Microsoft Defender for Endpoint Reviews

The solution is used as an endpoint solution to provide a 360-degree portfolio around an endpoint. It acts as a next-gen antivirus. 

It’s included with the Microsoft licensing, so we don't need multiple licenses.

Microsoft is very effective in device control. If there is malware that is coming in, It is very quick to remove it. It doesn't let it gain a footprint on your drive, so that prevents further damage from happening to the endpoint.

This solution helps us prioritize threats across our enterprise. When we are looking at our current scenario, post-COVID, most of the employees of the clients that we are dealing with are remote. When it comes to remote, you can make sure that they're logging in to VPN, however, most of their time is online and we need a product that is actively protecting them even if a user is not on a VPN or a company network. This product integrates very well with Windows due to the fact that it's a Microsoft product. It's giving users the protection that they need while ensuring businesses don’t have to spend extra on licenses.

We are using other Microsoft products. Including CASB integrated with our endpoint. We’re also using Azure, for example, and Microsoft Defender for Cloud as well as Sentinel (although a different team manages it). We have seen a very hybrid kind of environment with one of our clients where they were using an on-prem solution throughout, and they were aiming to move to the cloud. It becomes very easy to integrate everything and move most of their infrastructure to the cloud. It does take time and effort, however, with everything integrated, you can get it done. Microsoft solutions also work natively together. That’s a big strength. Everything communicates seamlessly.

We have very good visibility on our endpoints. The level of information it throws back is helpful.

How long it takes to see the level of benefits will depend on the deployment. Our deployment took two months for one client. Within a month’s time, they started seeing the benefits. We had a substantial number of endpoints to roll out, however, we began to note benefits pretty fast.

Microsoft Defender for Endpoint helps automate the finding of high-value alerts. It still needs to mature a little bit. Overall, we are seeing very security-intensive products and Microsoft still has a lot to learn.

It helped eliminate having to worry about multiple dashboards. Now, we have one single dashboard where our team takes care of everything. That has been very helpful. It makes the team focus on one single product. That helps prepare us for potential threats before they hit. We get fairly decent visibility into what's happening. Since we have one single dashboard that is giving us all the information, it becomes very easy for the team to react to incidents as well.

Overall, the solution has saved time. Previously, while we were doing deployment, most of our time was spent figuring out how to handle the products that are not natively from Microsoft. We had to figure out how we could integrate to get the most out of our products. Now, with Microsoft, we have all the integrations present in one place.

On average, we’ve likely saved nine to 12 hours weekly just by having one single Microsoft dashboard.

We’ve saved money, too. Considering it comes under one existing license, we don’t have to spend money separately or buy another license to get all the features we need.

The solution decreased our time to detection and time to respond. Our turnaround is better. From the moment we receive an alert to the moment we close the case, we’ve seen a reduction of 18% to 20% overall.

The visibility of threats needs to improve a bit. It still has to learn a lot. Where we stand right now, compared to other products that are there in the market, they still have to work on their threat intelligence and the overall maturity of detecting the malware. Sometimes we have seen instances where they have wrongly identified the malware. That is something that we would really hope that Microsoft works on.

Microsoft has to improve the efficacy of the product further. When we are talking about a security product, there are minor frameworks and there are close to 145 different techniques that we are talking about. It broadly categorizes into types yet it doesn't drill it down to techniques, which gives us a very specific idea of what they are aiming for. 

I've been using the solution for the past one and a half years as a solution architect to design and deliver EDR solutions. 

The product is fairly stable. 

The solution can scale. We scaled up initially from 500 to 32,00 endpoints and it was fine. 

We've had to contact support in the past and found them to be very effective. They are knowledgeable in their approach. However, the tasks can be a bit time-consuming.

Positive

We are using CrowdStrike, Palo Alto XDR, and a lot of different products. The client using CrowdStrike may have moved to Defender based on the cost.

The initial setup was simple. 

There is a bit of maintenance required around data retention. It has a data retention period of 80 or 90 days depending on the configuration. We make it a habit of filing data for compliance purposes. Two to three people are normally involved with the maintenance aspect. It's not resource-intensive. 

We are the third party. We help clients implement the solution. 

We have witnessed an ROI. 

The product is very cheap compared to other options. It's very affordable, which is why Microsoft is gaining a foothold in terms of client acquisition.

We're a Microsoft partner. 

I'd rate the product seven out of ten. 

You can spend a lot of money to get a very specific security tool, however, if you don't have the money, Defender does a pretty good job for you.

I'm a security coach with multiple clients. I provide security implementation, planning, and maintenance through Microsoft Defender. I use all the Defender products, including Defender for Identity, Defender for Office 365, and Defender for Cloud. 

It's easy to integrate the solutions. You only need to go into the settings and switch on the connectivity to all the Defender for Endpoint connectivity telemetry. Microsoft documentation is thorough, and it walks you through all the necessary steps.

We're multi-client and multi-cloud. We're working with multiple organizations and departments, so it's complex. We have domains and sub-domains that we must account for on the deployment side. We also use Defender for ATP, which is the Defender for domain controllers.

Defender for Endpoint helped to bridge the gap with remote workforce solutions because it protects managed and unmanaged devices. It's also easier to use because Defender for Endpoint is cloud-managed, so it stays maintained and updated. It has a leg up on competing solutions that require more system resources and maintenance. 

The tight integration with Microsoft operating systems is another advantage because it's easier to manage. It also goes beyond Windows OS. Defender for Endpoint supports other platforms and operating systems, such as Linux, iOS, and Android. I like that Microsoft is expanding the product's scope beyond Microsoft operating systems. Microsoft is developing a holistic approach, so you don't need a third-party product to protect these other non-Microsoft platforms.

Defender helps us to prioritize threats across the enterprise. The weighted priorities are based on all the MITRE security standards. Defender products work together to provide comprehensive protection. I agree with the placement of Defender Products on Gartner's Magic Quadrant. Defender is a leader in that area of threat protection. I'm pleased with the outcome of a lot of the investigations. I can protect and harden areas that didn't usually didn't have that level of visibility and granularity. 

Defender integrates with Sentinel, enabling me to ingest data from my entire ecosystem. Sentinel also covers non-Microsoft products with the third-party connectors that are provided. I enjoy that part of the Sentinel functionality and feature set. It has several features for aggregating the log data and analytics for the on-premises environment. Having that visibility is crucial.

