Cisco Secure Workload vs Microsoft Defender for Cloud comparison

Cisco Secure Workload vs. Microsoft Defender for Cloud

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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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Javier_Rodriguez

Cloud Consultant at i-Community AG

Unified security management enhances threat detection and streamlines user experience

At the moment, we work with Sophos, SentinelOne, or Microsoft Defender. Most of our customers have Microsoft infrastructure, and they are cloud-only customers with Microsoft business licensing. I primarily recommend Microsoft Defender for customers who already have Microsoft infrastructure The…

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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 solution helped free other staff to work on other projects or other tasks. We basically just had to do a bunch of upfront configuring. With it, we do not have to spend as much time in the console."

"The management console is highly intuitive to comprehend and operate."

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

"The mean time to detect has been reduced."

"Cloud Native Security offers a valuable tool called an offensive search engine."

"I did a lot of research before signing up and doing the demo. They have a good reputation as far as catching threats early on."

"The most valuable aspects of PingSafe are its alerting system and the remediation guidance it provides."

"Singularity Cloud Native Security provides us with a platform to scan instances when they are getting created, and the dashboard helps us to identify the critical issues."

More SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security pros

"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."

"A complete and powerful micro-segmentation solution."

"The product provides multiple-device integration."

"Secure Workload's best feature is that it's an end-to-end offering from Cisco."

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

"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."

"Scalability is its most valuable feature."

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

More Cisco Secure Workload pros

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

"The solution's coordinated detection and response across devices and identities is impressive because it is complete."

"When we started out, our secure score was pretty low. We adopted some of the recommendations that Security Center set out and we were able to make good progress on improving it. It had been in the low thirties and is now in the upper eighties."

"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."

"I find Microsoft Defender for Cloud's KQL very flexible and powerful. It's really easy to search through with KQL queries to find the security breaches and incidents and to track down the breach itself."

"The most valuable features of this solution are the vulnerability assessments and the glossary of compliance."

"Good compliance policies."

"The product has given us more insight into potential avenues for attack paths."

More Microsoft Defender for Cloud pros

Cons

"In some cases, the rules are strictly enforced but do not align with real-world use cases."

"While the future roadmap presented by SentinelOne appears promising, I hope the envisioned advancements are realistically achievable and that the gap between current offerings and long-term goals is not too significant."

"We can customize security policies but lack auditing capabilities."

"SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security has limited legacy system support and may not fully support older operating systems or legacy environments."

"PingSafe is an excellent CSPM tool, but the CWPP features need to improve, and there is a scope for more application security posture management features. There aren't many ASPM solutions on the market, and existing ones are costly. I would like to see PingSafe develop into a single pane of glass for ASPM, CSPM, and CWPP. Another feature I'd like to see is runtime protection."

"I would like PingSafe to add real-time detection of vulnerabilities and cloud misconfigurations."

"Crafting customized policies can be tricky."

"Sometimes the Storyline ID is a bit wacky."

More SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security cons

"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."

"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."

"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 product must be integrated with the cloud."

"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."

"It is not so easy to use and configure. It needs a bunch of further resources to work, which is mainly the biggest downside of it. The deployment is huge."

More Cisco Secure Workload cons

"However, some Copilot features aren't available in the GCP environment. This is something we hope will be addressed in the future."

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

"While we are satisfied with Defender for Cloud's features, an AI enhancement could potentially provide better advice and adapt more effectively to our environment."

"For Kubernetes, I was using Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). To see that whatever is getting deployed into AKS goes through the correct checks and balances in terms of affinities and other similar aspects and follows all the policies, we had to use a product called Stackrox. At a granular level, the built-in policies were good for Kubernetes, but to protect our containers from a coding point of view, we had to use a few other products. For example, from a programming point of view, we were using Checkmarx for static code analysis. For CIS compliance, there are no CIS benchmarks for AKS. So, we had to use other plugins to see that the CIS benchmarks are compliant. There are CIS benchmarks for Kubernetes on AWS and GCP, but there are no CIS benchmarks for AKS. So, Azure Security Center fell short from the regulatory compliance point of view, and we had to use one more product. We ended up with two different dashboards. We had Azure Security Center, and we had Stackrox that had its own dashboard. The operations team and the security team had to look at two dashboards, and they couldn't get an integrated piece. That's a drawback of Azure Security Center. Azure Security Center should provide APIs so that we can integrate its dashboard within other enterprise dashboards, such as the PowerBI dashboard. We couldn't get through these aspects, and we ended up giving Reader security permission to too many people, which was okay to some extent, but when we had to administer the users for the Stackrox portal and Azure Security Center, it became painful."

"With the new Copilot functionality available everywhere, it is challenging to pinpoint areas for improvement. If I put in a lot of thought, I might identify things, but right now, nothing significant pops into my mind, but there is always room for more transparency, especially in pricing."

"One of the main challenges that we have been facing with Azure Security Center is the cost. The costs are really a complex calculation, e.g., to calculate the monthly costs. Azure is calculating on an hourly basis for use of the resource. Because of this, we found it really complex to promote what will be our costs for the next couple of months. I think if Azure could reduce the complex calculation and come up with straightforward cost mapping that would be very useful from a product point of view."

"The product was a bit complex to set up earlier, however, it is a bit streamlined now."

"Sometimes it's very difficult to determine when I need Microsoft Defender for Cloud for a special resource group or a special kind of product."

More Microsoft Defender for Cloud cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"PingSafe's pricing is good because it provides us with a solution."

"For pricing, it currently seems to be in line with market rates."

"The features included in PingSafe justify its price point."

"It is not that expensive. There are some tools that are double the cost of PingSafe. It is good on the pricing side."

"PingSafe falls within the typical price range for cloud security platforms."

"PingSafe is affordable."

"We have an enterprise license. It is affordable. I'm not sure, but I think we pay 150,000 rupees per month."

"SentinelOne provided competitive pricing compared to other vendors, and we are satisfied with the deal."

More SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security pricing and cost advice

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

"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."

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

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

"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."

"The licensing is straightforward but can become expensive if you cover everything. You must balance the cost against the importance of what needs covering."

"I rate Microsoft Defender a three out of ten for affordability. The price could be a little lower."

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

"This is a worldwide service and depending on the country, there will be different prices."

"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."

"I'm not privy to that information, but I know it's probably close to a million dollars a year."

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

More Microsoft Defender for Cloud pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

19%

Financial Services Firm

15%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Computer Software Company

28%

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...

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for PingSafe?

The pricing is somewhat high compared to other market tools. This cost can be particularly prohibitive for small busi...

What needs improvement with PingSafe?

To enhance the notification system's efficiency, resolved issues should be promptly removed from the portal. Currentl...

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.

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

I don't have visibility into the specific costs, but it seems to be a significant concern for our organization. Every...

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Product Reports

SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security

October 2024

SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security report

Download SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security product report

Cisco Secure Workload

Download Cisco Secure Workload product report

Microsoft Defender for Cloud

Download Microsoft Defender for Cloud product report

Also Known As

PingSafe

Cisco Tetration

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

Learn More

SentinelOne

Cisco

Microsoft

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.

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

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.

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.

Cisco Secure Workload vs. Microsoft Defender for Cloud