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Lacework vs Microsoft Defender for Cloud comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Sep 16, 2024
 

Categories and Ranking

SentinelOne Singularity Clo...
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Ranking in Vulnerability Management
6th
Ranking in Container Security
3rd
Ranking in Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP)
4th
Ranking in Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM)
4th
Ranking in Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPP)
3rd
Ranking in Compliance Management
3rd
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
8.1
Number of Reviews
92
Ranking in other categories
Cloud and Data Center Security (5th)
Lacework
Ranking in Vulnerability Management
13th
Ranking in Container Security
12th
Ranking in Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP)
10th
Ranking in Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM)
12th
Ranking in Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPP)
10th
Ranking in Compliance Management
7th
Average Rating
8.6
Number of Reviews
10
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Microsoft Defender for Cloud
Ranking in Vulnerability Management
7th
Ranking in Container Security
5th
Ranking in Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP)
3rd
Ranking in Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM)
3rd
Ranking in Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPP)
4th
Ranking in Compliance Management
2nd
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.2
Number of Reviews
56
Ranking in other categories
Container Management (10th), Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) (3rd), Microsoft Security Suite (3rd)
 

Featured Reviews

Andrew W - PeerSpot reviewer
Aug 29, 2024
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.
Robert Croteau - PeerSpot reviewer
Dec 16, 2022
It provides a good overview of our security posture
The most valuable feature is Lacework's ability to distill all the security and audit logs. I recommend it to my customers. Normally, when I consult for other customers that are getting into the cloud, we use native security tools. It's more of a rule-based engine. They have to go in and put their policies in place. It's hard for them to implement that, especially if they don't have a real security team. The team's policymakers don't do anything. Lacework takes out all the noise and gives them bits of things that actually matter with the application after it learns the behavior.
Anurag Awasthi - PeerSpot reviewer
Oct 26, 2022
Offers excellent firewall management and visibility into threats in a stable, integrated security suite
The solution's robust security posture is the most valuable feature. We have a lot of firewalls, and we can manage them in the solution through the firewall manager. We can set up an Azure firewall and centralize the management policy. The solution provides excellent visibility into threats, and it's a cloud-based integrated solution, so we don't have to worry about any third-party products or services. Microsoft provides so many options, and that's great. Defender for Cloud generates reports we can use as an assessment, as it allows us to see the services in our environment and our points of highest risk. The solution's threat intelligence helps us prepare for threats before they hit and take proactive steps, which is very useful for analysis.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"All the features we use are equal and get the job done."
"The offensive security where they do a fix is valuable. They go to a misconfiguration and provide detailed alerts on what could be there. They also provide a remediation feature where if we give the permission, they can also go and fix the issue."
"The most valuable features of PingSafe are cloud misconfiguration, Kubernetes, and IaC scanning."
"Support has been very helpful and provides regular feedback and help whenever needed. They've been very useful."
"It has a user-friendly dashboard that I can access without any difficulty."
"Cloud Native Security offers a valuable tool called an offensive search engine."
"My favorite feature is Storyline."
"Our previous product took a lot of man hours to manage. Once we got Singularity Cloud Workload Security, it freed up our time to work on other tasks."
"The best feature, in my opinion, is the ease of use."
"The compliance reports are definitely most valuable because they save time and are accurate. So, instead of relying on a human going through and checking or providing me with a report, I could just log into Lacework and see for myself."
"For the most part, out-of-the-box, it tells you right away about the things you need to work on. I like the fact that it prioritizes alerts based on severity, so that you can focus your efforts on anything that would be critical/high first, moderate second, and work your way down, trying to continue to improve your security posture."
"The most valuable feature, from a compliance perspective, is the ability to use Lacework as a platform for multiple compliance standards. We have to meet multiple standards like PCI, SOC 2, CIS, and whatever else is out there. The ability to have reports generated, per security standard, is one of the best features for me."
"Lacework is helping a lot in reducing the noise of the alerts. Usually, whenever you have a tool in place, you have a lot of noise in terms of alerts, but the time for an engineer to look into those alerts is limited. Lacework is helping us to consolidate the information that we are getting from the agents and other sources. We are able to focus only on the things that matter, which is the most valuable thing for us. It saves time, and for investigations, we have the right context to take action."
"The most valuable aspects are identifying vulnerabilities—things that are out there that we aren't aware of—as well as finding what path of access attackers could use, and being able to see open SSL or S3 buckets and the like."
"I find the cloud configuration compliance scanning mature. It generates a lot of data and supports major frameworks like ISO 27001 or SOC 2, providing reports and datasets. Another feature I appreciate is setting custom alerts for specific events. Additionally, I value the agent-based monitoring and scanning for compute nodes. It gives us deeper insights into our workloads and helps identify vulnerabilities across our deployed assets."
"The most valuable feature is Lacework's ability to distill all the security and audit logs. I recommend it to my customers. Normally, when I consult for other customers that are getting into the cloud, we use native security tools. It's more of a rule-based engine."
"Some of the most valuable features of Microsoft Defender for Cloud include its effectiveness in threat detection through unsupervised machine learning, CTI, and advanced sandboxing."
"The security policy is the most valuable feature for us. We can go into the environment settings and attach any globally recognized framework like ISO or any benchmark."
"The technical support is very good."
"The solution is very easy to deploy."
"I've seen benefits since implementing Microsoft Defender for Cloud. It's easy to manage for our large organization as an endpoint security solution. It integrates well with Office 365 and Windows 11, which is better than before. Patching, updates, and threat protection are all handled together now. Its AI features help predict threats."
"Good compliance policies."
"Defender is user-friendly and provides decent visibility into threats."
"The first valuable feature was the fact that it gave us a list of everything that users were surfing on the web. Having the list, we could make decisions about those sites."
 