Sentinel provides the SIEM and the SOAR capabilities, offering a single pane of glass for all of the security operations centers and providing on-site reliability for many of my clients. Sentinel is Microsoft's answer to competing tools such as Splunk and other log application tools. Sentinel seems to provide more added value from the ease of use and visibility. The licensing is also competitive.

You can set up Sentinel to forward alerts if you want to create a managed Cloud environment solution for Sentinel for a client. There's a way to set that up through Azure Front Door. You're seeing the data reporting and single pane of glass for other tenants and customers. It enables you to offer security as a service to maintain visibility for clients.

I like that it considers the status of a device (whether the device is online or offline, VPN or not, etc.) and provides several options for telemetry, depending on where and how the device is being used. It gives a lot of flexibility with the installations, maintenance, and management of the Endpoint solution. In addition to Defender for Endpoint's feature set, other parts of device management reduce the attack surface and protect those devices.

Defender's automation features have been a significant advantage with many of my clients because the remediation has been automated. Most of the time, it doesn't require any human intervention unless there's something that hasn't been set up. I must demonstrate the automated investigation and remediation to my clients to ensure their environment is automatically protected on weekends and after business hours.

The single pane of glass is vital to us as security consultants and our clients, who need a high level of visibility. You can go into the high-level executive dashboard view and drill into each telemetry graphic to provide you with more granular data. I see how easy it is to see the big picture and effortlessly drill into the details using the side navigation menus and more.

Consolidating things into one dashboard streamlined them significantly. When working with multiple tools and vendors, you typically have to stitch the reporting together to get an overarching view of everything. It's time-consuming. By the time some of these tasks are accomplished, the data starts to get stale, so you need to refresh and create an all-new view again. Having real-time capability in a single pane of glass is essential.

Defender Threat Intelligence helps us develop a forward-looking approach to threats and plans. That's one aspect of the product I find incredibly helpful. It will highlight things that may require intervention, such as turning on conditional access rules or setting up some geofencing for anything that looks like it could be a password spray attack from a known location that we can block. 

There are opportunities to turn off any legacy protocols that may be in use. That's been a common thread with some of my clients who still use legacy protocols for sign-in and authorizations. The ability to do that has been a considerable help proactively.

You don't know what you don't know until you know. The continual flow of real-time data and analytics from Defender products helps create a security roadmap and harden many areas. With improved visibility, we can build a better roadmap to harden those areas by prioritizing and doing things methodically. Previously, we were guessing what to do next or what would be most important based on an educated guess. Now, we have data to guide our security decisions.

Microsoft Defender has saved us hours and hours. It has probably paid for itself many times over. I would agree that it has saved a lot of time and money. I estimate it probably saved us the equivalent of two people working full-time. You typically have at least one person overseeing on-premise resources and another dedicated to cloud resources.

In my opinion, the most valuable aspects are the reporting analytics and integration with Sentinel. Defender does an excellent job of correlating the different entities that comprise threat analysis, analytics data, and log analytics. It helps to piece together investigations into any exploit or malicious activity within a specific tenant. AI and analytics tools are probably the most valuable components.

The bidirectional sync capabilities and off-app sanctioning of the SaaS applications are helpful. The identity security posture feature set provides investigation recommendations for risky users. The heat map for locations is also handy. Defender integrates with the AIP DLP for data governance and protection. I use all of that.

There's a need to have augmented workforce capability. You need to see the data streams for client work augmentation for the security operation center and act on the information. Having data in near real-time is essential to my organization and the work we do for our clients. The built-in SOAR, UEBA, and threat detection features are comprehensive.

It always helps to have onboarding wizards. Microsoft has done a lot of work in that area. I would like to see some more refinement in the wizards to allow more diverse use cases and scenarios that help us deploy Defender globally. In particular, I would like to see more deployments considering localization barriers and networks or devices common in various regions. 

Localization is always a challenge, especially with new products you typically want. Solutions are designed to be deployed where the most licenses are being consumed, such as in the United States. They focus on US products, devices, and networks. Specialized deployments for other countries would allow for a smoother experience in transition.

I have been using Microsoft Defender for about two and a half years.

It's pretty stable. I haven't had any reliability concerns with Defender, and there have not been too many complaints from users that have to have extensive reboots or any kind of performance impact. So I would say it's pretty stable.

Scalability is built into the product. It's a cloud-managed solution, so it's capable of scaling pretty quickly as needed. You don't have to unlock another key or do something else to scale the product. It's scalable by design.

I rate Microsoft support a seven out of ten. We've opened a few Microsoft tickets. For example, we've seen some discrepancies between Defender for Exchange Online and the reporting from Sentinel. We raised tickets to determine why Sentinel's logging data doesn't match what we see in Exchange Online.

It can be slow and tedious sometimes. Microsoft has different support level agreements. If you want prompter and higher-quality support, you typically need to pay for an Ultimate Support contract. If we compare that with other companies or organizations, Microsoft is probably on par with everyone else. You don't get a higher level of support unless you pay for it.

Neutral

I've worked with all the major antivirus and endpoint protection vendors, including Splunk, CrowdStrike, Sophos, Norton, and McAfee. Microsoft's advantage is its integration with the operating system, ease of deployment, and support for the 365 Cloud experience. It makes everything easier to deploy, maintain and manage. It comes down to cost and integration. We realize cost savings because it's integrated into the E5 licensing product.

The setup is straightforward and mostly automated. You only have to intervene when you experience errors. Those typically happen on non-US systems or in other countries. For the most part, it's effortless to deploy.

We try to use the auto-onboarding capabilities that come with Autopilot. If you have new systems deployed with Windows Autopilot onboarding capability, that's going to turn Defender on with the proper policies and security parameters. 

One person is enough to deploy Defender if you have a plan and proper communication. You notify everyone that the deployment is happening and push the button. You need to let everyone know if reboots are required and the like. Other than that, it's pretty much a one-person deployment job.

In terms of maintenance, Defender is probably somewhere in the middle. Microsoft maintains a lot of automated updates. There are feature sets that come into play with things that are put in preview and you may want to see if it's something you want to turn on and try out while it's in preview. Those are the only areas that require some discussion and intervention. Most of the maintenance is automated. At the same time, you also need to be trained and aware of the updates and feature sets as they mature. You must stay on top of changes to the UI, reporting, etc.  

