Cisco SecureX [EOL] vs Microsoft Defender for Cloud comparison

Cisco and Microsoft are both solutions in the Vulnerability Management category. 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 Oct 19, 2025

Cisco SecureX EOL and Microsoft Defender for Cloud compete in the cybersecurity and threat intelligence domain. Based on the data, Microsoft Defender for Cloud appears to have the upper hand in regulatory compliance support and pricing for enterprises due to its integration with broader Microsoft services.

Features: Cisco SecureX EOL supports robust integration with both Cisco and third-party products, offering a unified threat intelligence experience. It excels in streamlining workflows and enabling collaboration through easy investigation sharing. In contrast, Microsoft Defender for Cloud is noted for strong security recommendations and regulatory compliance, particularly valued in multi-cloud environments. It offers extensive integration with Microsoft services.

Room for Improvement: Cisco SecureX EOL could improve automation and orchestration by adding prebuilt workflows and more streamlined reporting. Users also seek expanded third-party integrations and better documentation. Microsoft Defender for Cloud needs enhancements in managing false positives and improving the pricing structure for SMBs. Users desire more intuitive interfaces and better third-party solution integrations.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Cisco SecureX EOL is recognized for high-quality support, with quick response times and integrated resources making deployment straightforward for existing Cisco customers. Microsoft Defender for Cloud offers hybrid and multi-cloud deployment options but is noted for slower support response times, especially in urgent scenarios compared to Cisco.

Pricing and ROI: Cisco SecureX EOL is seen as cost-effective, serving as a free add-on for current Cisco users, offering high ROI by reducing manual workloads. Microsoft Defender for Cloud, while offering a competitive free tier, can be expensive for SMBs with its subscription-based model. Its ROI benefits are driven by automation capabilities, enhancing security operations despite some pricing complexity.

To learn more, read our detailed Vulnerability Management Report (Updated: September 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

Zafran Security

Featured Reviews

Israel Cavazos Landini

Associate Director IT Security Operations at a pharma/biotech company with 10,001+ employees

Weekly insights and risk analysis facilitate informed security decisions

I appreciate the weekly insights Zafran provides, which include critical topics for networks and IT security, allowing us to evaluate which insights apply to our environment. The organization score feature is valuable to keep the leadership team updated on how our infrastructure fares security-wise. The applicable risk level versus base risk level feature is beneficial because prior to Zafran, we only used the base risk level, but now understand that risk depends on the asset itself. Zafran is an excellent tool.

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Dene Lewis

Head of Technical Strategy and Direction CAE Technology Services Ltd at CAE Technology Services Limited

A scalable SaaS based platform that helps with cyber threat intelligence and automated hunting

I would rate Cisco SecureX a ten out of ten. I find the product to be a fantastic platform. If you are eligible, start using it straight away. The best way to evaluate it is to start using it and see where it fits within your organization. I think it helps our customers really deliver their SecOps goals, and I see it as a core foundation of CAE's own security strategy going forward. Our partnership with Cisco is one that was built on trust over a long period of time. This has enabled us to work together to be able to provide the solutions that our customers need to drive their organizations forward. The value we add as a reseller is being able to work closer with our customers, understand them, and get intimate with their organizations. That enables us to offer them the right solutions that will help them achieve their goals.

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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

"Zafran has become an indispensable tool in our cybersecurity arsenal."

"We saw benefits from Zafran Security almost immediately after deploying it."

"We are able to see the real risk of a vulnerability on our environment with our security tools."

"Zafran is an excellent tool."

"Overall, we have seen about eighty-seven percent reduction of the number of vulnerabilities that require urgency to remediate, specifically the number of criticals."

"Integrates well with our existing security infrastructure."

"SecureX takes all the separate pieces of security within your company, adds in intelligence from different sites and services on the internet, and makes them work together."

"Our customers find the product's third-party integrations valuable. Our customers are also impressed with the tool's capability to pick up third-party threat feeds and use that as part of the decision-making process."

