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Cisco Secure Workload vs Microsoft Defender for Cloud comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 25, 2026

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

SentinelOne Singularity Clo...
Sponsored
Ranking in Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP)
4th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.7
Number of Reviews
116
Ranking in other categories
Vulnerability Management (4th), Cloud and Data Center Security (3rd), Container Security (3rd), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (3rd), Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPP) (3rd), Compliance Management (2nd), AI Software Development (1st), AI Observability (2nd)
Cisco Secure Workload
Ranking in Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP)
14th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.7
Number of Reviews
15
Ranking in other categories
Cloud and Data Center Security (8th), Microsegmentation Software (4th), Cisco Security Portfolio (7th)
Microsoft Defender for Cloud
Ranking in Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP)
1st
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
87
Ranking in other categories
Vulnerability Management (6th), Container Management (7th), Container Security (7th), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (4th), Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPP) (4th), Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) (5th), Microsoft Security Suite (7th), Compliance Management (4th), Cloud Detection and Response (CDR) (2nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) category, the mindshare of SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security is 3.8%, up from 2.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Cisco Secure Workload is 2.5%, down from 3.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Microsoft Defender for Cloud is 16.7%, up from 14.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Microsoft Defender for Cloud16.7%
SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security3.8%
Cisco Secure Workload2.5%
Other77.0%
Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP)
 

