Check Point SandBlast Network vs Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps comparison

Check Point Software Technologies and Microsoft are both solutions in the Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) category. Check Point Software Technologies is ranked #10 with an average rating of 8.5, while Microsoft is ranked #12 with an average rating of 8.5. Check Point Software Technologies holds a 6.0% mindshare in ATP, compared to Microsoft’s 1.7% mindshare. Additionally, 92% of Check Point Software Technologies users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Microsoft users who would recommend it.

Check Point SandBlast Network

Read 36 Check Point SandBlast Network reviews

1,149 Views
819 Comparison Views

92% willing to recommend

Microsoft Defender for Clou...

Read 37 Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps reviews

303 Views
213 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Check Point SandBlast Network

Microsoft Defender for Clou...

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 1, 2024

Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps and Check Point SandBlast Network compete in the cloud security domain. Microsoft Defender has a slight upper hand due to its seamless integration with Microsoft ecosystems, offering a cohesive security posture and comprehensive visibility.

Features: Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps provides seamless integration across cloud environments with extensive monitoring capabilities, ensuring smooth operation on both public and private networks. It offers comprehensive visibility and coordination with other Microsoft security solutions. Check Point SandBlast Network is distinguished by its robust threat prevention, including zero-day threat protection and advanced AI techniques in sandboxing. It offers customizable policies and effective threat extraction and emulation features for strong threat management.

Room for Improvement: Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps could improve its macOS integration and overall user-friendliness. It needs better external DLP integration, streamlined reporting capabilities, and improved alert accuracy to reduce false positives. Users of Check Point SandBlast Network suggest revising pricing strategies to be more appealing to small businesses, simplifying the GUI, minimizing file scanning delays, enhancing third-party tool integration, and lowering support costs.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps offers robust cloud deployment options with seamless integration across Microsoft products, although technical support varies by service tier. Check Point SandBlast Network supports hybrid and on-premises deployments, praised for general customer support though improvements in resolution times and support package enhancements are suggested.

Pricing and ROI: Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps, often bundled with Microsoft 365 E5, can provide cost savings, though some find the pricing high. However, its ROI is appreciated for reduced operational costs. Check Point SandBlast Network's pricing is seen as high but justified given its security capabilities. It offers various licensing options with users recognizing the ROI due to enhanced security measures and reduced need for additional tools.

To learn more, read our detailed Check Point SandBlast Network vs. Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps Report (Updated: March 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Check Point SandBlast Network vs. Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps

March 2025

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Helped 846,617 peers since 2012

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

Check Point SandBlast Network

Ranking in Advanced Threat Protection (ATP)

10th

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.4

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Microsoft Defender for Clou...

Ranking in Advanced Threat Protection (ATP)

12th

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.3

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Cloud Access Security Brokers (CASB) (5th), Microsoft Security Suite (13th)

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) category, the mindshare of Check Point SandBlast Network is 6.0%, up from 5.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps is 1.7%, up from 1.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Advanced Threat Protection (ATP)

Featured Reviews

GaneshKhutwad

Network security architect at ATOS

Provides advanced threat prevention and utilizes geographic-based policies to mitigate attacks

Check Point offers three types of support: Gold, Platinum, and Diamond. The level of support you receive should be based on the criticality of the issue, not solely on your client's support tier. While there are established support levels, I have experienced instances where the support provided was not categorized as Gold, Platinum, or Diamond but rather a standard support level. In such cases, the response times were slower, and getting support personnel on the call was more difficult.

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Jagadeesh Gunasekaran

Cyber security engineer at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

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.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"SandBlast updates the threat signatures frequently."

"The sandbox is able to scan files without adding a delay or compromising productivity."

"SandBlast has opened us up to a lot more opportunities where we can offer this service to clients, that way they don't have to go to a third-party to get this specific solution. It comes in the Check Point Infinity Package so it has helped us a lot."

"Very few false positives are detected, which gives the confidence to raise flags when needed, ensuring the IT department is aware of threats and acting fast."

"The Check Point SandBlast Network uses caching and static analysis to actually reduce the time it takes to scan and isolate the same file for incoming data compromises."

"The main feature of the solution is that it protects against malicious threats from the outside."

"It saves time with us trying to do the analysis. We use it to try to find out how something got into the network. We use it to stop something before it ever gets in."