If you look at what we pay on average and all the potential ransomware and malware threats we've averted, we've definitely saved tens of thousands of dollars, depending on the client. Some of the bigger clients have saved millions of dollars of potential ransomware payouts because Defender products helped protect those areas of attack. 

The cost is competitive and reasonable because most of the expense is log analytics, storage, and data consumption and ingestion. They can be throttled and controlled, so they are highly flexible. Defender has a lot of advantages over competing products.

From a licensing aspect, you're not just getting a security product. You're getting a lot of other capabilities that go beyond the Defender products. You get an E5 or E3 license and some form of Defender for Endpoint included with all the other security features of the other Defender products. 

It didn't take too long to decide on Microsoft because of the integration and simplicity. CrowdStrike is probably the closest competitor.

I rate Microsoft Defender for Endpoint a nine out of ten. Defender is one of the best I've seen, and I'm not saying that as a Microsoft reseller. We use Defender and have gotten our Microsoft certifications to provide a high level of service for our clients. It's crucial to have a product we stand behind and believe in wholeheartedly. We're not getting kickbacks from Microsoft for saying or doing any of that. We use it because it works. 

I would say there's a trade-off. Once you start adding complexity to security, you're going against best practices that say simpler is better. Adding another vendor or a level of complexity is usually unnecessary. Unless there's something Microsoft completely missed, I would question the value of going to another vendor. 

Communication and planning are most important. Any time you change products or deploy something for the first time, you should test it first in a smaller use-case scenario. That will help you identify any issues with your network, firewall, or legacy applications that may be falsely identified as a threat. It's always best to test your use case scenarios in a proof of concept before you deploy it.

We use it as an Enterprise Detection and Response (EDR) solution. We use it for compliance purposes, and we are starting to use it for DLP purposes.

Microsoft Defender for Endpoint allows our threat hunting and threat remediation teams to reduce the footprint of viruses when they come on the network.

We have immediate visibility on all endpoints. It is very good at visibility.

For prioritizing threats across our enterprise, the threat-hunting system in Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is not top-notch. We usually integrate it into things like our SIEM or Sentinel or other things to prioritize or our SOAR system to automate.

We can feed the alerts coming out of it into our XSOAR system to immediately act on events versus waiting until people see them and use the ticketing system.

Microsoft Defender for Endpoint has saved us time. It has saved us at least 40 hours a week. We are able to automate and have the ability to handle threats on an enterprise with 50,000 devices.

Microsoft Defender for Endpoint has not saved us costs. It is a Microsoft product.

Microsoft Defender for Endpoint has reduced our time to detect and respond. By going from a manual process to an automated process, depending on the severity, the time reduced has gone from minutes and days to seconds.

The endpoint detection of threats is valuable. The initial detection of things like ransomware and viruses and being able to shut down machines immediately and stop a threat is valuable. We can stop a threat at a source versus allow it to propagate it across the network.

The product itself does not necessarily need improvement, but the support and implementation of the product are the disaster cases. Instead of being able to go back to Microsoft and ask how to do something, we have to work with a vendor who does not exactly know how to do that and has to go to Microsoft to say, "How do we do this?" so that they can answer our questions. There are a lot of things in relation to various compliance standards such as CIS. The primary levels of support of Microsoft do not know or cannot implement that. Working through vendors is time-consuming. It is a painful process to get back to them to get the answers.

I have been using Microsoft Defender for Endpoint for three years.

We have never seen any downtime in it, so it is incredibly stable.

It is incredibly scalable. However, its ability to bind things into the groups on its dashboard is limited. You can see your 50,000 machines empire, but dividing it into regions, and dividing it into subgroups and management areas is very limited.

It is deployed across the world. There are 250 sites worldwide with 50,000 devices.

I would rate their support poorly. I would rate them a two out of ten.

Negative

The history would be a Symantec product, but I do not remember what it was. Then we went up through Azure ATP to Microsoft EDR. 

I was involved in its deployment and initial setup, but I was not a part of PoC at the time. The deployment was very easy. We pushed it out with SCCM.

Our implementation strategy was PoC, small user groups, and then wide or regional deployments.

We have on-premises and cloud deployments. It is an endpoint protection platform. It goes on any endpoint that we have or that we have running. It could be an endpoint that is sitting in the cloud. It could be an endpoint that is sitting on-prem. We use Azure, GCP, and AWS. There is also some limited rack space from IBM.

We used CDW.

We have reduced man hours using the product. We have definitely been able to leverage automation with it more than other products that we have used previously and other products that we are using.

I recently switched from education to private business, and all I can say is that private business licensing from Microsoft is not cheap until you hit certain quantities or scale. That does not mean that it is not comparable to other industries. It is similar pricing, but it is still crazy to me how much you pay for a client. I feel it is high, but it is in line with other vendors.

We evaluated Cortex XDR, Carbon Black, and QRadar or whatever that solution was from IBM.

The Microsoft ecosystem is the main difference. Everything under the umbrella of the Microsoft security toolkit makes life easier when all the systems talk together nicely.

To those evaluating this solution, I would advise first figuring out what your needs are. Figure out what levels of granularity you need in the system to see if it will support your needs. For example, if you have something like department-level control over devices, you might want to look at another system versus a central security solution that controls all devices. Beyond that, make sure your machines have the resources necessary to support the features you turn on in the environment. A lot of the resources in Microsoft Defender for Endpoint can be shut down for slower machines and older machines.

I would rate Microsoft Defender for Endpoint a solid nine out of ten.

We use Microsoft Defender for Endpoint as an enterprise security solution.

The visibility is great. For example, Microsoft Defender for Endpoint's portal has a section called threat analytics. There's a threat intelligence box. So all new threats and trending threats are visible. If any of our devices in our organization are susceptible to this threat, the solution will let us know because it searches for that specific particular vulnerability, which can be exploited. The Microsoft threat analytics tool gives us that type of visibility into the threats that might affect our organization. For example, the threat analysis updates every half hour to one hour with the top ten latest threats. The scan tries to ensure that these threats don't belong to our organization and if they do, it identifies the infected device. Microsoft Defender for Endpoint makes a lot of security recommendations when we onboard it to quarantine a lot of security recommendations that help to improve the security posture of our environment.