Featured Reviews

SC
Information Security Engineer at DataVigilant Infotech
Enables us to prioritize and effectively address critical security issues
Evidence-based reporting helps us to prioritize and solve critical security issues. The new visualization feature demonstrates how an attacker can enter the system, highlighting the potential path that can be exploited and outlining all the steps the attacker could take. With that visibility, we can ensure the perimeter is strong and attackers cannot enter, thus reducing the risk. It has helped us prioritize issues. The visibility into how an attack could happen is valuable. For example, it highlights the system vulnerability and outlines where an attack could propagate. The visualization helps me to prioritize remediation, and if I don't know where to start, I can check to see the score that enables me to prioritize issues. I am using infrastructure-as-code scanning, and it's one of the useful features. In pre-production, it identifies embedded secrets and misconfigurations, including issues with Kubernetes or some privileged containers. This feature allows us to pass the audit and secure IaC code so that it isn't easily exploitable by attackers. We can more proactively work to identify and resolve vulnerabilities by using the dashboard and the alerting system that SentinelOne provides. It helps us with audits and compliance. We can show the compliance in percentage. We can confidently say that our company or infrastructure is very secure. It has improved our security posture by 30% to 35%. It has reduced our false positives by 30%. It has helped teams collaborate better. The security team manages SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security, and when it flags vulnerabilities, they are forwarded to DevOps for remediation. Previously, we needed to identify and report the issues, but there would be lapses in communication. Now, there is a centralized dashboard that anyone can look at and see the open issues and work on them.
Raj Metkar - PeerSpot reviewer
Director, Head of Networks at MUFG, EMEA
Discover internal application dependencies and create a dependency map
We actively seek improvements in integrating the Infoblox DDI platform with Cisco Secure Workload. This integration allows Cisco Secure Workload to learn about our networks and network tags, providing valuable insights into vulnerabilities related to the operating system and various applications installed on our servers. Recently, Cisco announced a new product called HyperShield, an AI-based autonomous micro-segmentation solution. While Cisco has not stated that HyperShield will replace Cisco Secure Workload, it represents a natural evolution for the company. HyperShield features dynamic policy discovery and enforcement; however, once policies are enforced, they do not change until a discovery occurs, requiring a re-enforcement process. This new platform operates autonomously, minimizing the need for user or security engineer intervention. I would have expected Cisco to incorporate more automatic discovery and enforcement features within the existing Cisco Secure Workload product. Instead of enhancing the current product, they have introduced a new solution. Cisco plans to honor existing Tetration licenses, allowing users to transition to HyperShield without additional costs, reflecting the investment enterprises have already made. From Cisco’s perspective, this represents a natural progression in their product line. While the product name changes, it seems more of a rebranding effort. The enhancements are greater autonomy, improved discovery, and automatic enforcement, which are now being introduced in HyperShield. Cisco Secure Workload offers automatic policy enforcement but cannot adjust policies dynamically as the application needs to change. Having used the platform for the past five years, the recent announcement has been reassuring. Cisco has confirmed that our investment in the platform will not go to waste. They will honor our existing licenses, providing a natural migration path to the new solution without any disruption
David Birhange - PeerSpot reviewer
Director, Cloud and Modern Workplace at Informanix Technology Group
Brings together cloud security insights through a unified view and supports agentless protection for virtual machines
Copilot and similar features are already being used, though not necessarily for Microsoft Defender for Cloud specifically. We are trying to get more experience before rolling out most of Microsoft Defender for Cloud's AI capabilities. This is definitely on our to-do list, and the priority is urgent as we seek to learn more about these capabilities. The GenAI threat protection from Microsoft Defender for Cloud has not been enabled yet. There are many unknowns with AI applications. AI agents will operate while you're not present, whether you are sleeping or awake, and it's unclear whether there would be any exfiltration of data or how data is being managed. Microsoft Purview is being used extensively, and there is significant development going on with DSPM that will be rolled out to address security concerns. Data labeling and proper demarcation for sensitivity of data before it is received are being actively pursued.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The solution's most valuable features are its ability to detect vulnerabilities inside AWS resources and its ability to rescan after a specific duration set by the administrator."
"I would rate SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security a ten out of ten."
"Singularity Cloud Workload Security provides us with better security detection and more visibility. It is another resource that we can use to detect vulnerabilities in our company's systems. For example, it can help us detect new file processes that we are not familiar with, which could be used by attackers to exploit our systems. Singularity Cloud Workload Security can also help us diagnose and analyze data to determine whether it is malicious or not. Singularity Cloud Workload Security is like another pair of eyes that can help us protect our systems from cyberattacks."
"Singularity Cloud Security's most valuable features are its ease of scalability and comprehensive security measures."
"Singularity Cloud's ability to create custom correlation searches and reduce noise is highly valuable."
"The offensive security feature is valuable because it publicly detects the offensive and vulnerable things present in our domain or applications. It checks any applications with public access. Some of the applications give public access to certain files or are present over a particular domain. It detects and lets us know with evidence. That is quite good. It is protecting our infrastructure quite well."
"The mean time to detect has been reduced."
"Cloud Native Security's most valuable features include cloud misconfiguration detection and remediation, compliance monitoring, a robust authentication security engine, and cloud threat detection and response capabilities."
"Instead of proving that all the access control lists are in place and all the EPGs are correct, we can just point the auditor to a dashboard and point out that there aren't any escaped conversations. It saves an enormous, enormous amount of time."
"By using Tetration insight, we are able to get the latency on our level accounts and we can determine whatever the issue is with the application latency itself."
"The product provides multiple-device integration."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is security."
"The solution offers 100% telemetry coverage. The telemetry you collect is not sampled, it's not intermittent. It's complete. You see everything in it, including full visibility of all activities on your endpoints and in your network."
"Scalability is its most valuable feature."
"Generally speaking, Cisco support is considered one of the best in the networking products and stack."
"The only use case I can see that makes sense is micro-segmentation. I think there are other use cases for it. The main purpose of the product is to do micro-segmentation by collecting IP. That could be done by installing an agent, and then you have all the communication coming in and out. You could also use some flow sensors installed in the network that receive a copy of the traffic and then report that back to the system."
"If you are a Microsoft organization and most of your organization uses Microsoft, Microsoft Defender for Cloud will be the best approach as it provides the easiest implementation to the most robust solution for a Microsoft suite."
"Microsoft Defender for Cloud has significantly enhanced our overall security posture by approximately 20 to 25 percent."
"It alerts us to our vulnerabilities and ensures compliance by marking off a compliance tool checklist."
"The most valuable feature is the regulatory compliance aspect, where we utilize predefined initiatives like NIST. Alert management is another useful feature. Alerts are directly integrated with our email or DevOps board for easy viewing, allowing us to identify problem areas efficiently."
"The scalability of Microsoft Defender for Cloud is very good."
"The technical support is very good."
"Microsoft Defender for Cloud is stable and reliable as advertised."
"There is no better tool found to protect workloads in Azure than Microsoft Defender for Cloud."
 

