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IBM Security QRadar vs Microsoft Defender for Identity comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary
 

Categories and Ranking

IBM Security QRadar
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
204
Ranking in other categories
Log Management (6th), Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) (4th), User Entity Behavior Analytics (UEBA) (1st), Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) (18th), Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR) (4th), Managed Detection and Response (MDR) (10th), Extended Detection and Response (XDR) (14th)
Microsoft Defender for Iden...
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.8
Number of Reviews
17
Ranking in other categories
Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) (5th), Microsoft Security Suite (7th), Identity Threat Detection and Response (ITDR) (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

While both are Security Software solutions, they serve different purposes. IBM Security QRadar is designed for Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) and holds a mindshare of 9.5%, up 9.3% compared to last year.
Microsoft Defender for Identity, on the other hand, focuses on Identity Threat Detection and Response (ITDR), holds 31.7% mindshare, down 38.8% since last year.
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)
Identity Threat Detection and Response (ITDR)
 

Featured Reviews

Muzzamil Hussain - PeerSpot reviewer
Is easy to integrate and doesn't require maintenance
One major drawback we are facing is in the area of IBM Security QRadar integration with flat file databases. IBM Security QRadar does not support flat file database integration. We are currently facing an issue with respect to the database, which you normally call a NoSQL database. There is no direct integration mechanism available with IBM Security QRadar. We have to approach IBM and generate a ticket so that they can develop a custom method for the integration. In database integration, we are facing issues with IBM Security QRadar. The solution does not support the integration of flat file databases. Certain organizations have flat file databases. IBM does not support direct integration with some databases. We had to create a plug, and we requested IBM to develop a parser, but it is taking IBM a couple of months to develop it. I think a flat-file database should be supported directly instead of developing a parser plugin. There should be a more refined threat intelligence platform, and cross-integration should be possible with locally available threat intelligence platforms.
Sachin Vinay - PeerSpot reviewer
Easily detects advanced attacks based on user behavior
The best feature is security monitoring, which detects and investigates suspicious user activities. It can easily detect advanced attacks based on the behavior. The credentials are securely stored, so it reduces the risk of compromise. It will monitor user behavior based on artificial intelligence to protect the identities in your organization. It will even help secure the on-premise Active Directory. It syncs from the cloud to on-premise, and on-premise modifications will be reflected in the cloud. Identity harvesting is the most common threat. Legacy Microsoft solutions and Amazon face the same issues in the cloud. Users don't implement other security mechanisms in the cloud. In an on-premise environment, we would have multiple security devices like firewalls and several layers of security. Cloud users are less bothered because cloud features are there and only need to be configured. Microsoft Defender for Cloud is the best solution because all threats are completely visible, and it has a great dashboard. The dashboard displays each threat and score, so we can identify the threat rating and act efficiently to avoid compromising user identities. We have a single sign-on feature on the cloud. If we lose a single set of identities, it can compromise the entire organization, including cloud and on-premise. The same identities are being used everywhere. The user activity has to be completely visible on the dashboard, and it has to generate a pattern. It will notify us if there is any security breach. It is a complete monitoring set. Minor changes in the user identity can lead to data leakage. If a password is changed in the cloud, it will be reflected automatically in the on-premise. This minor change will trigger an alert in Microsoft Defender for Identity. It ensures that each cloud identity is well protected from spoofing. It has a comprehensive database of well-known spoofing techniques, enabling us to provide cloud identity protection completely. It has a vast scope because it is completely single sign-on. In the emerging industry, we use single sign-on because users need to authenticate, but it's challenging to remember multiple passwords. Once your user signs in, you can access all the data. An identity compromise would lead to various issues and affect the data on-premises. Defender maintains a constantly updated database with the latest signatures, attack models, and threats. If it detects one threat, it will monitor the suspicious event and give us frequent alerts. Identity protection is vital because we use an identity mechanism for everything, including firewall-related activities. The exact identity used in the cloud is used in the most complex firewalls. We require an excellent migration technique to regain this user credential if something gets compromised. Blocking this requires a massive