Microsoft Defender for Endpoint assists our organization in prioritizing threats across our enterprise by providing security recommendations based on the weaknesses in our organization. It includes a department that provides management licenses and uses analytics to identify high-priority threats in our environment. This is connected to a common protocol that assigns a priority level of five to devices with vulnerabilities, indicating what actions should be taken. Thus, we have all the necessary information in one place.

Prioritization is crucial because there is a possibility of a high-priority threat entering our environment. This is how the solution determines the priority of threats. For instance, if one of our high-impact business devices is vulnerable to a top-priority security five threat we need to address it first. Alternatively, we may choose to address the sixty computers with a level two or three security threat, which are mostly associated with lower impacts. Therefore, prioritization aids in determining which critical business infrastructure requires immediate attention.

There are several lines with multiple solutions, but Microsoft offers a comprehensive solution with its E5 license. This license includes a wide range of features such as purview information protection, data protection, and other business-related tools. In my previous experience, I have noticed that some organizations utilize multiple Microsoft products, such as Defender for Endpoint, Identity Management, Defender for Cloud Applications, and Defender for IoT. This combination of different products can be quite useful.

Microsoft Defender for Cloud on Azure can be easily integrated with Defender for Endpoint, including on-premise solutions that can be onboarded to Azure with different subscription values. The integration will already onboard it to the device with Defender for Endpoint, along with additional features such as Just-in-Time Access, Defender for Vulnerability Management, and Control Sign-in Monitoring. These features provide robust cloud security monitoring and can be added to Defender for Endpoint. Moreover, Defender for Cloud is integrated with Defender for Endpoint portals, enabling a one-stop shop for onboarding devices with all the cloud posture management required for a single computer or software. This integration is highly beneficial, and other applications can be similarly integrated.

It is easy to integrate Microsoft Defender for Endpoint with other solutions.

These solutions seamlessly integrate to create a zero-trust platform, as offered by Microsoft. This platform ensures protection from various threats such as networks, applications, and infrastructure, with the added benefit of Microsoft Sentinel. The Sentinel tool combines threat analytics from multiple sources into a user-friendly workspace, providing optimal productivity. Additionally, sending logs from any of these products, including Sentinel, to the cloud connector is a simple process.

The integrated Microsoft security products offer comprehensive threat protection, such as Microsoft Defender for Office. With these products, our office is now able to identify and address email threats in a single platform, instead of checking each platform individually for application, identity, vulnerability management, and endpoint security. Moreover, these products can be easily integrated into a single workspace solution. With the help of pre-existing methods in Sentinel, we can efficiently handle a large number of alerts that we receive. Rather than going through each alert individually, we can activate a playbook that provides solutions for common alerts and takes actions in parallel to resolving them. This integration simplifies the process of achieving a complete security solution.

When we transition from on-premise servers to Azure ARC resources and activate Defender for Cloud Applications, it becomes easier to manage our servers from different networks, especially when it comes to security features. For example, we can check the compliance of our devices and organization with PCI DSS or other security protocols. Running compliance checks during the transition while syncing data with a different SL Cloud provides us with a significant amount of data and valuable information, including recommendations for improving compliance. This process involves bi-directional communication between devices, the cloud, Azure, and different network clouds.

Microsoft Sentinel allows us to easily ingest data from our entire ecosystem.

Microsoft Sentinel allows us to investigate threats and respond holistically from a single platform. Sentinel is both a SOAR and SIEM solution, meaning we can perform responses, but we must create a separate playbook for them. The default method may include some pre-built responses. The most important aspect is that if our company uses SentinelOne instead of Defender, we can still easily send logs through our Sentinel Workspace using API calls. This can be accomplished with a few connections, and we can create our own playbooks for different types of alerts. For example, if SentinelOne is not sending data, we can generate alerts of this type and respond accordingly. This significantly reduces user effort.

The security protection offered by Sentinel is extensive. It can be integrated with any Microsoft solutions, including information protection, and can be connected directly to Microsoft's threat intelligence sources and other resources. This allows for comprehensive protection.

Our clients have reported that Sentinel's cost and ease of use, in comparison to other stand-alone SIEM and SOAR solutions, are favorable. They find the user-friendliness of Sentinel to be worth the cost.

Microsoft Defender for Endpoint assists in automating routine tasks and identifying high-value alerts. We can automate actions based on the alert's sensitivity, and in case we are uncertain of how to handle those alerts, we have the option to seek assistance from a Defender expert. This feature is particularly valuable, as it can provide guidance in identifying and investigating such alerts.

Microsoft Defender for Endpoint helps eliminate multiple dashboards by giving us one XDR dashboard.

The solution's threat intelligence helps us detect and respond to threats proactively by identifying suspicious behavior.

Microsoft Defender for Endpoint has been instrumental in saving us time by alerting us about potential threats and automatically guiding us through the necessary steps to eliminate them. The solution logs all the actions taken, saving us from having to spend valuable time retracing the steps.

By detecting threats in advance before they can propagate, Microsoft Defender for Endpoint helps our organization save money. The tool helps to identify potential security risks early, preventing their escalation and the associated costs of mitigation.

Our detection and response time has improved. This is thanks to Microsoft Defender, which has Endpoint Detection and Response capabilities. Before, we used to manually create policies to address security incidents, but now the system can automatically remediate issues without us having to intervene.

The most valuable aspect is the information, specifically the automatic investigation of packages. For instance, during an automated investigation, data and information are collected. Additionally, there is an encapsulated view that shows the origin of the package, how it was propagated, and any blockages or attacks that may have occurred. The most critical factor is the information gathered regarding various types of incidents, including how they are mapped and propagated, and what actions should be taken in response.

Creating antivirus profiles for Linux is a more challenging task compared to other operating systems. The profiling method currently in use is not very user-friendly and has ample scope for improvement.

I have been using the solution for over four years.

Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is stable.

Microsoft Defender for Endpoint can scale effectively to meet the needs of our environment, regardless of its size.

The technical support team is highly knowledgeable, and in cases where they are unable to provide a solution, they escalate the issue to the second level of support. Their services are available around the clock, and if the assigned representative is unavailable, they promptly transfer the ticket to another capable person to ensure a seamless resolution of the issue.