Cons

"While SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security offers real-time response, there is room for improvement in alert accuracy."
"In some cases, the rules are strictly enforced but do not align with real-world use cases."
"There can be a specific type of alert showing that a new type of risk has been identified."
"When you find a vulnerability and resolve it, the same issue will not occur again. I want SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security to block the same vulnerability from appearing again. I want something like a playbook where the steps that we take to resolve an issue are repeated when that issue happens again."
"We repeatedly get alerts on the tool dashboard that we've already solved on our end, but they still appear. That is somewhat irritating."
"The documentation that I use for the initial setup can be more detailed or written in a more user-friendly language to avoid troubles."
"A vulnerability alert would appear, and we'd fix it, but then the same alert would return the next day."
"There is scope for more application security posture management features. Additionally, the runtime protection needs attention."
"They should scale down the hardware a bit. The initial hardware investment is two million dollars so it's a price point problem. The issue with the price comes from the fact that you have to have it with enormous storage and enormous computes."
"The integration could be better, especially with different types of solutions."
"Secure Workload is a little complicated to use, and the dashboard isn't intuitive, so it takes a while to learn how to use it."
"I'd like to see better documentation for advanced features. The documentation is fairly basic. I would also like to see better integration with other applications."
"The multi-tenancy, redundancy, backup and restore functionalities, as well as the monitoring aspects of the solution, need improvement. The solution offers virtually no enterprise-grade possibility for monitoring."
"The emailed notifications are either hard to find or they are not available. Search capabilities can be improved."
"There's room for improvement when it comes to Cisco Secure Workload. A couple of internal areas could be refined a little bit. They are trying to solve it, depending on where you suppose the agent is. Suppose you have the agent on both the server and the client, which could be the front-end server or web server connecting to the. In that case, if those two are communicating on RPC, the server can look into its configuration. It could go down and find the configuration file on the FTP server and then set the policies to it. But there are a lot of different FTP servers out there. It's also a complex case for the tool to support all FTP servers."
"It is highly scalable, but there is a limitation that it is only available on Cisco devices."
"The product's advanced analytics and reporting features could be improved."
"Azure is a complex solution. You have so many moving parts."
"The customer service at Microsoft has room for improvement. The first line of support is not technically adept and often requires engaging higher-level technicians to resolve issues."
"The documentation and implementation guides could be improved."
"From a compliance standpoint, they can include some more metrics and some specific compliances such as GDPR."
"The solution could extend its capabilities to other cloud providers. Right now, if you want to monitor a virtual machine on another cloud, you can do that. However, this cannot be done with other cloud platform services. I hope once that is available then Defender for Cloud will be a unified solution for all cloud platform services."
"The cost is always a concern, but overall, it's not too bad because it is easy to use and pretty friendly."
"They could always work to make the pricing a bit lower."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"PingSafe falls somewhere in the middle price range, neither particularly cheap nor expensive."
"We found it to be fine for us. Its price was competitive. It was something we were happy with. We are not a Fortune 500 company, so I do not know how pricing scales at the top end, but for our cloud environment, it works very well."
"The cost for PingSafe is average when compared to other CSPM tools."
"I am personally not taking care of the pricing part, but when we moved from CrowdStrike to PingSafe, there were some savings. The price of CrowdStrike was quite high. Compared to that, the price of PingSafe was low. PingSafe is charging based on the subscription model. If I want to add an AWS subscription, I need to pay more. It should not be based on subscription. It should be based on the number of servers that I am scanning."
"The tool is cost-effective."
"SentinelOne is quite costly compared to other security platforms."
"I would rate the cost a seven out of ten with ten being the most costly."
"I understand that SentinelOne is a market leader, but the bill we received was astronomical."
