Try our new research platform with insights from 80,000+ expert users

Microsoft Defender for Cloud pros and cons

Vendor: Microsoft

4.0 out of 5

59 reviews
94% willing to recommend

610 followers

Pros & Cons summary

Microsoft Defender for Cloud provides comprehensive threat protection with simple management features and automatic compliance checks. Designed for native Azure integration, it streamlines operations and offers insights through vulnerability assessments. Its AI threat intelligence engine adapts to new threats customizations are limited, and third-party integration is challenging. Pricing and licensing are complex, often confusing for users. Customization for specific compliance needs is lacking, affecting control adjustments based on configurations.

Buyer's Guide

Get pricing advice, tips, use cases and valuable features from real users of this product.

Prominent pros & cons

PROS

Microsoft Defender for Cloud offers comprehensive threat protection that is simple and not overly complex, making it accessible to many analysts.

It provides robust security features such as incident alerts and vulnerability reporting, which enhance an organization's security posture.

Integration capabilities with other Microsoft services streamline operations and security management across various environments, including hybrid and multi-cloud setups.

It accommodates continuous security assessment and offers recommendations for improving security measures based on real-time data.

Features like intuitive policy administration, alerts, and automated incident responses reduce manual workload and improve operational efficiency.

CONS

Microsoft Defender for Cloud is complex, making management across multiple subscriptions difficult.

The pricing structure is not ideal for government and small to medium organizations.

Customizing compliance requirements based on individual needs is limited.

There are challenges with integrating third-party products and extending capabilities to other cloud services.

The licensing policies are complicated, and transparency in cost calculation is needed.

Microsoft Defender for Cloud Pros review quotes

RP

Rajanikanth Prathapa

Associate Principal - Cloud Solutions at Apexon

Nov 9, 2021

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.

Read full review

TD

Thiago De Angelo

Global Cloud Security Architect at a consumer goods company with 5,001-10,000 employees

Nov 4, 2021

One of the features that I like about the solution is it is both a hybrid cloud and also multi-cloud. We never know what company we're going to buy, and therefore we are ready to go. If they have GCP or AWS, we have support for that as well. It offers a single-panel blast across multiple clouds.

Read full review

SF

Network & Security Manager at SNP Technologies, Inc.

May 21, 2021

It has seamless integration with any of the services I mentioned, on Azure, such as IaaS platforms, virtual machines, applications, or databases, because it's an in-house product from Microsoft within the Azure ecosystem.

Read full review

Microsoft Defender for Cloud

Free Report: Microsoft Defender for Cloud Reviews and More

Learn what your peers think about Microsoft Defender for Cloud. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: November 2024.

816,406 professionals have used our research since 2012.

IS

Senior Cloud Solutions Architect at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

Jul 26, 2022

When you have commissioned Defender, you have these things visible already on your dashboard. This gives the efficiency to the people to do their actual work rather than bothering about the email, sorting out the email, or looking at it through an ITSM solution, whey they have to look at the description and use cases. Efficiency increases with this optimized, ready-made solution since you don't need to invest in something externally. You can start using the dashboard and auditing capability provided from day one. Thus, you have fewer costs with a more optimized, easier-to-use solution, providing operational efficiency for your team.

Read full review

DS

Azure Solution Architect at Wipro

Nov 4, 2024

The solution is very easy to deploy.

Read full review

VA

Senior DevSecOps Engineer at a consumer goods company with 11-50 employees

Jun 10, 2021

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.

Read full review

Senior Cloud Platform Engineer at Deutsche Börse

Nov 19, 2024

Microsoft Defender for Cloud helps in improving our overall security posture. We have a nice overview of what is missing where and what can be improved.

Read full review

Principal Product Security Officer at Venafi

Aug 2, 2022

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.

Read full review

MS

Massimo Strazzeri

Cloud Architect at Epiq

May 25, 2021

Using Security Center, you have a full view, at any given time, of what's deployed, and that is something that is very useful.

Read full review

HJ

Cloud Architect at CloudShapers

Aug 3, 2022

Defender lets you orchestrate the roll-out from a single pane. Using the Azure portal, you can roll it out over all the servers covered by the entire subscription.

Read full review

Show 10 more reviews (out of 59)

Microsoft Defender for Cloud Cons review quotes

RP

Rajanikanth Prathapa

Associate Principal - Cloud Solutions at Apexon

Nov 9, 2021

For Kubernetes, I was using Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). To see that whatever is getting deployed into AKS goes through the correct checks and balances in terms of affinities and other similar aspects and follows all the policies, we had to use a product called Stackrox. At a granular level, the built-in policies were good for Kubernetes, but to protect our containers from a coding point of view, we had to use a few other products. For example, from a programming point of view, we were using Checkmarx for static code analysis. For CIS compliance, there are no CIS benchmarks for AKS. So, we had to use other plugins to see that the CIS benchmarks are compliant. There are CIS benchmarks for Kubernetes on AWS and GCP, but there are no CIS benchmarks for AKS. So, Azure Security Center fell short from the regulatory compliance point of view, and we had to use one more product. We ended up with two different dashboards. We had Azure Security Center, and we had Stackrox that had its own dashboard. The operations team and the security team had to look at two dashboards, and they couldn't get an integrated piece. That's a drawback of Azure Security Center. Azure Security Center should provide APIs so that we can integrate its dashboard within other enterprise dashboards, such as the PowerBI dashboard. We couldn't get through these aspects, and we ended up giving Reader security permission to too many people, which was okay to some extent, but when we had to administer the users for the Stackrox portal and Azure Security Center, it became painful.