Cons

"We are experiencing problems with Cloud Native Security reporting."
"Once all components, including the cloud piece and container runtime piece, integrate further and incorporate an AI layer for better comprehension, it will greatly enhance the utility of Singularity Cloud Security."
"I would like PingSafe's detections to be openly available online instead of only accessible through their portal. Other tools have detections that are openly available without going through the tool."
"The integration with Oracle has room for improvement."
"The Automation tab is an add-on that doesn’t work properly. They provide a list of scripts that don’t work and I have asked support to assist but they won’t help. When running on various endpoints the script doesn’t work and if it does, it’s only a couple. There are a lot of useful scripts that would be beneficial to run forensics, event logs, and process lists running on the endpoint."
"I want PingSafe to integrate additional third-party resources. For example, PingSafe is compatible with Azure and AWS, but Azure AD isn't integrated with AWS. If PingSafe had that ability, it would enrich the data because how users interact with our AWS environment is crucial. All the identity-related features require improvement."
"I'd like to see better onboarding documentation."
"SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security could be improved with easier integrations to the Singularity Data Lake, particularly for various vendors."
"Lacework has not reduced the number of alerts we get. We've actually had to add resources as a result of using it because the application requires a lot of people to understand it to get the value out of it properly."
"Visibility is lacking, and both compliance-related metrics and IAM security control could be improved."
"There are a couple of the difficulties we encounter in the realm of cybersecurity, or security as a whole, that relate to potentially limited clarity. Having the capacity to perceive the configuration aspect and having the ability to contribute to it holds substantial advantages, in my view. It ranks high, primarily due to its role in guaranteeing compliance and the potential to uncover vulnerabilities, which could infiltrate the system and introduce potential risks. I had been exploring a specific feature that captured my interest. However, just yesterday, I participated in a product update session that announced the imminent arrival of this feature. The feature involves real-time alerting. This was something I had been anticipating, and it seems that this capability is now being integrated, possibly as part of threat intelligence. While anomaly events consistently and promptly appear in the console, certain alerts tend to experience delays before being displayed. Yet, with the recent product update, this issue is expected to be resolved. Currently, a comprehensive view of all policies is available within the console. However, I want a more tailored display of my compliance posture, focusing specifically on policies relevant to me. For instance, if I'm not subject to HIPAA regulations, I'd prefer not to see the HIPAA compliance details. It's worth noting that even with this request, there exists a filtering mechanism to control the type of compliance information visible. This flexibility provides a workaround to my preference, which is why it's challenging for me to definitively state my exact request."
"The solution lacks a cohesive data model, making extracting the necessary data from the platform challenging. It uses its own LQL query language, and each database across different layers and modules is structured differently, complicating correlation efforts. Consequently, I had to create extensive custom reports outside Lacework because their default dashboards didn't communicate risk metrics. They're addressing these issues by redesigning their tools, including introducing the dashboard, which is a step closer to actionable insights but still needs refinement."
"Its integrations with third-party SIEMs can be better. That is one of the things that we discussed with them."
"The configuration and setup of alerts should be easier. They should make it easier to integrate with systems like Slack and Datadog. I didn't spend too much time on it, but to me, it wasn't as simple as the alerting that I've seen on other systems."
"A feature that I have requested from them is the ability to sort alerts and policies based on a security framework. Right now, when you go into alerts, you have hundreds and hundreds of them that you have to manually pick. It would be useful to have categories for CIS Benchmark or SOC 2 and be able to display all the alerts and policies for one security framework."
"Lacework lacks remediation features, but I believe they're working on that. They're focused on the reporting aspect, but other features need to improve. They're also adding some compliance features, so it's not worth saying they need to get better at it."
"There are challenges with the licensing policies, which are quite complicated."
"Most customer teams need more training on this type of product."
"For improvements, I'd like to see more use cases integrated with Microsoft Sentinel and support for multi-cloud environments beyond just Azure."
"Defender is occasionally unreliable. It isn't 100% efficient in terms of antivirus detection, but it isn't an issue most of the time. It's also somewhat difficult to train new security analysts to use Defender."
"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."
"Features like code scanning and pipeline scanning are not included in the solution."
"Microsoft sources most of their threat intelligence internally, but I think they should open themselves up to bodies that provide feel intelligence to build a better engine. There may be threats out there that they don't report because their team is not doing anything on that and they don't have arrangements with another party that is involved in that research."
"Azure's system could be more on point like AWS support. For example, if I have an issue with AWS, I create a support ticket, then I get a call or a message. With Azure support, you raise a ticket, and somebody calls back depending on their availability and the priority, which might not align with your business priority."
 