set of procedures. Microsoft Defender comprehensively monitors identity and provides frequent alerts regarding any issue, so we don't need to think of anything else. Defender's bidirectional sync capabilities are helpful because we need to sync data from multiple directions, including tenant-to-tenant, on-premise-to-cloud, and cloud-to-cloud syncing. As a university, we have multiple tenants, so we need to sync or access data across platforms. That way, everything is more secure, and Microsoft Defender for Cloud also provides ample security for cloud transfers. The bidirectional sync capabilities are flawless—10 out of 10. Our on-premise Active Directory is perfectly synced with the Azure AD. Everything is synced with on-premise, and changes are reflected in minutes. If a problem with identity is addressed on the cloud, the fix will be mirrored on-premise and vice versa. Microsoft Defender for Cloud and Identity are bundled. If we have these two solutions, we don't need to worry about anything else or third-party antivirus. Microsoft Defender for Identity acts as a link to all the Microsoft security features that require identity-based validation. Microsoft Defender instantly provides identity security for all our applications, and users need not worry about typing their passwords. Even in situations with less complex encryption mechanisms, users don't need to worry about typing in their passwords. Defender will check and monitor if there are any flaws in that, and it will let us know if there are any issues. We're a Microsoft shop, so everything works together. If one feature isn't working, everything will be affected. If Defender isn't working, half of our Microsoft security features will be dead. Without identity security, user data can easily be compromised, and data can fall into the hands of intruders or other hackers. The solutions have to complement each other. If anything got wrong, the entire setup would have flaws. Microsoft security has a legacy security mechanism. A while back, we might have gone with Defender for Endpoint, but Microsoft has also grown into the face of the cloud. The same Defender solution is completely maintaining cloud security. We can imagine Microsoft's vast scale and how Defender can protect the cloud environment from vulnerabilities and attacks. We are definitely delighted with Microsoft products. The dashboard features are fantastic because it provides a comprehensive overview. It has a great alert mechanism and log inspector that tracks when users access various servers. With this kind of identity validation, we can control which servers the users can access. We have total visibility from the dashboard. We can track identity usage even if there are no issues. That is an essential advantage.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"What I like the most about it is that you can very easily install and configure it. As compared to other SIEM solutions, for which you need to know and do a lot more to prepare your SIEM environment, QRadar is much simpler to install and configure. There are various options in the Admin console. In the Admin tab, you can design dashboards and view various graphs. It has a lot of attractive features, and you don't need to configure everything on your own."
"The visibility it gives you into your infrastructure has been great."
"It provides many options for searching. I can see devices from different vendors, like Cisco, in one interface, which is good for me."
"I have found its network traffic log, network bit log, and QBI most valuable."
"The event collector, flow collector, PCAP and SOAR are valuable."
"This solution provides me with various alarms, and I have found security issues with some of my other products."
"Integrations are quite a useful and key feature of this solution. It has integration with the CVSS score, which is a central point for all the data and scores about the threats. There is an IBM Bluemix dashboard that is integrated with the CVSS score."
"The playbook engine is flexible and allows for the graphical visualization of processes, enabling the implementation of dynamic playbooks for incident response or testing."
"Microsoft Defender for Identity provides excellent visibility into threats by leveraging real-time analytics and data intelligence."
"The most valuable aspect is its connection to Microsoft Sentinel and Defender for Endpoint, and giving exact timelines for incidents and when certain events occured during an incident."
"All the integration it has with different Microsoft packages, like Teams and Office, is good."
"The basic security monitoring at its core feature is the most valuable aspect. But also the investigative parts, the historical logging of events over the network are extremely interesting because it gives an in-depth insight into the history of account activity that is really easy to read, easy to follow, and easy to export."
"The feature I like the most about Defender for Identity is the entity tags. They give you the ability to identify sensitive accounts, devices, and groups. You also have honeytoken entities, which are devices that are identified as "bait" for fraudulent actors."
"One of our users had the same password for every personal and company account. That was a problem because she started receiving phishing emails that could compromise all of her accounts. Defender told us that the user was not changing their password."
"It automates routine testing and helps automate the finding of high-value alerts."
"Defender for Identity has not affected the end-user experience."
 