Read full review

TD

Thiago De Angelo

Global Cloud Security Architect at a consumer goods company with 5,001-10,000 employees

Nov 4, 2021

Azure is a complex solution. You have so many moving parts.

Read full review

SF

Network & Security Manager at SNP Technologies, Inc.

May 21, 2021

If a customer is already using Okta as an SSO in its entire environment, they will want to continue with it. But Security Center doesn't understand that and keeps making recommendations. It would help if it let us resolve a recommendation, even if it is not implemented.

Read full review

Microsoft Defender for Cloud

Free Report: Microsoft Defender for Cloud Reviews and More

Learn what your peers think about Microsoft Defender for Cloud. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: November 2024.

816,406 professionals have used our research since 2012.

IS

Senior Cloud Solutions Architect at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

Jul 26, 2022

The solution could extend its capabilities to other cloud providers. Right now, if you want to monitor a virtual machine on another cloud, you can do that. However, this cannot be done with other cloud platform services. I hope once that is available then Defender for Cloud will be a unified solution for all cloud platform services.

Read full review

DS

Azure Solution Architect at Wipro

Nov 4, 2024

You cannot create custom use cases.

Read full review

VA

Senior DevSecOps Engineer at a consumer goods company with 11-50 employees

Jun 10, 2021

The overview provides you with good information, but if you want more details, there is a lot more customization to do, which requires knowledge of the other supporting solutions.

Read full review

Senior Cloud Platform Engineer at Deutsche Börse

Nov 19, 2024

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.

Read full review

Principal Product Security Officer at Venafi

Aug 2, 2022

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.

Read full review

MS

Massimo Strazzeri

Cloud Architect at Epiq

May 25, 2021

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.

Read full review

HJ

Cloud Architect at CloudShapers

Aug 3, 2022

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.

Read full review

Show 10 more reviews (out of 59)

Product Categories

Product Categories

Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP)

Vulnerability Management

Container Management

Container Security

Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM)

Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPP)

Data Security Posture Management (DSPM)

Microsoft Security Suite

Compliance Management

Popular Comparisons

Popular Comparisons

Wiz vs Microsoft Defender for Cloud

Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks vs Microsoft Defender for Cloud

AWS GuardDuty vs Microsoft Defender for Cloud

SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security vs Microsoft Defender for Cloud

Orca Security vs Microsoft Defender for Cloud

Illumio vs Microsoft Defender for Cloud

Akamai Guardicore Segmentation vs Microsoft Defender for Cloud

CrowdStrike Falcon Cloud Security vs Microsoft Defender for Cloud

Aqua Cloud Security Platform vs Microsoft Defender for Cloud

Check Point Harmony Email & Collaboration vs Microsoft Defender for Cloud

Lacework vs Microsoft Defender for Cloud

Check Point CloudGuard CNAPP vs Microsoft Defender for Cloud

Cisco Secure Workload vs Microsoft Defender for Cloud

Trend Vision One - Cloud Security vs Microsoft Defender for Cloud

SUSE NeuVector vs Microsoft Defender for Cloud

See all alternatives

Product Categories

Product Categories

Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP)

Vulnerability Management

Container Management

Container Security

Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM)

Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPP)

Data Security Posture Management (DSPM)

Microsoft Security Suite

Compliance Management

Popular Comparisons

Popular Comparisons

Wiz vs Microsoft Defender for Cloud

Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks vs Microsoft Defender for Cloud

AWS GuardDuty vs Microsoft Defender for Cloud

SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security vs Microsoft Defender for Cloud

Orca Security vs Microsoft Defender for Cloud

Illumio vs Microsoft Defender for Cloud

Akamai Guardicore Segmentation vs Microsoft Defender for Cloud

CrowdStrike Falcon Cloud Security vs Microsoft Defender for Cloud

Aqua Cloud Security Platform vs Microsoft Defender for Cloud

Check Point Harmony Email & Collaboration vs Microsoft Defender for Cloud

Lacework vs Microsoft Defender for Cloud

Check Point CloudGuard CNAPP vs Microsoft Defender for Cloud

Cisco Secure Workload vs Microsoft Defender for Cloud

Trend Vision One - Cloud Security vs Microsoft Defender for Cloud

SUSE NeuVector vs Microsoft Defender for Cloud

See all alternatives

Related questions

330

How is Prisma Cloud vs Azure Security Center for security?

50

What tools provide the best container environment security?

6

When evaluating Cloud Workload Security, what aspect do you think is the most important to look for?

12

Can we customize the dashboard in Threat Stack Cloud Security Platform? Any recommendations for an alternative solution supporting dashboards?

56

What are the best cloud workload security software solutions?

8

Why use cloud workload security software?

14

Why are Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) important for companies?

1

Why is CWPP (Cloud Workload Protection Platforms) important for companies?