Microsoft Defender for Endpoint Reviews

I have been using Microsoft Defender for EDR (Endpoint Detection and Response). I started working with Microsoft when Defender was an anti-malware product. Over time, it evolved into an EDR solution.

Microsoft Defender helps investigate and monitor security alerts effectively. The EDR collects all the information from the device and matches it with an attack database. If it finds a match, it alerts, and then an investigator can trace back to find the root cause of what happened. This is very helpful for investigation purposes.

The valuable feature of Microsoft Defender is its ability to collect all the information from the device and match it with the attack database to alert if something matches. Investigators can trace back to find the root cause.

I have not thought about areas needing improvement, however, it seems there are challenges associated with IP addresses at times.

I began using Microsoft Defender since its beginning as an EDR solution and worked on it for a long time, even before it was known as Microsoft Defender when it was just an anti-malware product.

There are no stability issues. It is stable.

Scalability is good.

Many security products are used, including Trend Micro, Microsoft, Cisco, and Oracle. I worked with Microsoft for around ten years, focusing on Microsoft Windows Defender.

The initial setup is pretty easy to use.

I don't have any information on the pricing, setup cost, or licensing.

Microsoft Defender is integrated into Windows systems and is a pretty good product. It is something I would recommend to others.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.

It's an AV and EDR. The AV is integrated with the OS and, once you onboard the devices through a portal, it also functions as an EDR.

The main reason it has improved our organization is that it is integrated with the entire Microsoft 365 suite. We get a lot of functionality and a centralized way of operating or controlling all the devices in the environment.

The solution automates routine tasks and the finding of high-value alerts. That helps a lot. I worked with a different product before and, if we wanted to check if a specific application was affecting our organization, we had to get the application details and then search in the EDR console or on the devices for those application details. But with Defender for Endpoint, you can simply put the application details in a query and run it, and that becomes a customized detection. I don't need to check for the same application again and again. I can get an alert whenever it pops up again.

There is integration with all the products, whether Defender for Cloud or Microsoft Purview or Office 365, so we have a centralized console. There is a sync so that you can get all the alerts in different portals on a single portal. That consolidation makes things easier because we don't have to navigate to multiple portals to check for all the information. Before, we used to only get basic details, like the title or the category of a particular alert. But now, since it is also syncing with Sentinel, we don't need to go to the Defender portal. We can view the entire alert story and related devices, or potentially affected devices, and which devices could be the next targets.

Another advantage is that the threat intelligence helps us proactively prepare for potential issues before they strike. There is an option to check for vulnerabilities and that is not only limited to our organization or the license we bought. We have one filter that will show all the potential threats in the market or that other customers might have reported. We can view them and the steps they have followed. There are all the CVD details that are not affecting our organization, things that are still new in the market, and it will give the remediation steps for them as well.

In terms of deployment, management, and manual efforts, it has saved me a lot of time. Previously, I would review each alert. That meant, during a given week, that I would be on alerts for three or four days, and only then would I go on to other things. It has saved me a couple of days a week because of the automation and auto-suppress rules, which are configured to automatically resolve an alert and trigger an email to me that the alert has come up and the action has been taken.

Because it has been integrated with the OS, we get the entire software inventories, and we even get access to the registries. Those are the primary features. We also have something called advanced hunting, which uses SQL tables to list out all the details of the device and that is also used for threat hunting.

Defender for Endpoint also helps prioritize threats across our enterprise, and we have an option for customized detections, which is an additional feature that differentiates it from other products. The customized detection helps us identify threats.

I would like to see improvement from a management perspective. We have had to depend on Intune for certain tasks.

I would also like to see additional features related to device control. For now, it has all the common features that other EDR and AV products offer, but device control is missing. Device control means automatically syncing the devices without any dependency on other products, like Intune, SCCM, or even Azure. If it could sync between products after only adding it to one product, that would be great.

I've been working with Microsoft Defender for Endpoint for close to one year.

It is stable.

It is also scalable. 

Since it's an AV and EDR, you can use it at any location and on all the platforms, including Android and iOS.

Support depends on the support contract you have. The Premier support contract is comparatively efficient.

I would rate their support at eight out of 10. Sometimes, because they have multiple teams, there could be a delay with a ticket going to a wrong team. But once it is routed to the correct team, we get good support.

Positive

I worked with one similar solution, which was VMware Carbon Black Cloud. Defender for Endpoint has the advantage because Carbon Black is a third party to the OS. That is going to create a lot of additional work to manually deploy things, check the installation, see if it's parsing. There could also be compatibility issues. Because Defender is integrated with the OS, you don't need to do those manual tasks to install the product or work through the compatibility issues.

