potential threats and activities on the internet. We have integrated Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps alerts with Sentinel. The integration is straightforward. We can find the configuration details on Microsoft's official documentation website. If we are familiar with how Microsoft products work, we will be able to follow the instructions clearly. Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps and Sentinel work natively together to deliver coordinated detection and response across our environment. Our integrated Microsoft solutions provide comprehensive threat protection, covering most of the tactics and techniques relevant to the MITRE ATT&CK framework. Sentinel allows us to ingest data from our entire ecosystem. When implementing an SIEM solution, there are always prerequisites such as Active Directory logs, security logs, firewall logs, and DNS logs. These are important logs that need to be ingested into the environment. Sentinel has many third-party connectors available that make integrations straightforward. Microsoft provides the configuration details in the Sentinel platform. It is important to integrate all relevant log sources into the SIEM solution so that we can detect and be alerted to any type of threat factor, whether it is from an internal or external source. Integrating third-party solutions into the platform requires a separate configuration, but Microsoft provides the necessary information. However, we need to have the appropriate permissions to execute these setups. Sentinel provides a centralized dashboard that covers threat management and configuration. It gives us complete insight into what entities are accessing, as well as full details for investigation. We can see how the alerts and threats are relevant to suspicious activities, whether they are related to malicious IP addresses, suspicious ASHAs, or any other indicators of compromise. All of this relevant data can be seen in a single pane. Recently, Microsoft introduced a new investigation experience in a single pane. This means that we can now get a lot of details in a single pane, without having to go there and execute a query. There are a lot of new insights being developed in the Sentinel platform these days. It has software intelligence. They recently introduced Microsoft Defender Threat Intelligence, which covers almost all IOCs. This protects organizational assets from threats and suspicious traffic associated with IOCs. If a match is found, alerts are generated. This is a very interesting feature. Another great feature is automation and logic apps. We can create a number of operations, such as posting in a team's channel if a severe incident occurs or sending an email notification. There are many operations available, so we can automate a lot of tasks. Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps helps us stay compliant. It has predefined mechanisms in place to prevent attacks. For example, if an external user tries to access our SharePoint folders or files, an attack will be blocked. This is why it is important to give appropriate access to guest users. Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps has many features and benefits. It provides a number of policies that can be configured to meet the specific needs of our security team. These policies can be used to customize cloud applications so that only authorized users can access them and perform operations that benefit the organization. In terms of safety and security, Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps is top-notch. Using the solution's automation features, we can suppress false positive alerts. We can also close alerts, lower their severity from "high" to "low" or "informational," or close them immediately with the appropriate commands. This will depend on the configuration automation rule and the perspective from which we are testing. Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps provides a single console. We are also provided with Microsoft templates to enable workbooks instantly. Alternatively, we can build our own customized workbooks to provide better insights and improve our SOC efficiency and overall performance. Consolidating all of our security data into one dashboard has saved our security operations team a significant amount of time. From an analyst's perspective, it is now much easier to correlate events, investigate alerts, and visualize specific entities. For example, an analyst can quickly see all of the alerts associated with a particular IP address, or they can view all of the activity for a specific entity over the past 24 hours or 7 days. This level of detail and insight would not be possible if our data were siloed in multiple dashboards. The single dashboard saves our operations approximately 20 hours per week by eliminating the need to access multiple consoles and tabs. Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps threat intelligence can help us prepare for potential threats before they happen. However, it depends on how we develop the policies for the database to block or ignore things in our environment.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"Zafran has become an indispensable tool in our cybersecurity arsenal."
"Zafran is an excellent tool."
"It learns from behavior, attacks, management, detections, captures packets, real-time analysis, et cetera. It's generating knowledge from a variety of sources for an excellent analysis."
"The product allows us to enhance the security of the implementations we have."
"We like the ability to investigate, analyze, and generate reports."
"It presents great visibility of the traffic flow of our cloud, providing information on what data and users are circulating and in the event of a threat, it immediately identifies them by providing detailed and granular information from our entire environment."
"This solution helps to keep everything visible, and it also alerts us if something is wrong, such as if someone opened extra ports or services that they are not supposed to. This is a valuable tool for monitoring and maintaining our cloud environment."
"Alerts of cloud activity happening across all accounts is helpful."
"This product provides a really nice visualization of the infrastructure, including network topology, firewalls, etc."
"Auto remediation is a very effective feature that helps ensure less manual intervention."
"Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps is very comprehensive, providing a complete 360-degree view of applications within an organization."
"The ability to sanction unsanctioned apps using Secure Score benchmarking, included in Cloud, is also beneficial."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is its monitoring."
"Defender for Cloud Apps has given us good visibility regarding what we've allowed into our environment until now."
"It's very easy to install and it includes the Intune portal from Microsoft where I can control all the devices from one place."
"Better logging allows us to find problems and take appropriate steps to lock them out."
"If your business requirements are relatively simple, it can get the job done."
"In Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps, there is an option to enable files. Once you enable that, it will give you all the files in your organization and where they are located in the cloud... That feature is very useful for investigation purposes."
 