"The most beneficial feature of Cisco SecureX for cybersecurity efforts is its integration with other Cisco solutions and the environment. This sets it apart, as its APIs and overall integration capabilities are very strong. Additionally, its detection capabilities are commendable."

"It has evolved a lot, just that monitoring piece to the current Orchestrator piece. The additional analytics are there. They now have something called Insight, which can basically take data from Microsoft Azure AD and Intune to give us information about our endpoints. This is detailed information about the endpoints, from Secure Endpoint and all these different products. So, it is just constantly evolving. Every time that it evolves, we have more information with more visibility. There are more features that we have that just make everything so much easier, and it is in one place. I don't have to keep going back and forth. I don't have to go to Secure Endpoint and ISE to get the data. I don't have to go to Intune on Microsoft to get the information. It is all in one place."

"The ability to create firewalls online has been most valuable including the ability to create rules."

"I like that I don't have to jump around to five different products and log into five different places to view the data that it returns."

"The most valuable feature is its ability to manage all the applications and visibility. For example, if there is malware, spam, or another component that wants to attack the company in my servers, network, or applications, then SecureX will react to the problem."

More Cisco SecureX [EOL] pros

"The notification process of Microsoft Defender for Cloud has been the most valuable feature. The notification process is effortless, as it can tell me right there and then locate issues pretty fast, saving us a lot of time by not having to dig through all the warnings."

"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."

"With respect to improving our security posture, it helps us to understand where we are in terms of compliance. We can easily know when we are below the standard because of the scores it calculates."

"The most valuable feature for me is the variety of APIs available."

"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."

"One important security feature is the incident alerts. Now, with all these cyberattacks, there are a lot of incident alerts that get triggered. It is very difficult to keep monitoring everything automatically, instead our organization is utilizing the automated use case that we get from Microsoft. That has helped bring down the manual work for a lot of things."

"Microsoft Defender for Cloud is a valuable tool that integrates seamlessly with Azure Policy and our Security SIEM, simplifying implementation and enhancing security posture."

"It takes very little effort to integrate it. It also gives very good visibility into what exactly is happening."

More Microsoft Defender for Cloud pros

Cons

"The dashboarding and reporting functionality of Zafran Security is an area that definitely could use some improvements."

"I think the ability to have some enhanced reporting capabilities is something they can improve on, as they have good reports but we have asked for some specific reporting enhancements."

"Initially, we were somewhat concerned about the scalability of Zafran due to our large asset count and the substantial amount of information we needed to process."

"I would like it to integrate with another solution, e.g., DNA. I would like it to connect to that solution, but not the security aspect."

"For us, the biggest sticking point is that the product is not being designed for multi-tenancy use at present, from an MSP perspective."

"what's missing right now is the multi-tenant capability."

"The documentation can be improved and the on-prem integration. The set of applications that it was integrated with wasn't comprehensive."

"Enhancing automation capabilities could further improve the product."

"The front-end work controls the new algorithm and the firewall rules. The search feature of these rules could be improved."

"They could put in more third-party [integrations]... also more playbooks, out-of-the-box, for automation [would be helpful]."

"They could expand into more areas. The more third-parties that we have tied into it, the better. The capabilities are there. As they just continue to involve the product, the more things that you can look into, then the more analytics that you can get. Also, the more data that we can get, then the better off we will be."

More Cisco SecureX [EOL] cons

"Microsoft Graph needs improvement."

"Another thing is that Defender for Cloud uses more resources than CrowdStrike, which my current company uses. Defender for Cloud has two or three processes running simultaneously that consume memory and processor time. I had the chance to compare that with CrowdStrike a few days ago, which was significantly less. It would be nice if Defender were a little lighter. It's a relatively large installation that consumes more resources than competitors do."

"After getting a recommendation, it takes time for the solution to refresh properly to show that the problem has been eliminated."

"The most significant areas for improvement are in the security of our identity and endpoints and the posture of the cloud environment. Better protection for our cloud users and cloud apps is always welcome."