Positive

I previously utilized SentinelOne, Kaspersky Endpoint Detection and Response, Symantec Endpoint Detection and Response, and Carbon Black CB Defense. However, I find Microsoft Defender for Endpoint to be more user-friendly than the other solutions. The information provided by Defender is valuable, and the deployment process is easy. Additionally, it offers several valuable features.

The complexity of deployment depends on the client's environment. The number of people required for the deployment depends on the number of servers the organization has. For example, in a deployment of 700 workstations and 500 servers, one full-time and two part-time consultants are required.

We implement the solution for our clients in-house.

We experienced a positive return on investment by using Microsoft Defender for Endpoint. This solution allows us to streamline our operations by consolidating all necessary components under a single umbrella and eliminating the need for additional vendors and extra costs.

Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is included with a Microsoft E5 license.

I give the solution an eight out of ten.

The most cost-effective and user-friendly option for security is a single-vendor security suite. This approach also eliminates the need for multiple integrations.

I recommend that organizations avail themselves of Microsoft's trials and demos, and compare Defender with other solutions in their environment to determine the best fit. With a Microsoft E5 license, organizations can access all of Microsoft's solutions and use whatever they need.

We use Defender for Endpoint to secure our Windows 10 endpoints and Windows servers. We use Microsoft Defender as an antivirus, and we also leverage the EDR capability. If any malware or threat is present, Defender can take action on those threats and remediate if there are any malicious actors present in our environment.

It is deployed on-premises, on the cloud, and on multi-cloud solutions like AWS on Azure. We have a diverse, global environment with devices or servers in Europe, the US, and the Asia-Pacific region, except for China.

One feature I like the most is vulnerability management, which shows any vulnerable software or OS present in my environment. Microsoft Defender for Endpoint provides a complete overview and also recommends the steps to mitigate the vulnerabilities or threats. Most of the other antivirus or EDR solutions generally don't provide vulnerability management. It is an add-on that Microsoft Defender for Endpoint provides.

Also, because of this solution's EDR capabilities, we can determine what we want Microsoft Defender to do and then automate the entire process. We have already enabled these automated response capabilities and are leveraging them.

The visibility into threats that Microsoft Defender provides is very detailed. If we want to investigate how a threat was initially integrated into our environment, we can do that with a detailed activity timeline. It will be across the servers or Windows Endpoint, so we will be able to see the correlation and gain a complete picture of any threat within that timeline.

It helps us prioritize threats across our enterprise to a certain extent. Whenever there is a threat, we'll get a risk score along with the level of severity. We will then be able to see whether the threats are of high, medium, or low severity and can prioritize them accordingly.

Prioritization is really important to our organization because with 100,000 people working, we see an immense number of threat alerts including phishing, identity, and other kinds of threats. We have a limited number of people working in security operations centers, and we may see 30,000 alerts come through. Therefore, it's very important for us to prioritize those alerts so that we don't end up working on threats that are not important and miss critical alerts.

Along with Microsoft Defender, we also use Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps, Microsoft Defender for Cloud, and Microsoft Defender for Identity. Integrating these products is quite simple. You just toggle the button, and the integration will be turned on. Once you have turned on integration, you will see feeds from the other portals. That is, if I get something in Defender for Identity, then I will be able to see relevant items in the Defender for Endpoint portal as well. It's out-of-the-box integration, and no additional measures are required.

These solutions work natively together to deliver coordinated detection and response across our environment. They work in the background and share common intelligence with each other and provide correlated feeds within these portals. They provide comprehensive threat protection.

When the integration is in place, it eliminates the need to look at multiple dashboards. Initially, we used to have different portals for incidents, but now, we have one central console. We can see alerts and incidents from Defender for Cloud, Defender for Identity, etc. It saves us a lot of time because our analysts don't have to spend time looking at different dashboards or consoles.

In terms of preparing for potential threats before they hit and taking proactive steps, the feeds in Microsoft Defender for Endpoint help us detect zero-day vulnerabilities or any ransomware. The threat analytics show us what the current and upcoming threats are. I can get the indicators of compromise from that particular list and can prepare my team on how to act on those particular threats. It has helped us to become more efficient.

Overall, this solution has helped us save 30% to 40% of our time.

Also, our time to detect and respond has decreased by around 40 to 50%.

One major item for improvement is the ability to add exceptions. We can add some exceptions, but not at the level we need to.

The second major area for improvement involves enhanced capabilities for different operating systems or platforms. That is, even though we have coverage for different operating systems or platforms such as Linux, we don't get all of the controls and enhanced capabilities that are available with Windows devices.

Reporting could also be improved because, at present, we get limited results at times. For example, in an environment with more than 100,000 devices, you may just get 10,000 results when you run a report.

I've been using it for close to four years.

It's not very stable because Microsoft keeps making a lot of improvements as it's a new product. For example, today I might see something on one page, on another day, it might be located on some other page or portal. However, I have seen stability to some extent over the last couple of months.

It's definitely a scalable solution. Almost all of the users in my organization, close to 70,000, use this solution.

Technical support is an area that needs a lot of improvement. Microsoft does not have the right people who can help with any challenges or problems, and ultimately, we end up finding the solutions on our own rather than relying on them. They take a lot of time to work on a support case, and we can't find the right level of support as well. Therefore, on a scale from one to ten with one being the worst and ten being the best, I would give technical support a rating of four.

Neutral

We have seen a return on investment in the last few years in terms of our organization being protected against threats.

Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is cost-effective because there's one unified license, and with this unified license, you get the capabilities for your cloud applications, servers, and endpoints as well. Therefore, it saves us a lot of money because the cost with other solutions is for just one piece of OS or maybe an urban environment. The licensing process is not complex as well.

Your use cases, how your organization is configured, and what your infrastructure is like will determine whether you go with a best-of-breed strategy rather than a single vendor's security suite. From a cost perspective, I think it's better to just go with one technology because when you have two technologies in place, there may be conflicts with policies that may result in additional time spent investigating.

However, if an organization has a high number of macOSs and they have a lot of Linux servers, they may choose to go with two technologies if Microsoft Defender doesn't provide a complete set of security capabilities.