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."
"It's a fair price for what you get. We are happy with the price as it stands."
"The features included in PingSafe justify its price point."
"Their pricing appears to be based simply on the number of accounts we have, which is common for cloud-based products."
"The tool is cost-effective."
"PingSafe falls somewhere in the middle price range, neither particularly cheap nor expensive."
"It's not expensive. The product is in its initial growth stages and appears more competitive compared to others. It comes in different variants, and I believe the enterprise version costs around $55 per user per year. I would rate it a five, somewhere fairly moderate."
"The pricing is fair. It is not inexpensive, and it is also not expensive. When managing a large organization, it is going to be costly, but it meets the business needs. In terms of what is out there on the market, it is fair and comparable to what I have seen, so I do not have any complaints about the cost"
"The licensing fee was approximately $80,000 USD, per year."
"The pricing has gotten better. That scenario was somewhat unstable. They have a rather interesting licensing structure. I believe you get 200 resources per "Lacework unit." It was difficult, in the beginning, to figure out exactly what a "resource" was... That was a problem until about a year or so ago. They have improved it and it has stabilized quite a bit."
"My smaller deployments cost around 200,000 a year, which is probably not as expensive as Wiz."
"It is slightly expensive. It depends on how big your environment is, but it is expensive. Right now, we are spending a lot of money. We have covered all of the cloud providers and most of our colocation facilities as well, so we cannot complain, but it is slightly expensive. It is not super expensive."
"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."
"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."
"I'm not privy to that information, but I know it's probably close to a million dollars a year."
"Microsoft's licensing and pricing are sometimes complicated. If someone is new to Microsoft's licensing, they might have difficulty with it."
"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."
"The cost of the license is based on the subscriptions that you have."
"The price of the solution is good for the features we receive and there is an additional cost for Microsoft premier support. However, some of my potential customers have found it to be expensive and have gone on to choose another solution."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
19%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Insurance Company
5%
Computer Software Company
18%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Retailer
6%
Computer Software Company
16%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
7%
 

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?
I am personally not taking care of the pricing part, but when we moved from CrowdStrike to Singularity Cloud Native S...
What needs improvement with PingSafe?
They can provide some kind of alert when a new type of risk is there. There can be a specific type of alert showing t...
How would you compare Wiz vs Lacework?
Wiz and Lacework sucks... Buy Orca.
What do you like most about Lacework?
Polygraph compliance is a valuable feature. In our perspective, it delivers significant benefits. The clarity it offe...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Lacework?
My smaller deployments cost around 200,000 a year, which is probably not as expensive as Wiz.
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?
The pricing is good. It is license-based, and we are not utilizing all of the features, like API and other functional...
 

Also Known As

PingSafe
Polygraph
Microsoft Azure Security Center, Azure Security Center, Microsoft ASC, Azure Defender
 

Learn More

Video not available
 

Interactive Demo

Demo not available
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Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
J.Crew, AdRoll, Snowflake, VMWare, Iterable, Pure Storage, TrueCar, NerdWallet, and more.
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 Lacework vs. Microsoft Defender for Cloud and other solutions. Updated: October 2024.
814,649 professionals have used our research since 2012.