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

"Microsoft Defender for Cloud could be improved by adding capabilities for NetApp files and more PaaS resources from other vendors, not just Microsoft."

"I rate Microsoft support five out of 10. It gets better once you're escalated past the first and second levels. It's difficult to get the necessary support when tickets are first opened."

"Consistency is the area where the most improvement is needed. For example, there are some areas where the UI is not uniform across the board."

More Microsoft Defender for Cloud cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available

"For the value you get, the pricing of the solution is excellent."

"It is free. It can't get any better than that."

"The pricing is the best part of this solution. It is free if you buy Umbrella or Duo Security. It is also a good solution."

"It would be nice if they had a different pricing model. Most of our budget for projects goes towards Cisco."

"You can spend less money for another solution, but if you really want to have a good solution you have to pay. We are happy that we are getting such a good solution for what we are spending."

"The product is absolutely free to any customer. As such, the only thing one must keep in mind is that as long as he already has one Cisco security product, irregardless of what that product is, SecureX is available for free."

"The pricing is competitive, especially for education institutions. Licensing can be a little bit difficult to navigate, especially with resellers with Cisco, but for us it has been pretty easy."

"It comes free with all Cisco products. So, it is a good price."

More Cisco SecureX [EOL] pricing and cost advice

"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."

"Pricing is a consideration, but we strive to keep costs low by enabling only necessary services."

"It is bundled with our enterprise subscription, which makes it easy to go for it. It is available by default, and there is no extra cost for using the standard features."

"There are two different plans. We're using the secure basic plan, but we have used the end security plan as well. There are additional costs, but it gives us more functionalities compared to the basic plan."

"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."

"I am not involved much with the pricing but the bundle offering is good."

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

"Our clients complain about the cost of Microsoft Defender for Cloud."

More Microsoft Defender for Cloud pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

11%

Computer Software Company

Manufacturing Company

Government

Computer Software Company

30%

Manufacturing Company

Educational Organization

Comms Service Provider

Financial Services Firm

13%

Computer Software Company

13%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	4
Midsize Enterprise	7
Large Enterprise	3

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	26
Midsize Enterprise	7
Large Enterprise	45

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Zafran Security?

Since we stood Zafran Security up in our private cloud, we handle the maintenance on our side. As we opted not to use...

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What needs improvement with Zafran Security?

In terms of areas for improvement, Zafran Security is doing a really great job as a new and emerging company. Oftenti...

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What is your primary use case for Zafran Security?

My use cases for Zafran Security revolve around two primary areas. One is around vulnerability management and priorit...

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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...

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What do you like most about Microsoft Defender for Cloud?

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

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

The pricing is pretty standard.

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Zafran Security

September 2025

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Buyer's Guide

Cisco SecureX [EOL]

October 2025

Download Cisco SecureX [EOL] product report

Buyer's Guide

Microsoft Defender for Cloud

October 2025

Download Microsoft Defender for Cloud product report

Also Known As

No data available

Kenna.AppSec, Kenna.VI

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

Interactive Demo

Demo not available

Zafran Security

Demo not available

Cisco

Microsoft

Overview

Zafran Security integrates with existing security tools to identify and mitigate vulnerabilities effectively, proving that most critical vulnerabilities are not exploitable, optimizing threat management.

Zafran Security introduces an innovative operating model for managing security threats and vulnerabilities. By leveraging the threat exposure management platform, it pinpoints and prioritizes exploitable vulnerabilities, reducing risk through immediate remediation. This platform enhances your hybrid cloud security by normalizing vulnerability signals and integrating specific IT context data, such as CVE runtime presence and internet asset reachability, into its analysis. No longer reliant on patch windows, Zafran Security allows you to manage risks actively.

What are the key features of Zafran Security?

Threat Exposure Management: Utilizes existing tools to prioritize vulnerabilities and manage threats.
Integrative Analysis: Combines security data with IT context for precise vulnerability management.
Real-time Risk Reduction: Enables immediate risk management without waiting for patches.
Hybrid Cloud Compatibility: Functions across diverse cloud environments for comprehensive security.