"The zero-day protection is its most valuable feature."

More Check Point SandBlast Network pros

"Defender for Cloud Apps has given us good visibility regarding what we've allowed into our environment until now."

"The most valuable features of Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps include live, up-to-date information, which provided real-time alerts, and the ability to delve into detailed metadata information."

"We have become more aware of what services our users are using, how often they are using them, and what data is being sent out of the organization and to which services. So, it is really a lot about visibility and helping us make decisions based on that. It drives some of our policy decisions for adding extra security controls."

"The product helps us with privileged identity management to control who has access to what and for how long."

"The integration within the entire Defender suite is highly valuable because it allows for communication between different components and offers pretty decent correlations."

"On-demand scanning is the most valuable feature. In addition, it's a fairly fluid product. It syncs back to the cloud and provides metrics. It's pretty intelligent."

"The most valuable feature of Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps is to stop shadow IT."

"I like the alert policies because they are quite robust. It has some built-in templates that we can easily pick up. One of them is the alert for mass downloads, when a particular user is running a massive download on your SharePoint site."

More Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps pros

Cons

"I would like if it could emulate bigger files and somehow improve this usability. I don't know if this would be possible. However, if it was able to scan or emulate bigger files, then it would be safer for a company using it."

"I would like to see these solutions being easier to manage from mobile applications - from either iOS or Android - including other operating systems that appear in the future."

"When you have to scan emails that come with attachments, it takes a long time to examine them, which causes other emails not to be scanned, which can cause some danger to our organization."

"There have been a couple of things that we've tried where we read through the documentation, and we were really looking for some help in implementing, and technical support wanted me to try it first, then call them if it breaks. It would be nicer if they would hold my hand a bit more. It makes me nervous in production, as I don't have a lab."

"The response times were slower, and getting support personnel on the call was more difficult."

"The cost is a little bit high-end, and you need to get precise performance metrics in order to get the correct size. Improvements are required in both areas of the tool."

"SandBlast takes longer than FortiSandbox to complete a scan."

"I am very leery right now about the stability. We've had three outages in the last month because of Check Point, not because of something that the customer has done, but because of changes on the Check Point side."

More Check Point SandBlast Network cons

"We are having trouble with our continuous reporting configuration and struggling with configuring the collector properly with our log parsing. We've also faced difficulties getting support for this issue. It's taken us months to figure this out after going through a couple of different support channels."

"The product is very good so far, however, it would be better if it could include more up-to-date threat protection."

"The integration with macOS operating systems needs to be better."

"Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps’s technical support services needs improvement."

"There could be more granular roles that are out of the box included in the product."

"Defender for Cloud apps is primarily useful for Azure apps. It has limited capabilities for applications based on other cloud platforms."

"There are challenges with detection and there are challenges with false-positive rates."

"We sometimes get errors when we create policies, which is somewhat annoying because some policies stop working due to misconfigurations. We find this challenging because it limits our options for troubleshooting an issue."

More Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing is quite effective, not excessively high. On a scale of one to ten, where ten is the highest price, I rate the pricing a nine."

"Choosing the correct set of licenses is essential because, without the additional software blade licenses, the Check Point gateways are just a stateful firewall."

"We would like to try the Threat Extraction blade, but you need to buy a license. Check Point is expensive. I would like to buy things, but I would need the funding."

"I think the overall cost for introducing Check Point with SandBlast was reasonable and competitive in the market."

"The cost of Check Point SandBlast Network is annually, and there is only a standard license."

"We have seen ROI."

"The cost is not significantly high and it can be negotiated during any purchase of NGFW."

"The product's cost is high."

"Our clients normally use the Microsoft E1 licensing, which is renewed yearly."

"I'm not totally involved in the pricing part, but I think its pricing is quite aggressive, and its price is quite similar to Netskope. Netskope has separate licensing fees or additional charges if you want to monitor certain SaaS services, whereas, with MCAS, you get 5,000 applications with their Office 365. It is all bundled, and there's no cost for using that. You only have the operational costs. In the country I am in, it is a bit difficult to get people with the required skill sets."

"The pricing is fair."

"Its pricing is on the higher side. Its price is definitely very high for a small-scale company. As an enterprise client, we do get benefits from Microsoft. We get a discounted price because of the number of users we have in our company. We have a premier package, and with that, we do get a lot of discounts. There are no additional costs. It only comes in the top-tier packages. Generally, the top-tier license is the best license that you can get for your organization. If you want, you can buy it separately, but that's not a good idea."

