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Cisco Secure Workload vs Microsoft Defender for Cloud comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 19, 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

SentinelOne Singularity Clo...
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Ranking in Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP)
4th
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.7
Number of Reviews
116
Ranking in other categories
Vulnerability Management (5th), Cloud and Data Center Security (2nd), Container Security (3rd), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (3rd), Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPP) (3rd), Compliance Management (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 (9th), Microsegmentation Software (4th), Cisco Security Portfolio (8th)
Microsoft Defender for Cloud
Ranking in Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP)
1st
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
79
Ranking in other categories
Vulnerability Management (7th), Container Management (9th), Container Security (7th), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (4th), Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPP) (4th), Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) (4th), Microsoft Security Suite (8th), Compliance Management (5th), Cloud Detection and Response (CDR) (2nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) category, the mindshare of SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security is 3.7%, up from 1.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Cisco Secure Workload is 2.7%, down from 2.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Microsoft Defender for Cloud is 14.8%, down from 15.8% 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 Cloud14.8%
SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security3.7%
Cisco Secure Workload2.7%
Other78.8%
Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP)
 

Featured Reviews

Ritesh P. - PeerSpot reviewer
It's more scalable and flexible than our previous solution because we don't need to install any agents
The reporting works well, but sometimes the severity classifications are inaccurate. Sometimes, it flags an issue as high-impact, but it should be a lower severity. For example, it might highlight an exposed AWS encryption key, a critical compliance issue, but it isn't tagged as a high-risk problem. That only happens about 10 percent of the time. It shows a true positive 80-90 percent of the time.
Raj Metkar - PeerSpot reviewer
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
Vibhor Goel - PeerSpot reviewer
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"My favorite feature is Storyline."
"We've seen a reduction in resources devoted to vulnerability monitoring. Before SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security we spent a lot of time monitoring and fixing these issues. SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security enabled us to divert more resources to the production environment."
"The UI is responsive and user-friendly."
"The most valuable features of SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security are cloud misconfiguration, Kubernetes, and IaC scanning."
"SentinelOne's behaviour analytics are valuable because they detect anomalies and malicious behaviour that signature-based solutions might miss."
"SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security 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."
"SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security has significantly improved our risk posture."
"SentinelOne is far superior to our previous solution, Accops, due to its seamless updates, effortless maintenance, and user-friendly interface and dashboard."
"The product provides multiple-device integration."
"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 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."
"Generally speaking, Cisco support is considered one of the best in the networking products and stack."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is that we don't have to do packet captures on the network."
"A complete and powerful micro-segmentation solution."
"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 most valuable feature is micro-segmentation, which is the most important with respect to visibility."
"Technical support is helpful."
"The main feature is the security posture assessment through the security score. I find that to be very helpful because it gives us guidance on what needs to be secured and recommendations on how to secure the workloads that have been onboarded."
"The most valuable feature for me is the variety of APIs available."
"The most valuable feature is the regulatory compliance aspect, where we utilize predefined initiatives like NIST."
"The solution is quite good and addresses many security gaps."
"It's quite a good product. It helps to understand the infections and issues you are facing."
"It's got a lot of great features."
"The UX and UI are very good. Users have more of a taste for Microsoft UI."
 

Cons

"SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security has limited legacy system support and may not fully support older operating systems or legacy environments."
"SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security could be improved with easier integrations to the Singularity Data Lake, particularly for various vendors."
"There is no break-glass account feature. They should implement this as soon as possible because we can't implement SSO without a break-glass feature."
"SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security takes four to five hours to detect and highlight an issue, and that time should be reduced."
"In version 2, a lot of rules have been deployed for Kubernetes security and CDR, which makes a lot of issues of critical severity, whereas they are not critical or of high severity. There is a mismatch of severities."
"The could improve their mean time to detect."
"If something happens in our infrastructure, the alert appears on the dashboard, but I have to log in to the dashboard and refresh it. I would prefer it to provide better alerting and notifications so that I can resolve issues on priority."
"SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security has limited legacy system support and may not fully support older operating systems or legacy environments."
"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."
"The emailed notifications are either hard to find or they are not available. Search capabilities can be improved."
"The integration could be better, especially with different types of solutions."
"The interface is really helpful for technical people, but it is not user-friendly."
"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."
"It is highly scalable, but there is a limitation that it is only available on Cisco devices."
"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."
"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."
"The pricing could be better."
"From my own perspective, they just need a product that is tailored to micro-segmentation so I can configure rules for multiple systems at once and manage it."
"Defender could improve how data is represented. It can be unstructured or slow to load."
"After getting a recommendation, it takes time for the solution to refresh properly to show that the problem has been eliminated."
"The vulnerabilities are duplicated many times."
"The cost is always a concern, but overall, it's not too bad because it is easy to use and pretty friendly."
"I would like to have the ability to customize executive reporting."
"I would like to see more connectors and plugins with other platforms."
 

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."
"PingSafe falls somewhere in the middle price range, neither particularly cheap nor expensive."
"SentinelOne is relatively cheap. If ten is the most expensive, I would rate it a seven."
"Singularity Cloud Security by SentinelOne is cost-efficient."
"It was reasonable pricing for me."
"Singularity Cloud Workload Security's licensing and price were cheaper than the other solutions we looked at."
"We have an enterprise license. It is affordable. I'm not sure, but I think we pay 150,000 rupees per month."
"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."
"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."
"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 cost for the hardware is around 300k."
"The pricing is a bit higher than we anticipated."
"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 solution is expensive, and I rate it a five to six out of ten."
"We are using the free version of the Azure Security Center."
"Azure Defender is a bit pricey. The price could be lower."
"There is a helpful cost-reducing option that allows you to integrate production subscriptions with non-production subscriptions."
"The tool is pretty expensive."
"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."
"This solution is more cost-effective than some competing products. My understanding is that it is based on the number of integrations that you have, so if you have fewer subscriptions then you pay less for the service."
"Our clients complain about the cost of Microsoft Defender for Cloud."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
16%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Government
5%
Computer Software Company
21%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Government
7%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Computer Software Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business44
Midsize Enterprise20
Large Enterprise55
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business5
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise8
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business26
Midsize Enterprise7
Large Enterprise45
 

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?
One area that could be improved in SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security is their policies; the way they have config...
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 do you like most about Microsoft Defender for Cloud?
The entire Defender Suite is tightly coupled, integrated, and collaborative.
 

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: September 2025.
870,701 professionals have used our research since 2012.