What benefits can users expect from Zafran Security?

Improved Security: Enhances protection by efficiently identifying and mitigating risks.
Cost Efficiency: Reduces unnecessary patching expenses by confirming non-exploitable vulnerabilities.
Time Savings: Frees developers to focus on root causes by handling immediate threats.
Comprehensive Insight: Offers a holistic view of security threats and vulnerabilities.

In industries where security is paramount, such as finance and healthcare, Zafran Security provides invaluable protection by ensuring that only exploitable vulnerabilities are addressed. It allows entities to maintain robust security measures while allocating resources efficiently, fitting seamlessly into existing security strategies.

Zafran Security

Cisco SecureX is an integrated security platform that connects the breadth of Cisco's integrated security portfolio and the customer's infrastructure to create a consistent experience. The solution unifies visibility, enables automation, and strengthens your security across network, endpoints, cloud, and applications. Cisco SecureX is embedded within every Cisco Security product and supports integrations with SIEM and SOAR, so customers will not need to replace any solution or worry about layering on new technology.

Cisco SecureX Features

Cisco SecureX has many valuable key features. Some of the most useful ones include:

Unified overview: Cisco SecureX offers key metrics on transactions and threats for network, endpoints, cloud and applications. In addition, the SecureX interface is integrated into all Cisco Security technologies.

Automation and an increase in operational efficiency: With Cisco SecureX, you gain better automation of workflows for products of the Cisco Security portfolio and third parties, allowing you to focus on other more important tasks. By eliminating manual work (through automatic identification of threats using analytical data of Cisco Talos and other sources), the solution helps your organization save a significant amount of time.

Security strengthening: Cisco SecureX makes it easy to compare analytical data from a set of various sources with the telemetry received from network, endpoints, e-mail, cloud, and third-party products.

Cisco SecureX Benefits

Some of the benefits of using Cisco SecureX include:

Secure every business endeavor with an open, integrated platform that has out-of-the-box interoperability and scales to meet security needs.

Advance your security maturity level using existing resources.

Turn security from a blocker into an enabler. Cisco SecureX allows you to add new security capabilities for the threat landscape.

Maximize your operational efficiency, helping you get the most from your security investments.

Reviews from Real Users

Below are some reviews and helpful feedback written by Cisco SecureX users.

PeerSpot user Wouter H., Technical Team Lead Network & Security at Missing Piece BV, shares several reasons why he thinks the solution is fantastic. In his opinion, “SecureX takes all the separate pieces of security within your company, adds in intelligence from different sites and services on the internet, and makes them work together. If an email is received on a machine and malware is being executed, it can be put into lockdown mode. The fact that you can have a single solution that combines endpoint intelligence with email intelligence, firewalls, and publicly available intelligence is really helpful. Also, SecureX provides us with contextual awareness throughout our security ecosystem. Before SecureX, things that were not possible, or that would take days, now literally take seconds to find out.

Michal S., Infrastructure Engineer at a media company, says, “SecureX provides many measurements and has a really good dashboard. Working with it you are able to see things very clearly and you have every detail on a single display. That saves us money and time.” He also adds, “It brings all our data into a central point. It also shows us many data connections between many of our environments. SecureX gives you really good information about potential risks. You are able to find the source of a risk, a potential risk from a user or a machine.”

Blair A., Technology Director at Shawnee Heights USD #450, explains, "One of the most valuable features is the simplicity of deploying SecureX. It's very easy to do that and then you gain very detailed visibility into everything that's going on in your network and, obviously, at the device level. There's just a wealth of information that you can pull from all of these products that are part of SecureX. You know exactly if you have an issue or not."

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

NHS, Rackspace, UNC Pembroke, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Missing Piece

Microsoft Defender for Cloud is trusted by companies such as ASOS, Vatenfall, SWC Technology Partners, and more.

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