Before you implement the solution, first see what your use cases are and what you're actually looking for. Then, define your environment and what you're going to protect first, whether they be application servers or just endpoints. Then, you can have a detailed discussion with the implementer or vendor.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give Microsoft Defender for Endpoint an overall rating of seven.

We want to find a solution that fits businesses of every size and type, but we primarily target small and medium-sized enterprises. 

Defender helps us prioritize threats across the organization. When we needed to update the patches on our endpoints, we could look at all the patches and see what still needed to be fixed. We could decide whether it's necessary to address something urgently or deploy it as part of routine monthly maintenance. It's crucial to have the insights and a report that I can show to an executive to demonstrate that we need to act fast. This is less common because most people accept your hotfixes and patches when they come out, especially monthly security updates. However, some older shops might be like, "I'm running Windows 10. No one's touching this." We still need to service and support those machines, too. 

The solution helps us automate routine tasks and alerts. There's a dashboard where I can see the statuses of my machines in the environment. It helps us breathe a little bit easier. We're responding to businesses that had shifting needs during COVID. How can we be more proactive and help them to be more proactive? We shifted from traditional PC antivirus software to stuff that's totally different. I can't say it's "set it and forget it" because that implies a lazy mentality. However, I know I have a level of protection that I can have faith in. 

Defender helps us be more proactive. I find value in the zero-day threats that get fixed from Microsoft bug fixes or security updates. I can read and research about those zero-day threats from Microsoft's public site without digging too deeply into the Defender side of things. 

We've saved some time with Defender for Endpoint because we were doing a lot of unnecessary remediation with the other products. We had a series of servers that our previous product was installed on. It would blue-screen the server at random, and you can't have that. I'm not worried about Defender impacting my system stability. We put a lot of high-performance systems out there, including PCs and backend compute. I want to ensure we won't be overburdened by unnecessary security software that may not be giving me the protection I want.

Defender's reporting saves us four hours to eight hours each month. It has many of the standard reports we need built in, so it's effortless to generate and pull from. The time we save in other areas isn't as easy to quantify. I don't have to worry about the stability of a box or a computer cluster. 

It has decreased my detection time. On Wednesday, I got emails notifying me that new vulnerabilities were detected. They weren't new, but they were newly disclosed because patches came out for them. It has enabled us to react much quicker. 

I like Defender's reporting and logging features. The email alerts are also helpful. It's hard sometimes to sift through the email, especially if you're an IT firm managing hundreds if not thousands of endpoints, but we find email reporting useful. For example, last Tuesday, we learned of new vulnerabilities that were discovered as a result of the previous patches. The endpoints without those patches triggered alerts in Defender.

Defender ties into the Microsoft 365 portal where many shops spend a lot of their time doing password resets or other tasks. There is much more in the Azure portal too, but the 365 portal has a list of open issues, bugs, and necessary remediation steps. If I'm working on my security score, I have all of those on an active list, which is nice.

Defender should be more accessible for small and medium-sized businesses. You have some organizations that maybe have a hundred employees, and they're focused on making their widgets. That's their nine-to-five every day. They're not thinking about that security side, but maybe they're already invested in 365 or the Azure ecosystem and having Defender as an add-on makes sense from a price perspective. It's easy to deploy, but it could be easier for some of those smaller businesses to onboard endpoints.

The onboarding and deployment could be more user-friendly, and there is room to grow in some of the reports. I don't want them to be oversimplified or overly complex, but there is room for improvement in the reporting it can do. It's relatively minor.

We have used Defender for Endpoint for the last 18 months or so. 

Defender's stability is one of the things I love most about the solution. 

There are no limitations on Defender's scalability. I get the impression that it's designed to cater to massive enterprises with 20,000 or more endpoints, but I think there's a market for a simpler deployment, like 100 PCs, 10 servers, etc. Give me a deployment option that's simple. 

I rate Microsoft support eight out of 10. It's good overall, but it can be hit or miss depending on your issue, and sometimes you don't get the right level or technician. All of my 2023 support experiences have been stellar, but 2022 was a little inconsistent. 

Positive

The company evaluated other solutions in parallel and in tandem with it. Our trajectory shifted slightly during COVID-19, so we explored that more. We tried ESET and SentinelOne for a while. But those are apples-to-oranges comparisons. Defender for Endpoint is geared toward common reporting,  notifications, and backend stuff, whereas SentinelOne is designed to lock machines down. It has many more tendrils deep within, so they're not great comparisons. 

We decided to go with Defender because we're pretty heavily invested in the rest of the Microsoft Stack, so it made sense. However, we wanted to do our due diligence because we're already using other products. We wanted to ensure we were picking the best of breed for our customers fair enough.

We were having issues with other products like ESET, SentinelOne, and Symantec. SentinelOne is just too deep and heavy. It's like trying to shoot a fence post with a missile. It was too much. We rely on the product and trust it. It takes a little while to get there, but once you trust a product, you can move on to the next thing and know you're protected.

The onboarding process could be more straightforward. I wish the onboarding were simpler. It seems a little more ethereal than, "Hey, here's your executable, put this on every machine." That would be easier for a small shop. We're still deploying into a lot of our sites. It didn't take long at all, but it takes a while to get fully ready to deploy, 

Defender's pricing is competitive. There are ways to negotiate a better price with Microsoft or your reseller as your business grows. You can say, "Hey, I bought 365 Business, then E3, and E5. Now, I'm buying Defender, so give me bulk pricing."  There are opportunities to save as you grow that wouldn't exist if you picked a different vendor.

I rate Microsoft Defender for Endpoint eight out of 10. 

It is our endpoint protection solution as a part of the full Defender Suite that we use. We use it for every one of our devices, including Macs and Windows.

Each endpoint is with Intune, and then the management is done out of Azure.

It takes automated actions. If a device is found to have a virus, it will automatically remove it, isolate the device, and then notify us to follow up. That way, things are less critical when we get to them. It will stop the spread. We're a worldwide company with very few people on the security staff. It allows us to remove the risk in an immediate fashion without the staff having to jump on it, which just takes time.

It helps us prioritize threats across our enterprise. We have limited resources to deal with the threats. So, this prioritization is critical to us.

