What is our primary use case?
Mainly, companies use it for end-user compute devices.
How has it helped my organization?
It has provided more centralization for managing endpoint security. We have greater flexibility. We can have people manage it from anywhere. I could be working from home or on-prem. That's a great thing about the cloud. The portal is accessible anywhere in the world as long as you have an internet connection. It doesn't really limit you from where you can work or manage it.
It's an in-depth tool. It pretty much logs the events line by line, and with the portal, it just makes it searchable on a wider basis. We've got greater visibility than we used to have from historic products.
It helps to prioritize threats across the enterprise. Your AV is now your footprint, which means you can footprint files faster than you can provide a patch. That is the whole idea of security solutions these days. Sophos used to pioneer using file footprints to basically stop stuff at the front door. So, if you got an EXE or something else, such as a JavaScript file or JSP, or any nefarious malware, Trojans, they footprint the file. Such a file will get scanned and blocked. That's the whole idea of it. It can't ever execute on the machine.
It helps automate routine tasks and the finding of high-value alerts. It allows us to pinpoint threats and automate the boring stuff. Any automation or AI is a good thing.
It eliminates having to look at multiple dashboards and gives one XDR dashboard. I've one dashboard, and it's a unit. So, there is a unified approach.
Having everything in one place helps because the engineers don't have to log into multiple places to find something, and they can put in best practice rules quicker. If they want new ASR rules, they can put them in. One of the things that security engineers do is create alerts in there. If they want to alert for a specific threat and just create a query, they'll run it through the system, or they put an alert for specific file extensions that might execute, such as ICU.7ZZ. There are code obfuscations and file obfuscations, and they can search for those things. They'll put alerts on for them.
This centralization saves us time. Because it's all in one portal, we can search across all endpoints we manage. That's the whole idea. The automation has probably saved an engineer between 10% to 20% of the time. It's something we just plug in and leave to work. It gets tweaked every now and again. Since I have implemented it, the tickets I've got from the security department and the infrastructure have gone down to about 10% to 15%. Once the rules are in place, they're there forever or as long as the product life cycle lasts.
I am not sure if it has saved us money because that's finance-related. It's probably more about uptime if you can keep threats off the end-user devices and don't have to rebuild them. I don't recall seeing a virus on my PC here in the current client I've worked for in the last five years. If you got a virus on the device, you just have to rebuild it. I don't remember having seen any rebuilds here. They are only for new users.
It reduces the time to respond. Your portal is a few clicks away. The fourth-line engineer can assist the security department within five minutes. Generally, we just get a Teams message if they need assistance or they raise a ticket. It depends on if it's a structural change or if it's a reactive response.
What is most valuable?
On-demand scanning is the most valuable feature. In addition, it's a fairly fluid product. It syncs back to the cloud and provides metrics. It's pretty intelligent.
What needs improvement?
They need to improve the attack surface reduction (ASR) rules. In the latest version, you can implement ASR rules, which are quite useful, but you have to enable those because if they're not enabled, they flag false positives. In the Defender portal, it logs a block for WMI processes and PowerShell. Apparently, it's because ASR rules are not configured. So, you generally have to enable them to exclude, for example, WMI queries or PowerShell because they have a habit of blocking your security scanners. It's a bit weird that they have to be enabled to be configured, and it's not the other way around. Normally, you'd expect when something is not configured, it doesn't enable itself, but for the purpose of this, apparently, Microsoft has told us to enable them. So, you've got to enable them because they keep flagging and blocking products even when they're not configured. It was just an oversight in the design department when they deployed an update to the feature, but I'll live with it.
I'd like to see them automate best-practice antivirus rules. If you search Microsoft best practice antivirus exclusions, there are virus scanning recommendations for antivirus computers running Windows or Windows Server. There is a whole list to exclude the most common things, which could be anything from NTFRS, check folders, temp.DB, or EDBs. There are a lot of things for group policy extensions, exclusion, etc. This is a list of best-practice antivirus rules, but they still have to be implemented manually. In Sophos, five or six years ago, if it was a SQL Server, they automatically included the rules to exclude certain folders or file extensions when doing on-demand scanning. I'd like Microsoft to do the same.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using it in my professional capacity for five years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
It's definitely scalable. My current client has 2,000 users.
How are customer service and support?
They're excellent. I would rate them a 10 out of 10.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
I've previously used Symantec, which for some is the greatest product. My top two are Sophos and Microsoft Defender for antivirus or web filtering. Symantec doesn't really come close to these two.
Microsoft Defender is probably now accepted as the best product on the market for antivirus and web filtering. Five or ten years back, there were Symantec and others, but Microsoft has basically built a competitive product to rival those that used to do this kind of thing. Businesses are just happy to accept that it works. It's expensive, but it does what it says on the tin.
The legacy products, like Symantec, on servers and clients no longer work. They require a lot of manual configuration, and they also don't protect the PC or server as well as Defender, which is also more cost-effective. It's already built into your home PC's operating system. If you've got a business PC, it's built-in. With Defender for Cloud Apps or Defender Endpoint management or InTune, you've got the management of the PC, which is what this pays for.
How was the initial setup?
It's cloud-based and deployed through InTune. The device has to be registered, and the device also has to be in the right license period.
The initial setup is straightforward. We use InTune to roll it out. The actual component is already on the Windows PC. It's called Windows antivirus or Defender. From the business side, by putting the devices in InTune, we can gather the metrics from the PC through Defender for Cloud Apps, or the Defender Endpoint management portal. It gives you a bit more management of the PC from that perspective.
In a reasonable deployment, it takes at least a week to deploy. The PCs have to be in InTune first to roll it out, and then, it's generally a matter of just switching on the feature.
For most businesses where I worked, it took a period of time to realize its benefits from the time of deployment. As the product got developed and became more mature, it got greater functionality in the end. It's now a mature product. The initial deployment was done when I was here, but I've been involved in enabling the maturity of the product's life cycle. There were always lots of tickets for changes regarding Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps. It's a very intelligent product.
In terms of the number of people, sometimes, you need one person and sometimes two. Generally, you're trying to do things in the background.
It doesn't require any maintenance in particular. It's mainly just the configuration of rules and policies and then the security department does the rest and watches it.
What was our ROI?
The ROI is there. It's the uptime. You don't want end-user devices going offline. It disrupts the business for that user. Every time a user is down or the machines are being rebuilt because of a virus, it's downtime for the business. They can't do their work at that point in time. Increased uptime is always better on end-user compute devices or servers.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
It has fair pricing. You pay for what you get. As far as I know, there are no costs in addition to the standard licensing fee.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
It's probably one of the top three on the market. You've got Defender and then you've got Sophos, and then, I suppose the other one that comes close is probably Norton. These are probably the top three. I am not really a fan of Trend Micro products or Kaspersky.
What other advice do I have?
I would recommend implementing it. It's the number one product in the market. The only thing they should automate is to put AI on their virus scanner recommendations rather than having to enable them by default. They might already have done that, but from what I've seen, generally, they do things manually.
At the moment, we are not using other Microsoft Security products. We are mainly using Defender. I have previously made use of the Defender for Cloud's bidirectional sync capabilities, which I'd rate a 10 out of 10.
Overall, I would rate it a 10 out of 10.
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.