Cisco Secure Workload vs Microsoft Defender for Cloud comparison

Cisco and Microsoft are both solutions in the Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) category. Cisco is ranked #16 with an average rating of 9.5, while Microsoft is ranked #3 with an average rating of 8.1. Cisco holds a 2.6% mindshare in CWPP, compared to Microsoft’s 12.9% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of Cisco users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 94% of Microsoft users who would recommend it.

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 5, 2025

Cisco Secure Workload and Microsoft Defender for Cloud are competitive offerings in the realm of security management solutions. Microsoft Defender for Cloud is recognized as superior due to its features, making it a valuable investment despite higher costs.

Features: Cisco Secure Workload provides robust network segmentation and real-time traffic analysis, with security visibility as a main focus. Microsoft Defender for Cloud offers integration with Azure services, advanced threat intelligence, and comprehensive compliance tracking.

Room for Improvement: Cisco Secure Workload could enhance its ease of deployment and reduce the level of technical expertise required. Microsoft Defender for Cloud could improve on pricing flexibilities and further increase integration capabilities with non-Azure services.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Cisco Secure Workload has a more complex deployment process that entails extensive configuration. Microsoft Defender for Cloud provides a streamlined setup, particularly beneficial for existing Azure users, facilitating faster deployment.

Pricing and ROI: Cisco Secure Workload offers a favorable cost structure and significant long-term ROI for organizations focused on network management. Microsoft Defender for Cloud, while potentially more expensive initially, justifies its cost through enhanced security capabilities and improved cloud integration, leading to substantial ROI.

To learn more, read our detailed Cisco Secure Workload vs. Microsoft Defender for Cloud Report (Updated: January 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Cisco Secure Workload vs. Microsoft Defender for Cloud

January 2025

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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...

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2025, in the Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) category, the mindshare of SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security is 2.2%, up from 0.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Cisco Secure Workload is 2.6%, up from 2.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Microsoft Defender for Cloud is 12.9%, down from 14.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP)

Featured Reviews

Andrew W

VP - Information Technology at a financial services firm with 201-500 employees

Tells us about vulnerabilities as well as their impact and helps to focus on real issues

Looking at all the different pieces, it has got everything we need. Some of the pieces we do not even use. For example, we do not have Kubernetes Security. We are not running any K8 clusters, so it is good for us. Overall, we find the solution to be fantastic. There can be additional education components. This may not be truly fair to them because of what the product is going for, but it would be great to see additional education for compliance. It is not a criticism of the tool per se, but anything to help non-development resources understand some of the complexities of the cloud is always appreciated. Any additional educational resources are always helpful for security teams, especially those without a development background.

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Raj Metkar

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

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Vibhor Goel

Senior Cloud Platform Engineer at Deutsche Börse

A single tool for complete visibility and addressing security gaps

Currently, issues are structured in Microsoft Defender for Cloud at severity levels of high, critical, or warning, but these severity levels are not always right. For example, Microsoft might consider a port being open as critical, but that might not be the case for our company. Similarly, it might suggest closing some management ports, but you might need them to be able to log in, so the severity levels for certain things can be improved. Even though Microsoft Defender for Cloud provides a way to temporarily disable certain alerts or notifications without affecting our security score, it would be better to have more granularized control over these recommendations. Currently, we cannot even disable certain alerts or notifications. There should be an automated mechanism to design Azure policies based on the recommendations, possibly with AI integration. Instead of an engineer having to write a policy to fix security gaps, which is very time-consuming, there should be an inbuilt capability to auto-remediate everything and have proper control in place. Additionally, enabling Defender for Cloud at the resource group level, rather than only at the subscription level, would be beneficial.

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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

"The UI is responsive and user-friendly."

"PingSafe can integrate all your cloud accounts and resources you create in the AWS account, We have set it up to scan the AWS transfer services, EC2, security groups, and GitHub."

"The most valuable feature is the easy-to-understand user interface, which allows even non-technical users to comprehend and resolve issues."

"It is advantageous in terms of time-saving and cost reduction."

"When creating cloud infrastructure, Cloud Native Security evaluates the cloud security parameters and how they will impact the organization's risk. It lets us know whether our security parameter conforms to international industry standards. It alerts us about anything that increases our risk, so we can address those vulnerabilities and prevent attacks."

"I like CSPM the most. It captures a lot of alerts within a short period of time. When an alert gets triggered on the cloud, it throws an alert within half an hour, which is very reasonable. It is a plus point for us."

"All the features we use are equal and get the job done."

"It is very straightforward. It is not complicated. For the information that it provides, it does a pretty good job."

More SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security pros

"It's stable."

"Generally speaking, Cisco support is considered one of the best in the networking products and stack."

"The most valuable feature is micro-segmentation, which is the most important with respect to visibility."

"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."

"The most valuable feature of the solution is that we don't have to do packet captures on the network."

"The product offers great visibility into the network so we can enforce security measures."

"Scalability is its most valuable feature."

More Cisco Secure Workload pros

"The scalability of Microsoft Defender for Cloud is very good."

"The integration with Logic Apps allows for automated responses to incidents."

"Scalability is great, and I would rate it a ten out of ten."

"It is very intuitive when it comes to policy administration, alerts and notifications, and ease of setting up roles at different hierarchies. It has also been good in terms of the network technology maps. It provides a good overview, but it also depends on the complexity of your network."

"Microsoft Defender for Cloud is stable and reliable as advertised."

"Defender is user-friendly and provides decent visibility into threats."

"The entire Defender Suite is tightly coupled, integrated, and collaborative."

"Defender for Cloud provides a complete DevOps security package for cloud services."

More Microsoft Defender for Cloud pros

Cons

"There can be a specific type of alert showing that a new type of risk has been identified."

"For vulnerabilities, they are showing CVE ID. The naming convention should be better so that it indicates the container where a vulnerability is present. Currently, they are only showing CVE ID, but the same CVE ID might be present in multiple containers. We would like to have the container name so that we can easily fix the issue."

"The SentinelOne customer support needs improvement, as they are sometimes late in responding, which is critical in a production issue."

"I'd like to see better onboarding documentation."

"In the Analytics section, there is a tab for showing the severity of open issues by day. There are three options: by week, by month, and for more than thirty days. However, despite being aware of many issues open for more than thirty days, it shows no data available."

"With Cloud Native Security, we can't selectively enable or disable alerts based on our specific use case."

"One potential drawback is the cost of SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security, which may be prohibitive for smaller businesses or startups, particularly those in regions with lower average incomes, such as India."

More SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security cons

"It is highly scalable, but there is a limitation that it is only available on Cisco devices."

"The product must be integrated with the cloud."

"There is some overlap between Cisco Tetration and AppDynamics and I need to have a single pane of glass, rather than have to jump between different tools."

"The integration could be better, especially with different types of solutions."

"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 emailed notifications are either hard to find or they are not available. Search capabilities can be improved."

"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."

"There was a controversy when Cisco reduced the amount of data they kept, and the solution became quite cost-intensive, which made its adoption challenging….Although they have modified it now, I preferred the previous version, and I wish all the functionality were back under the same product."

More Cisco Secure Workload cons

"Integration into other third-party products, particularly those from tier three vendors like ManageEngine and Hexcode, has proven difficult."

"My experience with Microsoft Defender for Cloud has been largely negative due to a poor user experience."

"If they had an easier way to display all the vulnerabilities of the machines affected and remediation steps on one screen rather than having to dive deep into each of them, that would be a lot easier."

"I would like to see better automation when it comes to pushing out security features to the recommendations, and better documentation on the step-by-step procedures for enabling certain features."

"Defender could improve how data is represented. It can be unstructured or slow to load. The recent update allowing policy grouping into control groups is beneficial, but further enhancements for speed and clarity are needed."

"Microsoft Graph needs improvement."

"The range of workloads is broad, but we'd love to add more workloads and make it a single security solution that covers all those workloads."

"The solution could improve by being more intuitive and easier to use requiring less technical knowledge."

More Microsoft Defender for Cloud cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"PingSafe is cost-effective for the amount of infrastructure we have. It's reasonable for what they offer compared to our previous solution. It's at least 25 percent to 30 percent less."

"While I'm slightly out of touch with pricing, I know SentinelOne is much cheaper than other products."

"PingSafe is not very expensive compared to Prisma Cloud, but it's also not that cheap. However, because of its features, it makes sense to us as a company. It's fairly priced."

"Singularity Cloud Workload Security's licensing and price were cheaper than the other solutions we looked at."

"It's a fair price for what you get. We are happy with the price as it stands."

"Pricing is based on modules, which was ideal for us."

"Singularity Cloud Security by SentinelOne is cost-efficient."

"I wasn't sure what to expect from the pricing, but I was pleasantly surprised to find that it was a little less than I thought."

More SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security pricing and cost advice

"The pricing is a bit higher than we anticipated."

"It is not cheap and pricing may limit scalability."

"The cost for the hardware is around 300k."

"Pricing depends on the scope of the application and the features. Larger installations save more."