We use more than just Defender for Endpoint. We use Defender for Identity, Defender for Office 365, and Cloud App security. We use the whole 365 Defender suite. It is easy to integrate these products. The challenge is having all the features in your environment and obviously making it work within your environment because of your different applications and business processes, but all these solutions work natively together to deliver coordinated detection and response across our environment. This is critical for us because we have limited resources. So, allowing the machines to talk to each other and not having to jump from place to place just makes life a lot easier.

We use Microsoft Defender for Cloud for the hybrid cloud environment. We are not multi-cloud at this point. We use it to identify weaknesses within our environment, both prem and off-prem so that we can prioritize. We do not use Sentinel at this time.

For the most part, it gives me what I need in one spot. I do have to drill down into other dashboards for more defined reports. We go into the Intune dashboard for compliance and things like that.

Its threat intelligence helps prepare us for potential threats before they hit and take proactive steps. We use the secure score to help identify what we need to do to protect against things as they come up. It lets us know about any ransomware out there so we can jump right on those and do protections. We also use it for the compliance piece against NIST, PCI, and things of that nature.

It saves time. If I didn't have the integrated pieces of Microsoft Defender, to do the same amount and be on top of things, I would probably need two FTEs.

It has absolutely decreased our time to detect and time to respond.

The best thing I like about it is its interaction with the other Defender products. It provides the ability to push telemetry up. It gives me endpoint visibility and allows me to take automated actions. 

It is excellent in terms of visibility into threats. It is very comprehensive in terms of threat detection, and it keeps on getting better. They are consistently adding new features.

They're in the process of pulling more things together. They can continue with the integrations and provide a better way of seeing the impact of security changes, especially on the endpoint side. Before we actually flip the switch, we should be able to see the impact of security changes on the business or business applications. It would prevent breaking any business applications.

In its current rendition, I have been using it for two years.

Its stability is very good.

Its scalability is very good. It definitely scales easily.

Their support is okay. We get support through Insight, which is also our CSP. They're better. I would rate them a five out of ten.

Neutral

On the endpoint side, I've used Sophos and Symantec. We switched because of the integration between all different securities.

The deployment was relatively easy, but when you get into turning on the switches, things can get complicated because it has a lot of different features. Overall, it was easy.

We did it in-house. We had two security systems engineers doing it. 

We have seen a return on investment, but it is hard to give metrics. It has definitely allowed us to maintain a small team and increase our security posture. 

If you're on Microsoft products, and you've bought into what they're doing with Teams Voice and Office, then adding in the security piece is just a slight bump. You go with the E5 licensing, which saves you a lot of money.

With the bundling that Microsoft does, we have saved money. Buying individual point products would've cost us a lot more money than one integrated solution that also capitalizes on Teams Voice and things of that nature. Given our size, buying individual products would have easily cost us a million dollars.

We've looked at other solutions. We've looked at CrowdStrike. We've looked at Symantec. We went for Microsoft because of the full integration. The breadth of the products and the pricing were the main reasons.

I would advise following those secure scores and watching out as you start to communicate with your user base because you're going to impact applications.

To a security colleague who says that it is better to go with a best-of-breed strategy rather than a single vendor’s security suite, my response would be that you got to measure trying to do the integration because with security, to me, bringing that integration together is the key thing. You need to know how quickly you are going to be able to move from your detection to your mitigation. Are you going to turn on things on the firewalls or can you go right to the devices and isolation? The best of the breed is great, but trying to get them all to work together becomes very complex.

I would rate it an eight out of ten.

It comes inbuilt with Windows Server and Windows 10, so we are using its latest version. It is deployed centrally on all the platforms, whether it is a virtual environment, a BYOD device, or an office device. It is deployed everywhere. 

All of our users are on Office 365. By default, every user is getting Office 365, and we are also incorporating this into data leak prevention. We have also enabled Azure Active Directory, so policies are deployed directly from our active directory. 

It has reduced admin overhead. Because it comes inbuilt with Windows, we don't have to deal with the complication of using a third-party solution. We stopped using Symantec Antivirus three years ago. Previously, we had to find a person who knew how to manage Symantec Antivirus. Now, we don't have that overhead. It is also less taxing on the admins because they don't need to license an extra software every year and then deploy and manage those licenses. Everything is seamlessly managed from a central application.

Our full backup is on OneDrive. We had deployed separate storage area networks to back up important data for off-site users, not on-site users. In the current scenario of work from home, users need to establish a VPN connection to run our backup system. When they are at home, we cannot back up their systems if they don't have good connectivity. We also can't tax their broadband connections. Incorporating OneDrive as a backup solution with Windows Defender and Windows 10 has helped us immensely. We were not prepared for having people working from home because we always worked from the office, and 100% office attendance was required, but due to the pandemic, people moved to their hometowns, and we could no longer manage those systems. It became a headache for us when people used to report that their Windows got corrupted. Because they were working from home and there is a big problem of electricity in India, if electricity is not there, the systems suddenly shut down, and the registry gets corrupted. All these things are difficult to handle when you're at a remote location and you don't have your eyes and hands on that particular location. In such times, Windows Defender became a very big helping hand in managing the recoveries of such systems. The backups managed from OneDrive were very helpful. It has saved hundreds of hours of restoring the system in case something goes wrong. There was an instance where a user opened a spam message, and a ransomware attack was done on that system. Because the backup is managed by OneDrive, within 17 hours, this user's whole laptop was recovered without physically working on that laptop. Because of slow connectivity, it took time, but we were able to recover. This is the best feature of having OneDrive backup on the fly and recovery on the fly. These 17 hours were peanuts as compared to the data that we were able to save. This is the best selling point of having OneDrive as a backup with Windows Defender and Office 365.

The best part is that it is built into Windows, whether it is a server base or a desktop base, which gives more control over the operating system. Because Defender, the operating system, and the Office solution are by Microsoft, everything is working like hand-in-glove. Its administrative overhead is less because a desktop user has already got some experience of how to handle a Microsoft Defender notification or administer it. While working on Windows 10, every now and then, users might have seen it popping up, and they know how to do certain things. So, it is not too taxing from an administration point of view where we have to tell users what to do. 

Centralizing policies and rolling everything out is done only from one console. We are able to provide restrictions based on what we want to filter, such as certain apps should not run and certain things should run. Because we are also into website development and code development, sometimes, users need to run certain software or their own build application, which is not possible to specify with an antivirus solution. With Defender, we can centrally deploy a policy where certain parts are excluded, and they can run their code in those particular parts. This is a very nice feature where we don't have to micromanage developers' PCs or exceptions.

