Microsoft Defender for Cloud vs Skybox Security Suite comparison

Microsoft and Tufin are both solutions in the Vulnerability Management category. Microsoft is ranked #7 with an average rating of 8.1, while Tufin is ranked #41 with an average rating of 7.3. Microsoft holds a 5.6% mindshare in VM, compared to Tufin’s 0.5% mindshare. Additionally, 94% of Microsoft users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 83% of Tufin users who would recommend it.

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Feb 25, 2025

Skybox Security Suite and Microsoft Defender for Cloud are competing within the security solutions category, focusing on network and cloud-native security respectively. Microsoft Defender for Cloud demonstrates superior feature integration, making it more valuable for its robust capabilities.

Features: Skybox Security Suite provides robust network security tools including advanced vulnerability management, network modeling, and risk analysis. Microsoft Defender for Cloud offers comprehensive threat protection, compliance management, and integrations with Azure services. While Skybox is strong in network-focused features, Microsoft Defender stands out with its holistic cloud-oriented approach, which suits large-scale cloud environments.

Room for Improvement: Skybox requires enhancements in cloud security features and scalability to better serve cloud-centric organizations. It could also improve the customization of its modules for better deployment flexibility. Microsoft Defender for Cloud could benefit from more personalized customer support and reduction in its complexity to facilitate ease of use. An improvement in integration capabilities with non-Microsoft cloud services could expand its applicability.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Skybox Security Suite is favored for its flexible deployment options suitable for complex network environments, coupled with positive customer support feedback. Microsoft Defender for Cloud excels in seamless integration within Azure, simplifying deployment for cloud-centric operations, though users perceive its support as less personalized. Skybox focuses on versatility, whereas Microsoft Defender offers smooth integration with popular cloud platforms like Azure.

Pricing and ROI: Skybox Security Suite offers a cost-effective setup that provides excellent ROI by enhancing network security measures. In contrast, Microsoft Defender for Cloud has a higher initial cost but delivers significant ROI through expansive protection across cloud infrastructures. Skybox's pricing model is efficient, while Microsoft Defender's premium pricing is justified by its advanced protection capabilities.

To learn more, read our detailed Microsoft Defender for Cloud vs. Skybox Security Suite Report (Updated: April 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Microsoft Defender for Cloud vs. Skybox Security Suite

April 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

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Vulnerability Management category, the mindshare of Zafran Security is 0.4%. The mindshare of Microsoft Defender for Cloud is 5.6%, up from 4.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Skybox Security Suite is 0.5%, down from 0.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Vulnerability Management

Featured Reviews

Israel Cavazos Landini

Associate Director IT Security Operations at Novartis

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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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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NenadMijatovic

Director of Sales at S4E Serbia

Efficient in vulnerability management, stable and easy to use

Vulnerability management is the most valuable feature because it lets you focus on the most critical vulnerabilities. That's the important thing. Here in Serbia, there are not so many companies that have too many firewalls inside one company. So, they usually don't buy this model for Firewall Assurance unless there is some compliance. So you can prove that your firewalls are compliant. So, that model is not so important here in Serbia. It's for bigger companies. So, they usually buy network assurance to build the model of the network and vulnerability management to focus on the most important vulnerabilities. Moreover, Skybox can collect data for many vendors. From the endpoint protection vendors to the network equipment vendors to other security vendors. So, it supports more than one hundred vendors to collect data from them.

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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

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

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

"Zafran is an excellent tool."

"Microsoft Defender for Cloud has significantly enhanced our overall security posture by approximately 20 to 25 percent."

"Technical support is helpful."

"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 most valuable feature is the comprehensive overview across different workloads. It allows us to see protection not just across one workload, such as virtual machines, containers, infrastructure, or data, but across all our workloads. This overall visibility is really helpful."

"The vulnerability reporting is helpful. When we initially deployed Defender, it reported many more threats than we currently see. It gave us insight into areas we had not previously considered, so we knew where we needed to act."

"The scalability of Microsoft Defender for Cloud is very good."

"Scalability is great, and I would rate it a ten out of ten."

"Microsoft Defender for Cloud can find potential phishing links and malicious code in data at rest."

More Microsoft Defender for Cloud pros

"The performance could be good because we chose it at the time, but it is too complex for us to appreciate its performance because we lack the necessary skills."

"We are currently working on rule review and compliance. The logging features are good."