"The price could be better and should be reconsidered."

"This product is not expensive."

"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 utilize the Microsoft E5 licensing, which encompasses the entire Microsoft suite; however, it is costly."

More Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

16%

Computer Software Company

14%

Government

11%

Energy/Utilities Company

Computer Software Company

16%

Financial Services Firm

12%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Check Point SandBlast Network?

The solution can detect and prevent attacks that may be encrypted.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Check Point SandBlast Network?

As of now, everything is good enough.

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What needs improvement with Check Point SandBlast Network?

The cost is a little bit high-end, and you need to get precise performance metrics in order to get the correct size. Improvements are required in both areas of the tool.

See all answers

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-native solution, unifying multiple features like DNS-layer security, threat intelli...

See all answers

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 notifications are pretty good.

See all answers

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 expense.

See all answers

Comparisons

Palo Alto Networks WildFire vs Check Point SandBlast Network

Compared 54% of the time

Fortinet FortiSandbox vs Check Point SandBlast Network

Compared 31% of the time

Symantec Advanced Threat Protection vs Check Point SandBlast Network

Compared 5% of the time

Microsoft Defender for Office 365 vs Check Point SandBlast Network

Compared 5% of the time

Cisco Secure Network Analytics vs Check Point SandBlast Network

Compared 5% of the time

More Check Point SandBlast Network Competitors

Zscaler Internet Access vs Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps

Compared 22% of the time

Cisco Umbrella vs Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps

Compared 16% of the time

Netskope vs Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps

Compared 13% of the time

Prisma Access by Palo Alto Networks vs Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps

Compared 6% of the time

Skyhigh Security vs Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps

Compared 6% of the time

More Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Check Point SandBlast Network

April 2025

Download Check Point SandBlast Network product report

Buyer's Guide

Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps

March 2025

Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps report

Download Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps product report

Also Known As

No data available

MS Cloud App Security, Microsoft Cloud App Security

Overview

Check Point’s evasion-resistant technology maximizes zero-day protection without compromising business productivity. For the first time, businesses can reduce the risk of unknown attacks by implementing a prevent-first approach. Learn More about Check Point Sandblast

Check Point Software Technologies

Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps is a comprehensive security solution that provides protection for cloud-based applications and services. It offers real-time threat detection and response, as well as advanced analytics and reporting capabilities. With Defender for Cloud Apps, organizations can ensure the security of their cloud environments and safeguard against cyber threats. Whether you're running SaaS applications, IaaS workloads, or PaaS services, Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps can help you secure your cloud environment and protect your business from cyber threats.

Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps Benefits:

Provides comprehensive security for cloud applications
Integrates with other Microsoft security tools
Easy to use and deploy
Provides real-time threat detection and response
Strong protection against phishing attacks and other common threats
Highly customizable to meet specific needs of different organizations

Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps Use Cases:

Governance, authentication, security, and compliance.
Detects shadow IT and anomalous user behavior
Controls access to applications
Provides auditing and filtering setups
Used for end-user compute devices, file monitoring, user investigation, and activity
Used for data governance, threat detection, and getting visibility over cloud applications
Used to identify information about applications beyond organizational boundaries
Prevent exfiltration and data filtration of corporate data
Used to deal with spam emails and detect shadow IT

Reviews from Real Users

Ram-Krish, Cloud Security & Governance at a financial services firm, says that Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps "Integrates well and helps us in protecting sensitive information, but takes time to scan and apply the policies and cannot detect everything we need".

PeerSpot user, Senior Cloud & Security Consultant at a tech services, writes that Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps "Great for monitoring user activity and protecting data while integrating well with other applications".

Simon Burgess,Infrastructure Engineer at SBITSC, states that Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps is "A fluid, intelligent product for great visibility, centralized management, and increased uptime".

Microsoft

Sample Customers

Edenred, State Transport Leasing Company (STLC), Edel AG, Laurenty, Conseil Départemental du Val de Marne, Koch Media

Customers for Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps include Accenture, St. Luke’s University Health Network, Ansell, and Nakilat.

Buyer's Guide

Check Point SandBlast Network vs. Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps

March 2025

Free Report: Check Point SandBlast Network vs. Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps

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