It is pretty straightforward to deploy. There isn't any manual effort, even if you are a new customer and migrating from a different product to Defender. All you need to do is get a license and the credentials to log in.

In the back-end, if we were to deploy the new tenant, it would be on Azure, and there are a series of steps to follow, nothing complex. It's just a GUI. You just need to give the device count and the geographical location. It takes four to five people for the deployment. 

Once the deployment is done, you don't need to constantly monitor it, but four people would be good for operations: two people to manage the devices and configuration, and the other two to review the alerts that are coming and analyze the vulnerabilities. Once a month you should review and update the software. Other than that, there is only maintenance when there is an issue. The signatures are updated automatically.

You can manage the devices on-prem, but if you want the EDR solution, it's completely cloud. You still have the option to control the devices on-prem through SCCM or any other integration, but ideally, it's cloud-based. The back-end portal is on Azure, but the console or tenant for users or management is a different portal. It's not on the Azure portal, it's a different URL.

The time it takes to see benefits depends on the end-users' requirements or which products they want to integrate it with. In my case, after two or three months I felt like I had found the good things to integrate it with and had a centralized way to manage them.

The solution has saved us money compared to the other products we use, but it depends on the situation. If there are multiple integrations, you have to get the licenses for those as well. But in our case, comparatively, we have saved money.

We did consider other options, CyberArc and Trellix (which is the new name for McAfee products). But the ease of using Defender for Endpoint and the reduction in manual efforts are why we went with it. Also, collecting and reporting on the data was easier.

The visibility into threats that the solution gives us is the same as other EDR products. But one advantage I have noticed, because I have experience working with a couple of other EDR products, is getting the complete device registry information. If we want to query anything or look into the complete alert or vulnerability details, we can get to the core. We don't need to depend on getting access to the device. We can do it from a centralized console.

I've seen a lot of people saying that they are looking for feature X but it's not there in the product. Most EDR products function in the same way, but they call features by different names. My advice would be to consult with Microsoft's Fast Track support engineers. They can guide you and explain every feature. Go for that first and then implement it.

I would definitely recommend Defender for Endpoint because going with a third party would require a lot of maintenance. For smaller companies, Defender for Endpoint would be more cost-efficient than requiring more headcount to do more maintenance.

It provides good visibility in terms of the number of devices covered, users covered, and so on. With most people working from home for the past two years as a result of the pandemic, Microsoft has helped us improve our security. Because it's a cloud component, we have been able to have improved coverage for our remote users, which was a challenge when we were using traditional endpoint protection solutions. Microsoft Defender for Endpoint has enabled us to secure devices even when they are off of the organization's premises. It has added value to our organization and has helped improve and mitigate security risks across the organization.

I like the fact that it's prebuilt onto Windows and that it integrates with various solutions.

The Microsoft Defender for Endpoint dashboard gives you a very wide view. If, for example, a device is having some malicious activity, it will tell you who has logged into that device and the history of the activity such as whether the activity began because that particular user clicked a malicious link in an email. It is able to do this because Microsoft Defender can connect to the whole Microsoft 365 ecosystem. Thus, it can provide more visibility as compared to a standalone endpoint solution, which will only give you visibility with regard to the information collected on the client in which it is installed.

It provides a detailed level of visibility considering that it's prebuilt onto Windows. It's able to drill down into the processes, such as the DLL files that are running and the installation files from where the threat is emanating. It gives you a deeper threat analysis in comparison to that of other solutions I've worked with. Microsoft Defender is able to provide details such as whether it is a malicious file, the process that is executing a particular file, how it is initiated, the process number, the particular execution file that is running, and so on.

When it discovers a threat, it has its own inbuilt capabilities to prioritize the severity as low, medium, high, and critical. You can also intervene and assign a particular priority to an incident if the priority was not what you expected. Microsoft Defender gives you visibility not just from a threat perspective but also from a user perspective, for example, to identify the most high-risk users in an organization. It gives you the ability to prioritize the riskiest users and devices.

We use Azure AD Identity Protection, Windows Defender for Cloud, and Microsoft Defender for Office 365.

It is easy to integrate these solutions because Microsoft Defender for Endpoint gives you a central view of all of the security components in the organization. We have integrated these solutions to have one central dashboard.

Having one XDR dashboard has eliminated the need to look at multiple dashboards.

In terms of these solutions working natively together to deliver coordinated detection and response across our environment, Defender for Endpoint works natively well on its own Defender for Office 365. The full integrated visibility doesn't come natively enabled by default. As an administrator, you have to figure out where the configuration is and enable that configuration so that the events are captured by one solution and pushed to the central dashboard for security.