"It can be integrated with a vulnerability management solution. When a client comes, apart from pitching network and firewall change management, we are recommending having vulnerability management. So, rather than just having the audit of the firewall, they can integrate it with their vulnerability management solution, which could be Rapid7, Qualys, or any other solution. This provides them the most value out of the platform. That is the way we are approaching our customer base."

"Correlates logs and threats and prioritizes; provides network maps;p provides change result context and resulting vulnerability."

"The solution's simplicity of use is its most valuable feature."

"When you import all the assets that you have, like desktops, servers, networks, devices, routers, and then firewalls, and other products, then Skybox makes like, a model of the network, but with context. So, it is not just a model in VIZIO. Or something like it like that. You get the model with context, and, like, it looks like a real network in a real-time. So you can check your network and the security of your network on that model."

"It has a good policy management feature and can provide customers with good quality outputs."

"It shows me a client's or an organization's entire network. I can see everything."

More Skybox Security Suite pros

Cons

"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."

"It needs to be simplified and made more user-friendly for a non-technical person."

"You cannot create custom use cases."

"I would like to have the ability to customize executive reporting."

"Integration into other third-party products, particularly those from tier three vendors like ManageEngine and Hexcode, has proven difficult."

"From a compliance standpoint, they can include some more metrics and some specific compliances such as GDPR."

"Customer service and support from Microsoft are very poor. Even for high-severity cases, response or resolution time can extend to three or four weeks."

"It's hard to reach someone who understands my problems. I haven't had many issues, so I haven't called them."

"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."

More Microsoft Defender for Cloud cons

"The vendor's support is terrible."

"The price could be cheaper."

"There is room for improvement in pricing. It would be better, especially if a customer bought all four modules."

"I've had issues with licensing where, when they were expiring and I asked for the updated licenses, I would the wrong ones. I think their process needs to be straightened out a little bit - I don't know if they fixed it already, it has been awhile. It wasn't as straightforward as it could have been."

"The initial setup with Skybox Security is hard. You need one or two strong security engineers on your team."

"There are multiple dashboards but no custom dashboard. It would be good to include a custom dashboard so that we can actually choose which field and what kinds of things we want to look at."

"The solution was quite technical. It would be easier to manage if the solution was more specific about aspects of the solution and provided more advisory around how to use it effectively. It would help users a lot if they were more clear about everything."

"The primary room for improvement would be to enable a web interface, which is not something which is there in the product. This is supposed to have come a year, a year and a half ago, but still has failed to come out. It still needs a client application to be installed on a workstation to be able to access that server and then run these reports. So I cannot extend that access to anybody. It has to be one administrator all the time. So unlike a web interface, where you can give multiple users simultaneous access and generate the various reports, that isn't a possibility at the moment."

More Skybox Security Suite cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available

"The cost of the license is based on the subscriptions that you have."

"The cost is fair. There aren't any costs in addition to the standard licensing fee."

"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."

"Azure Defender is definitely pricey, but their competitors cost about the same. For example, a Palo Alto solution is the same price per endpoint, but the ground strikes cost a bit more than Azure Defender. Still, it's pricey for a company like ours. Maybe well-established organizations can afford it, but it might be too costly for a startup."

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

"The tool is pretty expensive."

"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."

"The product's pricing policy is generally favorable."

More Microsoft Defender for Cloud pricing and cost advice

"With licensing, the number of network nodes becomes very expensive to the point where you have to rationalize if the tools are warranted anymore."

"Licensing is normally on a yearly basis. There may also be a perpetual license. Normally, the customers ask for a lower price. If you want to sell more, you have to think about it."

"The price is not expensive."

"The price of the Skybox Security Suite can be expensive."

"Skybox comes with extra licenses and has a change management license. The licenses are expensive, but they come with extra value."

"I've seen the pricing of every solution on the market. When you compare apples to apples, where Skybox becomes exceedingly expensive is if you look at it compared to something like FireMon that only does a fraction of what Skybox does. But if you include everything that Skybox does, it becomes way more expensive than the competition, but you're also not comparing apples to apples. If you look at FireMon, and you look at like just the firewall assurance piece, they are fairly comparable and, actually, Skybox comes in a little bit cheaper in some cases, depending on which product you're looking at."

"Pricing is on the higher side. In terms of licensing, you should buy the complete suite rather than buying only the Change Manager. I think Change Manager with Vulnerability Control is something that would be interesting to look at."

"Currently, the licensing costs me about $300 USD for the year. This is a huge amount for my environment."