Cons

"Initially, we were somewhat concerned about the scalability of Zafran due to our large asset count and the substantial amount of information we needed to process."
"The impact analysis that they perform can be improved. It is currently lacking. It should be more detailed."
"Automatic remediation requires read/write access. When providing read/write access to third-party applications, this can add risk. It should have some options of triggering API calls to the cloud platform, which in turn, can make the required changes."
"The shift left part is not yet at a maturity level I desire. I need more integration from the code-to-cloud principle."
"I would like them to include support for their products in languages other than English."
"The entire system is complicated, and the setup process may not cater to the company's demands."
"The biggest thing is the documentation aspect of Dome9 is a little lacking. They were purchased by Check Point about a year and a half to two years ago. When they integrated into Check Point's support system, a lot of the documentation that they had previously got mangled in the transition, e.g., linking to stuff on the Dome9 website that no longer exists. There are still a lot of spaces with incomplete links and stuff that is not as fully explained as it could be."
"I would like CloudGuard's pricing to be cheaper, but I think that's impossible. The pricing is the only thing I think they can improve."
"Almost all features are good, however, they still require improvements to the code security portion on which integration with the major source code repository is required."
"The integration with macOS operating systems needs to be better."
"This service would be better if it had a separate license, only for this service, that could be used to track usage."
"Defender could integrate better with multi-cloud and hybrid environments. It requires some additional configuration to ingest data from non-Azure environments and integrate it with Sentinel."
"I would like for it to be available on Mac and for it to support all of the features of Microsoft financing products. It is really for Windows."
"I would like to see them include more features in the older licenses. There are some features that are not available, such as preventing or analyzing cloud attacks."
"Defender for Cloud apps is primarily useful for Azure apps. It has limited capabilities for applications based on other cloud platforms."
"The interface needs to be more user-friendly."
"Generally, the pricing can always be improved along with the management system."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"It is a very straightforward licensing model that is based on the number of assets you are discovering and managing with the solution."
"The license for CloudGuard Posture Management is about $80 a year, and it's based on your cloud footprint, not the number of users. So you could have a million users, and it doesn't matter."
"The pricing is tremendous and super cheap. It is shockingly cheap for what you get out of it. I am happy with that. I hope that doesn't get reported back and they increase the prices. I love the pricing and the licensing makes sense. It is just assets: The more stuff that you have, the more you pay."
"The pricing is extremely competitive."
"CloudGuard is fairly priced."
"The price is on the higher end."
"I suggest that you pay attention to the product pricing because while there are no tricks, and the licensing model is transparent, the final numbers may surprise you."
"​They support either annual licensing or hourly. At the time of our last negotiation, it was either one or the other, you could not mix or match. I would have liked to mix/match. ​"
"Microsoft offers bundle discounts and a pay-as-you-go option."
"The pricing is a little bit high but right now, we are okay with it because of the compatibility with Office 365, Teams, and Azure AD."
"The product's pricing seems fair."
"The pricing is fair."
"The E5 license offers everything bundled. People are moving to Microsoft because you buy one license and it gives you everything."
"The pricing is in the middle. It isn't too cheap or expensive compared to other antivirus or security products. It is priced according to industry standards."
"We have an educational licensing agreement. It's a customer agreement for multiple years."
"We utilize the Microsoft E5 licensing, which encompasses the entire Microsoft suite; however, it is costly."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
11%
University
6%
Retailer
6%
Computer Software Company
16%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Manufacturing Company
9%
University
6%
Computer Software Company
16%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Zafran Security?
Pricing for Zafran Security is not expensive. We have a contract for five years, and the cost is lower than other too...
What needs improvement with Zafran Security?
I would like to see an integration with Check Point firewalls. It's essential for us and they are currently working o...
What is your primary use case for Zafran Security?
We use Zafran Security for threat prioritization. We establish priority to understand which risks should be patched o...
Which is the better security solution - Cisco Umbrella or Microsoft Cloud App Security?
Cisco Umbrella is an integral component of the Cisco SASE architecture. It integrates security in a single, cloud-nat...
What do you like most about Microsoft Cloud App Security?
It does a great job of monitoring and maintaining a security baseline. For us, that is a key element. The notificatio...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Microsoft Cloud App Security?
The pricing for Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps is acceptable. If a product is of high quality, it justifies the ex...
 

Also Known As

No data available
Check Point CloudGuard Posture Management, Dome9, Check Point CloudGuard Workload Protection, Check Point CloudGuard Intelligence
MS Cloud App Security, Microsoft Cloud App Security
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
Symantec, Citrix, Car and Driver, Virgin, Cloud Technology Partners
Customers for Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps include Accenture, St. Luke’s University Health Network, Ansell, and Nakilat.
Find out what your peers are saying about Wiz, Qualys, Tenable and others in Vulnerability Management. Updated: March 2025.
842,767 professionals have used our research since 2012.