Microsoft has come a long way in terms of security and comprehensive threat protection. They've done quite a lot to mature their solutions. It's hard to find one vendor who covers your email security, cloud security, and endpoint security, giving you central visibility into all of it, and Microsoft is one of the major players at the moment.

Threat intelligence helps us proactively prevent attacks before they happen. Defender can pick up an activity that is happening across other tenants in the organization. You can then look at what controls you can put in place to prevent it from happening in your own organization. It's better to prevent an attack rather than to stop one that is already happening. This approach allows us to proactively put measures in place and be ready to respond in case an attack does occur. It keeps us more alert and prepared.

With Microsoft Defender for Endpoint, you can automate some of the incident response actions. However, we do have false positives that are picked up, and automation needs to be done sparingly. Automation of routine tasks does free up our admins, and they can focus on more strategic initiatives and improvements, and leave the day-to-day administrative duties to the system.

This solution has saved us time in terms of providing centralized visibility and not having to onboard agents when deploying. It has made management a bit easier because it can be accessed from anywhere and has made it a bit more convenient to manage the whole Endpoint protection activities. Our team is still quite lean, and the time spent on EDR activities has probably reduced by about 50%, freeing us up to catch up on other activities that we're following up on in the entire information security program.

Microsoft Defender for Endpoint has decreased our time to detect and our time to respond. Proactive alerts help you send notifications before something actually happens. That means you have more time at hand to quickly detect threats before they happen. If they do happen, it gives you all of the information you need to be able to quickly respond compared to traditional EDR solutions for which you may need to look for VPN production to access your tenant. The ability to automate the responses has also decreased the time it takes to respond to an incident by about 50% because even before the notification is received, the system would have begun to take the action that you had configured for the automation. That is, the response will begin without your intervention.

Automation is one of the areas that need improvement because if you fully automate, then there's a high chance that you're going to be blocking a lot of actual false positives.

With the XDR dashboard, when you're doing an investigation and you're drilling down to obtain further details it tends to open many different tabs that take you away from your main tabs. You can end up having 10 tabs open for one investigation. This is another area for improvement because you can end up getting lost in multiple tabs. Therefore, the central console can be improved so that it does not take you to several different pages for each investigation.

Microsoft keeps changing the name of the solution, and when we go to senior management to ask for a budget, they think you're asking for a different solution. It would be great if Microsoft could decide that Defender for Endpoint is the name and stick with it.

I've been using it for three years.

It's quite stable.

It's very easy to scale because it comes built-in with Windows 10, and you just need to enable it. This can be done on scale using group policies or through Endpoint Manager on cloud or Intune.

We have about 5,000 users.

The technical support is okay, and I would rate them at seven out of ten. It depends on the level of support that you have with Microsoft. If you have enterprise support, you'll get dedicated support, and your issues will be resolved much faster. That is, if you're able to pay for premium support, you'll get good, faster responses. If you have normal support, however, it may take a bit longer to get someone to look at an issue.

Neutral

We previously used Kaspersky Endpoint Protection. One of the reasons why we switched is the fact that traditional endpoint solutions tend to be monolithic. They usually run on an on-premises infrastructure. As a result, you have to deploy agents to all of the machines and to manage them, you have to be on the company's network or be able to access it through VPN. Also, those who work remotely will need to log into the VPN to receive updates. Often, those who don't need access to internal systems will go for months without logging into the VPN, which means that they will not pick up the updates.

We were also looking for a solution that was more cloud-friendly because the organization was moving towards the cloud with the emergence of remote work.

The initial deployment can be straightforward if you have Windows 10 Enterprise Professional because it will come preinstalled. All you will have to do then is to enable it. In our case, we wanted to enable a particular GP and encountered some complexities in terms of connectivity. It took us about six months to deploy it.

It's a SaaS solution, so you don't require much effort in terms of deployment. Once installed, there's very little maintenance required. We don't have to upgrade any agents; it's straightforward. It mainly requires administrative work from the console.

Our environment is across multiple branches in the organization with branches in different locations and countries.

We had a team of three with someone to configure the group policies, someone to look at the admin center on Microsoft, and someone to ensure that the traffic is allowed.

Because Microsoft Defender comes as an add-on, it can be a bit expensive if you're trying to buy it separately. Another option is to upgrade, but the enterprise licenses for Microsoft can also be quite a bit pricey. Overall, the cost of Microsoft Defender compared to that of other endpoint detection solutions is slightly higher.

If you have a big team, then you can go with a best-of-breed strategy where you have dedicated teams that are looking at your endpoint protection, email protection, network protection, and so on. You may have a SOC team as well that gets the events and incidents from all of the different teams, analyzes centrally and provides a general view from a security operations perspective. In summary, if you have a well-resourced, mature organization, then it may make sense to go for the best-of-breed strategy.