More Skybox Security Suite pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

15%

Financial Services Firm

12%

Manufacturing Company

Retailer

Computer Software Company

15%

Financial Services Firm

13%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Computer Software Company

17%

Financial Services Firm

17%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Energy/Utilities Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

Questions from the Community

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

I find that the pricing for Zafran aligns well with the comprehensive features it offers. The asset and user-based li...

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What needs improvement with Zafran Security?

While Zafran Security is already a powerful tool, there are areas where it could be further improved to provide even ...

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What is your primary use case for Zafran Security?

Our primary use case for Zafran involves leveraging it to enhance our vulnerability risk scoring methodology. In toda...

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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?

Initially, the cost was reasonable, but additional services from Microsoft sometimes incur extra expenses that seem h...

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What do you like most about Skybox Security Suite?

Overall, the tool has helped us reduce risks. If any step is missing, it's easier for my team or engineers to identif...

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Skybox Security Suite?

Skybox Security Suite has indeed helped us reduce costs. The prices of AlgoSec and Skybox Security Suite are approxim...

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What needs improvement with Skybox Security Suite?

There is room for improvement in the product's user interface. It could be more user-friendly.

See all answers

Comparisons

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Compared 53% of the time

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Tenable Vulnerability Management vs Zafran Security

Compared 10% of the time

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AWS GuardDuty vs Microsoft Defender for Cloud

Compared 20% of the time

Wiz vs Microsoft Defender for Cloud

Compared 13% of the time

Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks vs Microsoft Defender for Cloud

Compared 11% of the time

Microsoft Defender XDR vs Microsoft Defender for Cloud

Compared 4% of the time

Orca Security vs Microsoft Defender for Cloud

Compared 3% of the time

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AlgoSec vs Skybox Security Suite

Compared 33% of the time

Tufin Orchestration Suite vs Skybox Security Suite

Compared 29% of the time

FireMon Security Manager vs Skybox Security Suite

Compared 14% of the time

RedSeal vs Skybox Security Suite

Compared 5% of the time

Qualys VMDR vs Skybox Security Suite

Compared 4% of the time

More Skybox Security Suite Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM)

March 2025

Download Zafran Security product report

Buyer's Guide

Microsoft Defender for Cloud

March 2025

Download Microsoft Defender for Cloud product report

Buyer's Guide

Skybox Security Suite

March 2025

Download Skybox Security Suite product report

Also Known As

No data available

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

No data available

Interactive Demo

Demo not available

Zafran Security

Microsoft

Demo not available

Tufin

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

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

Skybox Security Suite provides comprehensive tools for network and firewall compliance, vulnerability management, and change management, with a focus on risk reduction and network optimization.

Skybox Security Suite supports over 130 vendors with massive scalability and seamless integration, notably with Nessus and Qualys. Its features include network path analysis and offline attack simulation, which enhance management effectiveness. Despite its robust offering, improvements are needed in its UI, web interface, reporting detail, and customization. Automation, orchestration, and device policy provisioning require better support, and integration with tools like Rapid7 could be improved. Enhancements in firewall configuration checks, cloud connectivity, pricing, and marketing awareness are also called for, alongside a transition from Java GUI to a consistent web-based system.

What Are Key Features of Skybox Security Suite?

Network Assurance: Enhances visibility and optimization of network paths.
Firewall Assurance: Facilitates firewall rule set audits for compliance.
Vulnerability Management: Offers path detection and risk prioritization.
Compliance Management: Ensures adherence to standards like PCI.
Change Management: Simplifies management across extensive infrastructures.

What Benefits and ROI Can Users Expect?

Scalability: Supports numerous vendors and large-scale deployments.
Integration: Seamlessly connects with tools like Nessus and Qualys.
Risk Reduction: Improves security across network infrastructures.
Simplified Management: User-friendly interface and reporting tools enhance usability.
Network Optimization: Streamlines processes and improves performance.

Skybox Security Suite is commonly used in industries requiring strict compliance like finance and healthcare. Firms employ it for firewall audits, enhancing network visibility, and managing configurations against standards such as PCI, ensuring security and policy compliance across expansive networks.

Tufin

Sample Customers

Information Not Available

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

ADP, Blue Cross Blue Shield, BT, USAID, Delta Dental, EDF Energy, EMC, HSBC, Johnson & Johnson

Buyer's Guide

Microsoft Defender for Cloud vs. Skybox Security Suite

April 2025

Free Report: Microsoft Defender for Cloud vs. Skybox Security Suite

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