Data leak prevention is something that our company requires, and it is incorporated in this solution. Because we are using Microsoft OneDrive, and it is easy to take the backup to OneDrive via Microsoft Defender.

It has helped in improving our security posture.

Its user interface (UI) can be improved. Currently, in the console, you have to dig down for certain things. They've got many different layers to get to things instead of having it all on the surface. You have to go three folds lower to get to specific functionality or click a particular option. It would be good if we can manage the console through menus and instead of three clicks, we can do things in one click. They need to change the UI and work on it in terms of a better user experience. For example, user management should be in one menu, license management should be in one menu, and backup management should be in one menu. Currently, if you click on a user, you will get some devices there, and some devices will be on the other menu. Its UI is complicated. In terms of functionality, everything is okay. We don't want anything to be changed in it.

We have been using this solution for three years.

It is highly stable. We don't even have to look into it to see if it has stopped working, or whether it is doing its job well or not. We have around 500 devices in our organization, and all devices do the regular login with the logs. It is immensely stable.

Its scalability is immense. There is no device, user, or policy limit. You install a device, and it is automatically configured because the policy is deployed from the centralized policy server or active directory.

We have around 500 devices in our organization, and all devices are using it. We have all kinds of devices such as laptops, desktops, notebooks, surface devices, etc. We also have in-house virtual servers on the AWS cloud and in-house physical servers. We also recommend enabling it for our client servers, and we configure policies for them.

Every person in our organization is using this solution. We have approximately 380 users. Its users include everyone from a new joiner to our management president. Last year, our strength was 260, and this year we have 380 users. We are growing, and by 2022, we should have more than 600 users. We are growing in a very good manner, and a group target is there. We are definitely going to grow.

We have been using Microsoft products since the commencement of Windows 95. We have rarely used their support because they make their products in a way that makes them easy to use. Sometimes, there are flaws and issues, and because we are also a Microsoft Partner, we get support on priority. They take a case at the level where they think it will be resolved, and if someone is not able to resolve it, it automatically gets escalated. 

We mostly use our in-house support. In the past 20 years, we have used their support twice. When I used their support last time around four to five years ago, they were really very helpful. They were good and very professional. I cannot comment on how their support is now with the current pandemic and people not working from the office. 

We were using Symantec Antivirus three years ago. When we were using Symantec Antivirus, users used to report that certain popups are there, and what should they do with them. They used to ask, "Is my system infected?" They used to panic on seeing those pop-ups. Most of them were unnecessary and would say that they need to have admin access or a particular software is trying to open a port. Because we are into development, it is a requirement of a developer to open certain ports and to make that application listen on certain ports. Such requirements were very difficult to configure in Symantec. It was difficult to make it understand that these ports are going to be used by developers, and they are going to be opened, and it is not a virus activity. Sometimes, the temporary folder of users used to get infected, and it used to give hundreds and hundreds of pop-ups. We didn't know how to close all those pop-ups in one go because they were not in a group. Imagine sitting and closing a hundred pop-ups. We had to click the Close button on each and every pop-up.

With Microsoft Defender, we can control notifications. We can tell which notifications should go to the users and which shouldn't go to the users and should be forwarded to the admin central console. In terms of user experience, users are happier with less annoyance of pop-ups that they used to get with Symantec Antivirus. They do not need to know each and everything that is going at the backend. Only the admins need to know certain things, and they should know them. With Microsoft Defender, users don't even get to know that they have an antivirus solution on their system because they never get any irritating pop-ups or notifications or slowness of the system. We configure everything from the backend, and we are managing their systems from one console, which is the biggest plus point of Microsoft Defender.

Its initial setup is very easy. It took us just a couple of hours to deploy it on remote devices.

Our implementation strategy was to deploy group policies and manage the DLP policies from the central console.

We did our own research, and because it was a lockdown, we had resources on our hands. We asked one of our system admins to look into the options and the policies that we need to deploy and what we need to do. He went over it for a month and trained the rest of the team. Within one and a half months, it was fully operational on each device, and my whole team was trained on it.

The whole job of its deployment was done by one person, and for maintenance, we have got a five-person team because we have 380 users across the clock and across the globe.

We have very much seen an ROI.

Licenses depend upon what you are looking for and what kind of security do you want to implement. There are costs in addition to the standard licensing fees.

When we used to buy Symantec, we used to spend on 100 licenses. We used to spend approximately $2,700 for those many licenses, and they came in packs. To add one more license, I had to buy a pack with a minimum of 10 licenses. I had to spend on nine extra licenses because I can't get a single license, whereas when we go for Microsoft, we can get as many licenses as we want.

If I have 100 users today, and tomorrow, I have 90 users, I can release my 10 licenses next month. With any other software vendor, you buy licenses for one year, and you have to stick with that. If today you have 100 licenses, and tomorrow, you have 50, you have already paid for one year's license. You can't go back and tell them that I don't require these 50 licenses because I have lost my 50 users, but with Microsoft Defender, licensing is on a monthly basis. It gives you both options. You can go yearly and save on it, or you can go monthly. You will, again, save on it. It is very fair everywhere.

My advice is, "Try it, and you will love it." If you go for any other product, you will have to manage everything separately, which becomes an overhead. You will have a separate console, separate licensing, and a separate vendor. You will also get a piece of software that is going to have a layer in between the operating system and your applications, whereas Defender incorporates itself onto the layer where the operating system is sitting. So, you don't tax your resources to manage a product that is already incorporated into all systems. Everybody knows how to use Windows and Defender, so the learning curve is also not there. It is very easy, and it offloads a lot of things such as tech requirements, separate licensing requirements, and separate vendor management. 

I am not advising you to go ahead and discard whatever you are using. You should implement it in a test environment and see what your requirements are because the requirements will definitely impact the licensing. If your requirements are met, and then compare the time required to manage Defender versus the current solution that you are using. You should compare how many hours are you putting in managing both solutions with a different skill set. Only after such evaluation, you should deploy it. 

The biggest lesson that I have learned from using this solution is to always keep it simple. Don't complicate.

I would rate Microsoft Defender Antivirus a nine out of 10. If they can make the UI more systematic, I can give it a 10 out of 10.