However, if you have an organization without a big security team, it makes sense to have a single vendor's suite. At times, it may appear to be a single point of failure, but in terms of management and usability, it's a bit easier to work with and deploy. It will give you some level of visibility that will cut across the different domains.

Overall, Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is a good solution, and it'll give you good visibility and protection. It's worth considering, and I will rate it at eight on a scale from one to ten.

I'm a consultant. When we do a project with a client, they want us to make an assessment of their environment so they know how to improve their security through Endpoint. I give advice on how to manage the daily case reports that Microsoft automatically sends. 

The solution is mainly deployed on the cloud. Most of our clients are on-premises, but they are transitioning and moving most of their administrative tasks to the cloud.

We deploy this solution for multi-national companies. For example, the last customer I worked with has several departments and locations in several countries. It's a mixture of everything. It's a multi-national company nowadays.

We use all of the M365 security products. I'm also looking into Sentinel. For on-premise security, we're using Windows Defender managed by Security Center or Intune.

We have integrated the solution with other Microsoft products. For example, integrating Azure Active Directory and on-premises computers with Intune is really easy to accomplish. The security console gives us visibility over all the products that are managed by different Microsoft tools. The integration is amazing. 

The solutions work natively together to deliver coordinated detection and response across our environment.

Using ORCA PowerShell provides us with an extensive report and assessment of the platform. It's officially recommended by Microsoft to get an assessment of their environment. It's easier to get the big picture from this tool than from the Microsoft console.

The main improvement is that we have complete integration. For example, there were a couple of projects where I integrated the already managed platform from on-premises using Endpoint Corporation Manager with Defender. The integration between the on-premises Microsoft hybrid environment, Intune, and Defender for Endpoint is secure. It gives me a full picture of the status of the entire organization. That was unimaginable a couple of years ago, but now it's real.

This solution helps us train a lot of customers and their employees to be aware of what they shouldn't do with certain behaviors, mail, and files on their corporate computers. It helps customers to be more aware of behaviors that put the entire company at risk.

We realized these benefits from the beginning of using this solution. It gives us information from different points of view and consoles in a convenient way.

It helps prioritize threats across an enterprise. The reporting shows companies what they need to do to resolve abnormalities and prioritize what needs to be solved in order to improve the security level of the company.

Prioritization is important because it's absolutely necessary to know what has been upgraded and what hasn't. Hackers take advantage of that.

Defender gives us the ability to look at all the dashboards from a single screen. The solution's threat intelligence helps us prepare for potential threats before they hit and take proactive steps by configuring some behaviors.

Microsoft Endpoint saved us from a lot of potential problems. It has absolutely saved us time. From the point of view of our clients, the solution saves money because the main tools that are used by the platform are already integrated into their contracts with Microsoft.

The solution provides protection and reports strange behavior and automatically blocks some of it. I love the way that statuses are represented.

It provides visibility into threats and gives daily reports about new threats and how to deal with them. We can change configurations so customers are continuously aware of new threats.

The dashboard customization could be improved. It's not as good as Azure. The center console isn't very flexible.

The automated remediation could be improved too. If there's a problem, most of the time they open a ticket for another help desk team. They don't remediate these vulnerabilities themselves 90% of the time.

I have been using this solution for about five years.

It's stable. From time to time, there's a blackout on the web pages.

The quality of technical support depends on the technicians who are assigned to your case, but the solutions they provided us with have worked every time. The reply time can be fast, but it depends on if you're lucky or not. You can be waiting for a week or two days. 

I would rate technical support an eight out of ten. 

Positive

The setup is very quick. The amount of time it takes depends on the infrastructure that someone wants to maintain or update.

Only a couple of people were involved in the deployment. From my point of view, I leave the customer's teams in charge of the maintenance of the tools. I recommend taking a look at the weekly reports that Microsoft sends in order to know what changed, what's new, and what has been upgraded.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

There are several free platforms to test all the functionalities and evaluate the solution. If you see that they cover all of your needs, my advice is to buy the product.

I prefer a single vendor's security suite because integration is easier.

We are a property investment company, and people here use Microsoft Surface devices for their daily job. We are a Microsoft-oriented company, and we use it for our basic endpoint security implementation. 

Our entire security is based on this endpoint solution. Sometimes you have centralized security where you scan all traffic going through a central firewall and you also check through several types of solutions. You also check HTTPS connections. Basically, for all the traffic going inside and outside the company, you use a security firewall, and this endpoint solution is actually a firewall solution or security solution that is distributed. So, all the traffic coming from and going into the end-user device is basically submitted for scanning. If you download an ISO on a website or an email, everything is scanned for security to check whether it contains any malicious data. 