"Regarding price, Cisco Secure Workload can be expensive if you don't have a budget. If you're not doing micro-segmentation, every extra security measure or enforcement you're putting on top of your existing environment will be an extra cost. It's not a cheap solution at all. But from my point of view, if you need to do micro-segmentation, this is one of the best tools I've seen for it. I can't compare that to Microsoft's solution because I haven't looked into it. I've looked into VMware and Cisco. Those are the only two that I know of. I didn't know that Microsoft could do micro-segmentation at all. Maybe they can, but I haven't heard anything about it."
"The cost for the hardware is around 300k."
"The pricing is a bit higher than we anticipated."
"Pricing depends on the scope of the application and the features. Larger installations save more."
"The price is based on how many computers you're going to install it on."
"The price is outrageous. If you have money to throw at the product, then do it."
"It is not cheap and pricing may limit scalability."
"The cost of the license is based on the subscriptions that you have."
"The price of the solution is good for the features we receive and there is an additional cost for Microsoft premier support. However, some of my potential customers have found it to be expensive and have gone on to choose another solution."
"The pricing is very difficult because every type of Defender for Cloud has its own metrics and pricing. If you have Cloud for Key Vault, the pricing is different than it is for storage. Every type has its own pricing list and rules."
"Its pricing is a little bit high in terms of Azure Security Center, but the good thing is that we don't need to maintain and deploy it. So, while the pricing is high, it is native to Azure which is why we prefer using this tool."
"Although I am outside of the discussion on budget and costing, I can say that the importance of security provided by this solution is of such importance that whatever the cost is, it is not a factor."
"I'm not privy to that information, but I know it's probably close to a million dollars a year."
"The tool is pretty expensive."
"Microsoft Defender for Cloud is pricey, especially for Kubernetes clusters."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
14%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Government
6%
Computer Software Company
15%
Manufacturing Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Government
8%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business48
Midsize Enterprise20
Large Enterprise54
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business5
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise8
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business27
Midsize Enterprise10
Large Enterprise49
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about PingSafe?
The dashboard gives me an overview of all the things happening in the product, making it one of the tool's best featu...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for PingSafe?
I think the pricing of SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security is a bit high.
What needs improvement with PingSafe?
We did not try to use the threat investigations feature from SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security.Drift detection w...
What do you like most about Cisco Secure Workload?
The product provides multiple-device integration.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cisco Secure Workload?
CloudStrike offers antivirus capabilities and firewall features for servers and VDI but lacks automatic policy discov...
What needs improvement with Cisco Secure Workload?
We actively seek improvements in integrating the Infoblox DDI platform with Cisco Secure Workload. This integration a...
How is Prisma Cloud vs Azure Security Center for security?
Azure Security Center is very easy to use, integrates well, and gives very good visibility on what is happening acros...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Microsoft Defender for Cloud?
My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing for Microsoft Defender for Cloud was pretty straightforward. We...
What needs improvement with Microsoft Defender for Cloud?
Microsoft Defender for Cloud can be improved. An additional feature that should be included in the next release is Ze...
 

Also Known As

PingSafe
Cisco Tetration
Microsoft Azure Security Center, Azure Security Center, Microsoft ASC, Azure Defender
 

Interactive Demo

Demo not available
Demo not available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
ADP, University of North Carolina Charlotte (UNCC)
Microsoft Defender for Cloud is trusted by companies such as ASOS, Vatenfall, SWC Technology Partners, and more.
Find out what your peers are saying about Cisco Secure Workload vs. Microsoft Defender for Cloud and other solutions. Updated: December 2025.
881,036 professionals have used our research since 2012.