"The price is outrageous. If you have money to throw at the product, then do it."

"The price is based on how many computers you're going to install it on."

"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."

"Security Center charges $15 per resource for any workload that you onboard into it. They charge per VM or per data-base server or per application. It's not like Microsoft 365 licensing, where there are levels like E3 and E5. Security Center is pretty straightforward."

"The licensing cost per server is $15 per month."

"The pricing and licensing of Microsoft Defender for Cloud have been good for us. We appreciate the licensing approach based on employee count rather than a big enterprise license."

"They have a free version, but the license for this one isn't too high. It's free to start with, and you're charged for using it beyond 30 days. Some other pieces of Defender are charged based on usage, so you will be charged more for a high volume of transactions. I believe Defender for Cloud is a daily charge based on Azure's App Service Pricing."

"Currently, Microsoft offers only one plan at the enterprise level which is $15 per machine."

"Microsoft Defender for Cloud is pricey, especially for Kubernetes clusters."

"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."

"Pricing depends on your workload size, but it is very cheap. If you're talking about virtual machines, it is $5 or something for each machine, which is minimal. If you go for some agent-based solution for every virtual machine, then you need to pay the same thing or more than that. For an on-premises solution like this, we were paying around $30 to $50 based on size. With Defender, Microsoft doesn't bother about the size. You pay based on the number of machines. So, if you have 10 virtual machines, and 10 virtual machines are being monitored, you are paying based on that rather than the size of the virtual machine. Thus, you are paying for the number of units rather than paying for the size of your units."

More Microsoft Defender for Cloud pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

18%

Financial Services Firm

15%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Computer Software Company

27%

Financial Services Firm

12%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Computer Software Company

15%

Financial Services Firm

13%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

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...

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for PingSafe?

SentinelOne is relatively cheap. If ten is the most expensive, I would rate it a seven.

See all answers

What needs improvement with PingSafe?

From my personal experience, the alerting system needs to be faster. If something happens in our infrastructure, the ...

See all answers

What do you like most about Cisco Secure Workload?

The product provides multiple-device integration.

See all answers

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...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Cisco Secure Workload?

We actively seek improvements in integrating the Infoblox DDI platform with Cisco Secure Workload. This integration a...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

What do you like most about Microsoft Defender for Cloud?

The entire Defender Suite is tightly coupled, integrated, and collaborative.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Microsoft Defender for Cloud?

The licensing is straightforward but can become expensive if you cover everything. You must balance the cost against ...

See all answers

Comparisons

Wiz vs SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security

Compared 24% of the time

Cortex Cloud by Palo Alto Networks vs SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security

Compared 21% of the time

AWS GuardDuty vs SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security

Compared 8% of the time

Orca Security vs SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security

Compared 6% of the time

Check Point CloudGuard CNAPP vs SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security

Compared 5% of the time

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Akamai Guardicore Segmentation vs Cisco Secure Workload

Compared 20% of the time

Cisco Hypershield vs Cisco Secure Workload

Compared 17% of the time

Illumio vs Cisco Secure Workload

Compared 17% of the time

Cisco ACI vs Cisco Secure Workload

Compared 12% of the time

CrowdStrike Falcon Cloud Security vs Cisco Secure Workload

Compared 2% of the time

More Cisco Secure Workload Competitors

AWS GuardDuty vs Microsoft Defender for Cloud

Compared 21% of the time

Cortex Cloud by Palo Alto Networks vs Microsoft Defender for Cloud

Compared 12% of the time

Wiz vs Microsoft Defender for Cloud

Compared 12% of the time

Microsoft Defender XDR vs Microsoft Defender for Cloud

Compared 4% of the time

Orca Security vs Microsoft Defender for Cloud

Compared 3% of the time

More Microsoft Defender for Cloud Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security

February 2025

SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security report

Download SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security product report

Buyer's Guide

Cisco Secure Workload

March 2025

Download Cisco Secure Workload product report

Buyer's Guide

Microsoft Defender for Cloud

February 2025

Download Microsoft Defender for Cloud product report

Also Known As

PingSafe

Cisco Tetration

Microsoft Azure Security Center, Azure Security Center, Microsoft ASC, Azure Defender

Interactive Demo

Demo not available

SentinelOne

Demo not available

Cisco

Microsoft

Overview

SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security protects cloud workloads, offering advanced threat detection and automated response. It integrates seamlessly with cloud environments and secures containerized applications and virtual machines against vulnerabilities.

SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security is renowned for its efficiency in mitigating threats in real-time. The platform integrates effortlessly with existing cloud environments, ensuring robust cloud security management with minimal manual intervention. Securing containerized applications and virtual machines, it excels in threat intelligence and endpoint protection. However, improvements are needed in performance during high workload periods, and more integrations with third-party tools and better documentation would be beneficial. Users often find the installation process complex, support response times slow, and the dashboard's navigation unintuitive.

What are the key features of SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security?

Real-time Threat Detection: Identifies and mitigates threats as they occur.
Automated Response: Automatically responds to threats to minimize impact.
Ease of Deployment: Simple setup process with scalable options.
Machine Learning Insights: AI-driven insights enhance threat prevention.
Seamless Integration: Integrates with cloud environments for unified security management.

What are the primary benefits or ROI to expect from SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security?

Enhanced Threat Mitigation: Improved security against real-time threats.
Reduced Manual Intervention: Automated processes save time and resources.
Scalability: Easily adapts to growing security requirements.
Centralized Management: Manage security across platforms from a single console.
Advanced Threat Intelligence: Provides in-depth analysis and protection.

In specific industries, SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security is implemented to safeguard critical data and infrastructure. Organizations in finance, healthcare, and technology depend on its real-time threat detection and automated response to protect sensitive information. Its ability to secure containerized applications and virtual machines is particularly valuable in dynamic environments where rapid scaling is necessary.

SentinelOne

Cisco Secure Workload is a cloud and data security solution that offers a zero-trust policy of keeping an organization’s application workloads safe and secure throughout the entire on-premise and cloud data center ecosystems.

Cisco Secure Workload will consistently provide protection by discovering workload process anomalies, stopping threats immediately, minimizing the risk threat surface, and aborting any lateral movement.

Today’s ecosystems are very elastic, and in the application-focused dynamic of today’s aggressive marketplace, Cisco Secure Workload delivers a robust security solution that works effectively with today’s most popular applications. The solution uniquely surrounds each and every workload to ensure organizations are able to keep their data, network, and applications safe and secure at all times. Cisco Secure Workload ensures that enterprise organizations can maintain secure applications by consistently building firewalls around every workload level throughout the entire ecosystem. The solution can manage applications that are deployed on containers, virtual machines, or bare-metal servers.

Cisco Secure workload is able to meet an organization's busy needs and offers flexible options such as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and on-premises options. Using the Secure Workload SaaS options, users receive all the benefits of Cisco Secure Workload protection without the hassle of having to deploy and maintain the platform on premises. Users are responsible for acquiring the necessary software licensing and deploying software agents. Using SaaS, Secure Workload runs in the cloud and is operated and maintained by Cisco. This option offers the ability to scale easily and is a popular choice for SaaS-first and SaaS-only clients. Many organizations find they get the best TCO and achieve the best productivity and profitability using the SaaS options.

When choosing on-premises options, organizations choose between hardware-based appliance models (large or small form factors). Platform selection is dependent on scalability goals, the desired fidelity level of flow telemetry, and the actual number of workloads. When a user chooses to configure Cisco Secure Workload for a conversation-only flow telemetry for all workloads, each platform has the capability to scale up vertically twice the default platform scale. Additionally, with Secure Workload, it is possible for the platform to be scaled horizontally in order to satisfy the demands of extra large widely distributed enterprise environments using federation capabilities.

Cisco Secure Workload also provides a robust disaster recovery (DR) tool, which helps to make it a complete, comprehensive solution. The DR allows for continuous restore and backup capabilities that enable users to quickly remediate operations and data to a standby cluster in the event of a drastic failure or disaster.

Reviews from Real Users

“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. Other valuable features include vast support for annotations, flexible user applications, machine learning, automatic classification, and hierarchical policies.” - CTO at a tech vendor

Cisco

Microsoft Defender for Cloud is a comprehensive security solution that provides advanced threat protection for cloud workloads. It offers real-time visibility into the security posture of cloud environments, enabling organizations to quickly identify and respond to potential threats. With its advanced machine learning capabilities, Microsoft Defender for Cloud can detect and block sophisticated attacks, including zero-day exploits and fileless malware.

The solution also provides automated remediation capabilities, allowing security teams to quickly and easily respond to security incidents. With Microsoft Defender for Cloud, organizations can ensure the security and compliance of their cloud workloads, while reducing the burden on their security teams.

Microsoft

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.

Buyer's Guide

Cisco Secure Workload vs. Microsoft Defender for Cloud

January 2025

Free Report: Cisco Secure Workload vs. Microsoft Defender for Cloud

Find out what your peers are saying about Cisco Secure Workload vs. Microsoft Defender for Cloud and other solutions. Updated: January 2025.

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