We are using Microsoft Defender for Endpoint Plan 2, which is the enterprise version of Microsoft Defender for Endpoint. We are using the most recent version of it.

We deploy it via Intune. The feature is called Microsoft Intune Autopilot. We have a hardware hash. A colleague of mine prepares the configuration and then based on the hardware hash and Autopilot, the devices are completely installed and joined to Azure AD and then to our enterprise. Intune is a Microsoft device management platform that comes with Microsoft solutions. When you buy a new device, based on the hardware hash, it can automatically find that device through Autopilot and do the specific deployment for your company. So, the users can use any type of device, start it, and then it will automatically be joined to our environment.

It is a completely integrated platform with advanced threat analysis, SIEM features, updated inventory, and so on. It is an all-in-one solution. Microsoft is taking over lots of companies to provide more and better services to its clients. This is one of the best solutions around at the moment.

It protects our organization from all kinds of attacks, such as ransomware attacks and any malware downloads. It is like an oracle who knows everything about:

• What is around at the moment?
• From where the attacks are coming?
• What is currently going on security-wise?

It knows about all the software that you have installed on the laptop, and whether they are not patched or have security issues. It covers everything you want from your security platform.

It is a very advanced system based on AI. It has a very large database of places or sites on the internet where you should not go. It is continuously online. 

It is completely self-sufficient. You don't have to install anything. It is completely integrated into the operating system, and it also has a centralized information dashboard where you can immediately see:

• Are all your devices up to date?
• Are there any threats?
• Are the devices having problems with updates?
• Are they infected with anything?
• Was something blocked?

You can immediately see what is going on in your enterprise, in different networks, and also in people's homes in terms of endpoint security.

It is a zero-trust platform, and it integrates with all types of enterprise services that we run. It also integrates with the Office 365 environment where you can securely connect from anywhere.

It makes your Surface devices hot. It is resource-intensive. It strains your CPU, not more than other file scanners around, but it also does a lot more. When you are transmitting files or data, it is continuously scanning the traffic and analyzing it bit by bit to see what's going on, and that, of course, is costly in terms of CPU. It is CPU intensive, and if you are on battery, it drains your battery fast. That's the only drawback that it has.

They're continuously improving it. You can compare it with Teams. About a year ago, the codex and the presentation of the Teams application were not very well optimized, and if you were using the Teams application, it used to drain your battery. It still drains your battery, but they have improved it a lot, and it is a lot less CPU intensive after one year. They're working on Defender for Endpoint to make it less CPU intensive.

We have been using Microsoft Defender for Endpoint for more than six months.

Its stability is quite good, especially with Windows 11, which is a very stable operating system. Of course, you can run into some issues. We have some issues with docking stations for Surface and screens, but generally, the operating system together with the endpoint security solution is very stable.

It is the most scalable solution around. You can create an Azure tenant, and with a script, you can deploy 1,000 user accounts. There is no actual limit to it, so the scalability is infinite.

Their support has improved. They're quite good. I would rate them an eight out of ten.

Positive

It has the easiest setup that I've ever seen. It's completely integrated with Microsoft. When you deploy your machine through Autopilot and Intune and assign the license, everything is done automatically. Of course, you have a lot of possibilities and a lot of freedom for detailed configuration, but out of the box, it comes completely self-sustained. You don't have to do anything. This is one of the easiest solutions that I've seen.

You just apply for the plan in Office 365, and you set up your very basic Autopilot template where you would specify the types of software that have to be installed. For instance, you want Office or other types of software. The very basic template is enough to roll it out fully automatically.

It takes a couple of hours. If you apply for a tenant on Azure, you pay for the licenses, and you can roll out with a click on 200 to 1,000 endpoint devices within the hour. This cloud is really amazing.

We are a small company with a few technical engineers, and we provide services for our clients. We provide all kinds of services such as maintaining endpoints and Azure cloud solutions with virtualized services and SaaS services.

Its implementation is more or less handled by my colleague. I do a little bit of configuration but not so much. My colleague knows about all the technical details. He does the complete installation and the complete central management of policies and templates. However, a basic part with basic software is very quickly implemented. You just create a tenant on microsoft.com, and then you can very easily roll out to as many workstations as you would like the necessary configuration for Defender for Endpoint.

Its price at the moment is very good because you get a lot of value for your money, especially with the subscriptions. If you have the E1, E3, or E5 enterprise subscription, you pay per month per user, and you get almost an infinite number of solutions. If you compare the price to the number of solutions that you get, it is a very good deal. 