Cons

"They need to improve their threat intelligence feed and they need to improve their user behavior analytics modules."
"From a functionality point of view there are issues sometimes."
"The product does not have a team for investigating malware."
"I would like the rule creation interface to be much more user-friendly in the next release."
"Some UI enhancements would be nice, such as exporting custom event properties and the ability to export rules."
"We have had problems with networking."
"In a future release, the solution could provide malware analysis."
"IBM QRadar User Behavior Analytics is good, but I think the functionality should be much more integrated. You should have easy access to the artifacts if you are doing a particular investigation. It's good, but other team solutions like LogRhythm are actually merging the functionality. So, I think that is something IBM can work on."
"When the data leaves the cloud, there are security issues."
"I would like to be able to do remediation from the platform because it is just a scanner right now. If you onboard a device, it shows you what is happening, but you can't use it to fix things. You need to go into the system to fix it instead."
"The solution could improve how it handles on-premises Android-related attacks."
"Microsoft should look at what competing vendors like CrowdStrike and Broadcom are doing and incorporate those features into Sentinel and Defender. At the same time, I think the intelligence inside the product is improving fast. They should incorporate more zero-trust and hybrid trust approaches. They need to build up threat intelligence based on threats and methods used in attacks on other companies."
"One potential area for improvement could be exploring flexibility in the installation of Microsoft Defender for Identity agents."
"Defender for Identity gives us visibility, but we often get false positives from Azure that take us down the garden path. We go through 30 incidents each day and most of those are false positives or benign positive alerts. Occasionally, we get true positive alerts."
"An area for improvement is the administrative interface. It's basic compared to other administrative centers. They could make it more user-friendly and easier to navigate."
"The solution could be better at using group-managed access and they could replace it with broad-based access controls."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"IBM's Qradar is not for small companie. Unfortunately, it would be 'overkill' to place it plainly. The pricing would be too much."
"It's not expensive for the resources that it gives you."
"The price of this solution is a little high."
"There is a license to use this solution, which is paid annually. However, there are subscription options available."
"An X-Force feed is free with QRadar."
"It would be great if this product were cheaper."
"The price of this product is high."
"On a scale of one to ten, I rate the price a one, where one is an extremely expensive product, and ten is a cheap product."
"It is very affordable considering that other SIEM solutions are much more expensive and have many more licensing restrictions and fees."
"Defender for Identity is a little more expensive than other Microsoft products. Identity and Microsoft Defender for Cloud are both a bit costly."
"You won't be able to change your tenants from where you deploy them. For example, if you select Canada, they will charge you based on Canadian pricing. If you are also in London, when you deploy in Canada, the pound is higher than Canadian dollars, but your platform resources are billable in Canadian dollars. Using your pounds to pay for any of these things will be cheaper. Or, if you deploy in London, they will charge you based on your local currency."
"Microsoft Defender for Identity comes as part of the Microsoft E5 licensing stack."
"The product is costly, and we had multiple discussions with accounting to receive a discounted rate. However, on the open market, the tool is expensive."
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Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) solutions are best for your needs.
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Comparison Review

VS
Jun 28, 2015
Qradar vs. ArcSight
Continuing with the SIEM posts we have done at Infosecnirvana, this post is a Head to head comparison of the two Industry leading SIEM products in the market – HP ArcSight and IBM QRadar Both the products have consistently been in the Gartner Leaders Quadrant. Both HP and IBM took over niche SIEM…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
23%
Computer Software Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Government
6%
Computer Software Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Government
9%
Manufacturing Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What are the biggest differences between Securonix UEBA, Exabeam, and IBM QRadar?
It mostly depends on your use-cases and environment. Exabeam and Securonix have a stronger UEBA feature set, friendlier GUI and are not licensed based on capacity (amount of logs and information in...
What SOC product do you recommend?
For tools I’d recommend: -SIEM- LogRhythm -SOAR- Palo Alto XSOAR Doing commercial w/o both (or at least an XDR) is asking to miss details that are critical, and ending up a statistic. Also, rememb...
What do you like most about IBM QRadar?
The event collector, flow collector, PCAP and SOAR are valuable.
What do you like most about Microsoft Defender for Identity?
Microsoft Defender for Identity provides excellent visibility into threats by leveraging real-time analytics and data intelligence.
What needs improvement with Microsoft Defender for Identity?
The solution could improve how it handles on-premises Android-related attacks. Without Microsoft Defender, it can be challenging to check which accounts are compromised and to analyze activities on...
What is your primary use case for Microsoft Defender for Identity?
We use Microsoft Defender for Identity to prevent user account-level attacks such as lateral move attacks and pass-the-hash attacks on our on-premises servers. We leverage its features to mitigate ...
 

Also Known As

IBM QRadar, QRadar SIEM, QRadar UBA, QRadar on Cloud, QRadar, IBM QRadar User Behavior Analytics, IBM QRadar Advisor with Watson
Azure Advanced Threat Protection, Azure ATP, MS Defender for Identity
 

Learn More

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Clients across multiple industries, such as energy, financial, retail, healthcare, government, communications, and education use QRadar.
Microsoft Defender for Identity is trusted by companies such as St. Luke’s University Health Network, Ansell, and more.
Find out what your peers are saying about IBM Security QRadar vs. Microsoft Defender for Identity and other solutions. Updated: July 2023.
816,406 professionals have used our research since 2012.