I'm only concerned about the future because Microsoft is taking over one company after another. In the end, there will be no alternative and then they can do whatever they like, but for now, in terms of price, Microsoft is one of the best performers.

At the moment, it is one of the best security platforms for endpoint security in the market. It is comparable to SentinelOne in terms of features and functions.

It is part of Microsoft's ecosystem. If you need a reliable and secure work environment, and you are bound by GDPR and other standards where you have to take care of your data and prevent breaches and unauthorized access, it is a great solution. 

The E1, E3, or E5 license contains Defender for Endpoint along with many other solutions. Having just the scanner is not enough these days. You need an overview of your whole environment. You need to make sure that your endpoints are encrypted, they are up to date, and they are correctly using zero-trust relationships for your central services. All these things that you need these days are perfectly implemented in the solutions that Microsoft provides. This is the only way for a company that takes data seriously and has to give a guarantee to customers that data is protected.

It is resource-intensive, but you have to take into account that it is not only a file scanner. It is continuously scanning every connection you make on the internet. It is deeply investigating the data that you transport and the connections that you make. It is scanning your files, and it is scanning your software against all kinds of knowledge bases to identify whether there are vulnerabilities in the software that you use. It is a solution that integrates almost everything. It is doing what a central firewall did before, but it is doing that in a distributed way on your device. So, it does so much more than you expect. If you are providing it to your users, you have to take its CPU consumption into account, and you need to provide sufficient CPU power for this.

I would rate it an eight out of ten.

We use Microsoft Defender for Endpoint for anti-malware purposes.

Microsoft Defender for Endpoint has good visibility into threats, capturing 95 percent of them.

Microsoft Defender for Endpoint helps us prioritize threats across our organization, which is important.

We have integrated Microsoft Defender and Sentinel. The process of integrating Microsoft Defender for Endpoint and Sentinel was easy.

They work natively together to deliver coordinated detection and response across our environment which is important. Microsoft Defender for Endpoint and Sentinel work together comprehensively to detect and protect against threats. If one solution misses a threat, the other one will pick it up.

Sentinel allows us to gather data from our entire ecosystem, which is crucial for us.

It enables us to investigate threats and respond holistically from one place.

Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is an effective anti-malware solution. Additionally, it offers the capability to isolate a device in case of more significant issues with a workstation or server. Moreover, we can directly connect with the machine through Microsoft Defender itself to access and check files using live response, allowing us to assess the situation accurately.

Microsoft Defender for Endpoint offers a unified XDR dashboard that eliminates the need to view multiple dashboards. However, we are only focusing on incidents and log queries.

The threat intelligence helps us prepare for potential threats before they occur, allowing us to take proactive steps, as long as there are alerts and we have properly configured them.

We were previously using IBM QRadar, but it was not quite effective for generating alerts or for data analytics. Additionally, it created numerous alerts, which only sent us notifications for issues like behavioral concerns. This had a significant impact on the workload for InfoSec Operations. Microsoft Defender for Endpoint has helped to reduce our SecOps team's investigation time.

Once we invest the initial time to create alerts and queries, Microsoft Defender for Endpoint saves us time by sending alerts and logs directly. This eliminates the need to repeatedly create queries to search for specific alerts, incidents, or events.

Microsoft Defender for Endpoint has decreased our time to detection and time to respond.

There are a couple of features, such as isolating the devices or connecting the device and connecting live response. These are very good features of Microsoft Defender for Endpoint because we can directly connect to the machine, access the system, and check if any malicious files that our Defender or Sentinel is detecting are present or not. This allows us to investigate those files further.

Microsoft Defender for Endpoint sometimes fails to detect malware incidents, and when it does manage to stop them, we only receive a notification stating that the issue has been resolved. Unfortunately, we are not provided with any information on how the solution resolved the incident.

Microsoft Defender for Endpoint does not offer default templates for alerts, requiring us to configure everything ourselves to avoid numerous false positives.

The pricing needs to be improved.

I have been using Microsoft Defender for Endpoint for a little over one year.

I give the stability a nine out of ten.

I give the scalability an eight out of ten.

We rarely need technical support, but when we encounter issues with log ingestion, we contact them. Unfortunately, the support isn't very helpful as they suggest trying things we've already attempted, which haven't worked. Consequently, we often find ourselves searching online to resolve the problem on our own.

Neutral

I also use FireEye, which is now called Trellix, along with McAfee. Each tool has its own advantages and disadvantages. FireEye was solely an EDR solution. Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is superior to McAfee due to the higher number of alerts and the ability to isolate and connect to the machine in real-time.

Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is the default solution for Microsoft, but it can be challenging to integrate with Linux environments. Additionally, if we are using any other EDR or anti-malware solutions, Microsoft Defender for Endpoint will only work passively, not actively, and we cannot convert it to function as an active anti-malware solution.

The initial setup of Microsoft Defender for Endpoint may be more complex compared to other solutions that only require pushing agents to workstations or servers. Each device must be compliant and onboarded to Azure in order to be active, and any non-compliant workstations cannot be uploaded to Azure. On the other hand, with McAfee and similar solutions, we only need to push the agent and it starts reporting to the console. Our deployment process lasted six months and involved a group of three to four people and their respective teams. We had one team for field agents, another for SCCM purposes, and an Operations team as well.

Microsoft assisted with the implementation, and they were efficient.

We are required to pay for the data we ingest, and increasing the data amount incurs additional expenses.

I give Microsoft Defender for Endpoint an eight out of ten.

We currently have around 6,000 Microsoft Defender for Endpoint users in our organization.

We have a team called InfoSec Operations that handles maintenance and consists of approximately five people.

I recommend Microsoft Defender for Endpoint for larger organizations, and they should undergo training if they intend to use it in conjunction with Microsoft Sentinel, as it is a complex tool compared to others like QRadar. For smaller organizations, I suggest using Splunk, which is a reliable solution.

Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is a viable solution, but it does have limitations when it comes to other operating systems. I would not recommend this solution for an organization that operates in a Linux-based environment.

We use it for endpoint detection and response.

The agent is installed on the endpoint, on the laptop or desktop, but it's a SaaS solution.

One feature that has proven beneficial is the Threat and Vulnerability Management module of Defender for Endpoint, which provides information on the vulnerability of all the endpoints. We don't have to run active scans via network scanners. It is built-in. That has proven to be helpful, although we're still in the early phases. We have identified vulnerabilities that were in our organization for too long and nobody knew about those machines and the vulnerabilities on them. From a vulnerability remediation point of view, it has been quite helpful to us.

One of the features which differentiates it from other EDR providers is the Automated Investigation and Response, which reduces the workload of SOC analysts or engineers. They don't have to manually investigate each and every alert on the endpoint, since it does so automatically. And you can automate the investigation part.

In addition, there are several features that have helped to improve our security posture at the prevention level, such as the attack surface reduction controls and the exploit prevention control. The attack surface reduction comes with the solution, out-of-the-box. There is Application Control as well, which is kind of difficult to implement, but once you are through the pain of designing and implementing it, it is one of the very good features to have. These tools are some of the things that are missing from other vendors' products, as I have worked with McAfee, Symantec and Carbon Black.

One area for improvement is that, because it comes out-of-the-box, it does not interact well with many applications we have developed in-house. There is no way to exclude them because it interacts with everything on the endpoint. One of the issues is lagging: the in-house-developed applications suffer from this and they become slow. For a big enterprise, it is important that they include a feature so that we can exclude these applications.

Another area where it could be improved is that, while it collects a lot of data, it misses some data, which is important, such as the hardware version of the endpoint and the AV signature version. I think this improvement is in the Microsoft pipeline already but it is not in the solution yet.

I have been using Microsoft Defender for Endpoint for around one and a half years.

It has been quite stable up until now. It does not break. Microsoft is developing on it quite frequently and more and more features are coming in, but overall it is quite stable. It does not break that often.

As we have moved away from Microsoft Defender Antivirus and to the EDR solution, we have seen very few issues so far that users have faced with this. There have been very occasional performance issues for some users, but they have been very rare.

Scalability is one thing which, I think, Microsoft is working on, because it is not yet very scalable. What it provides out-of-the-box is all it has. Any big organization needs customization, but the customization of it and running customized things on top of it are areas where it is lagging. That something Microsoft needs to work on. Examples include running custom playbooks or customizing the events which it is collecting.

We are protecting 100,000 endpoints with this solution. We may increase usage, but there is no plan for that as of yet.

Microsoft technical support is good.

Before Microsoft Defender for Endpoint we had Carbon Black. But when I came onboard, Defender for Endpoint had already been chosen.

The setup process is not very complex, but it is also not very straightforward. It depends what solutions you have. If you have everything set up, which is usually the case for big organizations, then it is pretty smooth. But if there are some things that are not set up properly in the organization, like certain parts of the infra or the cloud onboarding, then it becomes cumbersome, not the installation part, but in setting up the backend which it needs.

Our implementation strategy was that we started with a few pilot machines, to onboard Defender for Endpoint. We noticed that we had around 70 to 80 percent failures. It was a learning phase and we identified the root cause of those failures. There are some settings in Defender AV that need tweaking when you want to onboard Defender for Endpoint. We struggled to tweak those settings, but once that was done, it went pretty smoothly for the next couple of pilots. Then we encountered another roadblock which was related to an OS version dependency.

Overall, it took us about one month to onboard the solution, but we are weak in infra.

We had our consultant from Microsoft for the implementation. The engagement went on for three to four months. But one thing we noticed from this project was that it did not need a consultant. It was not that difficult to do. Maybe we did not get an expert consultant because, for solving issues, he also took time.

In addition to doing onboarding, we wanted our third-party integrations, but that was something they could not do because they were Microsoft. We had to do that ourselves. Over that three or four months, we realized that we didn't need them.

Microsoft consultancy is good and bad. If you get good consultants, they are really good. But sometimes you get consultants who are not expert enough in their domains and you don't get enough from them.

We have not seen ROI yet, but we are hopeful that in the future it will provide that.

One of the differences between other solutions I have used and Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is that the latter is not yet enterprise-ready to the same extent that the other vendors are. Other vendors provide a lot of customization when it comes to integration, which every big organization requires. No big organization depends on one particular tool. Defender lacks that at this point.

Defender for Endpoint is marketed as an endpoint detection and response tool, but for others who are looking at onboarding it, they should take it as a holistic tool that provides AV, EDR, and vulnerability management all in one. However, it does not provide very good integration with third parties.

We primarily used the solution as Endpoint Detection and protection (EDR, EPP) with secondary benefits of threats and vulnerability management, security incident response, automated query and real-time device monitoring, and with the capability of email security, identity management (DFI), and task automation (Power automate). We used respective licenses where required.

The solution was also used for an endpoint antivirus for workstations in a multi-OS environment, including Windows and Mac OS. We had file, device, and user trajectory monitoring for the security operations team.

The solution benefited the company via:

• OS-level/Tool compatibility for endpoints running Windows (since both are Microsoft products and Defender core files are included in Win10 or later delivery).
• Heuristic capability. Consistent usage of MDE indicates that the tools are continuously learning new prevention techniques by pulling real-time up-to-date cloud resources.

• Alert chaining. The solution makes security Incidents, events, and alerts less tedious from a Security Operation Center standpoint. This can result in false negatives or detriment for small to medium-scale firms running no or semi-automated threat response features.

The most valuable aspects of the solution include:

• Advanced hunting. The product offers flexibility, visibility, and automation capability using a user-friendly query language (KQL).
• Reporting. Clear and concisely plotted graphics show real-time data representation - which is valuable to upper management.

• Scalability/API. We are able to productively integrate with existing on-prem, hybrid, or cloud applications. 
• Great OOB features. The solution comes with SIEM-ingestion-ready features for extensive visibility, automation, and integration, including advanced hunting, threats and vulnerability management, embedded simulation for end-to-end testing, ransomware prevention (Controlled Folder Access), and Attack Surface Reduction (ASR) rules.

Improvements could be made via:

• Clicks. There's a poor user experience with lots of optimizable opportunities of user interface particularly on the newly improved portal (https://security.microsoft.com/). Features like device inventory continue to lack essential workstation drill-downs showing the entire device information with the least effort.

• De-centralized console features. Discrepancies with enabling core features at the click of a button within the MDE portal is mostly due to prerequisites that are tied to the functionality or partial enforcement requirements from other Microsoft tools (Group policy, Azure, Sentinel, SCCM, Intune). EDR in block mode requires Intune security baselines and tamper protection requires MAPS enabled. Web content filtering also has security baseline dependencies

• No single pane of glass. There are too many loose ends with tiny bits and pieces to enforce essential security policies compared to other EDR solutions within the same caliber. A typical example is having to create exclusions in different locations for entirely different functionalities, such as: automation folder exclusion, group policy exclusions (per tenant), Controlled Folder Access (ASR) Allowed application, and Attack Surface Reduction (ASR).

• Service Requests. Noncritical cases with MDE technical support teams tend to be queued for over a week before the first customer engagement. Most of these tickets also end up in the hands of temporary or contracted non-Microsoft employees who are scripted and offer little attention to unique incidents.

Suggested additional features that should be included in the next release include:

• Digestible interface/filter for crown-jewel capabilities like ASR, CFA and Exploit mitigation occurrences.
• Restoration of an always visible search bar from the previous console view (https://securitycenter.windows.com).
• A definitive action plan for Secure Score recommendations and deduplicate of controls.

We were using Microsoft Defender for Endpoint prior to its change of name from Defender ATP. We experienced a plethora of GA changes including, but not limited to, IOS/multiple OS support, device discovery, web content filtering, API updates, and continuous integrations with existing security tools.