Microsoft Defender for Office 365 Reviews

We use Microsoft Defender for Office 365 to protect our Outlook 365 inboxes. When opening links in emails, Defender's URL defense verifies the legitimacy of the URL, ensuring it's not a spam link. This protection is active whenever clicking on any link within Outlook 365.

Our organization's security has been strengthened with Microsoft Defender for Office 365. Regardless of the specific tools we use for our daily office tasks, our data remains protected.

It provides great visibility into vulnerabilities compared to its competitors. Its insights and timely identification of Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures enable proactive threat mitigation, making it the preferred choice for comprehensive security.

Microsoft Defender for Office 365 is critical for our organization's security and privacy because it helps prioritize enterprise-wide threats and protects our sensitive data. Data breaches pose a significant financial risk, potentially costing millions or even billions of dollars, making Defender's role in safeguarding our data vital.

It automates routine tasks and prioritizes high-value alerts, providing automated insights to our security team. This allows us to proactively block harmful activities like anonymous calls and intrusions, significantly enhancing our overall security automation.

Microsoft Defender for Office 365 provides threat intelligence, enabling proactive threat mitigation. It monitors all network traffic, both incoming and outgoing, allowing us to track data and protect our network perimeter. This comprehensive monitoring includes network calls, enhancing our overall system security.

Microsoft Defender for Office 365 has helped to save us time and money and has reduced our time to detect and respond.

The most valuable feature of Microsoft Defender for Office 365 is its spam filter. This filter effectively reduces wasted time by automatically identifying and blocking spam emails before they reach our inboxes, moving them directly to the spam folder. This prevents the constant need to manually review and delete these unwanted messages.

Microsoft needs to broaden its global support presence by establishing teams of subject-matter experts in all regions.

I have been using Microsoft Defender for Office 365 for six months to one year.

Microsoft Defender for Office 365 is stable.

Microsoft Defender for Office 365 offers excellent scalability, as evidenced by Microsoft's support of nearly all Fortune 10 companies.

The technical support is good, providing a clear channel for submitting requests. Based on the severity level, C1, C2, or C3, they consistently provide appropriate responses within the agreed-upon four-hour service level agreement.

Positive

As a technical user of Microsoft Defender for Office 365, I've seen a positive return on investment in how it helps secure our environment and ecosystem. The insights and intelligence provided have also been invaluable to our security team in securing our enterprise's information.

I would rate Microsoft Defender for Office 365 nine out of ten.

As a specialist in SOC, we work closely with multiple customers to cover their IT assets using Microsoft 365 Defender. They have Microsoft Defender for Endpoint deployment, especially for Microsoft 365. We configure the tool to implement the different policies and requirements to cover the email security part and the cloud apps part with the different strategies available on the platform.

After that, we either work directly on the Microsoft 365 portal or configure the sending of the alerts from this portal to Microsoft Sentinel. This will act as a single pane of glass for us to follow the incidents and advise our customers based on that.

One of the best features of the tool is its capability to aggregate insights from different workloads, basically from the Office 365 and endpoints part. With the integration of Microsoft Defender for Identity and Microsoft Entra ID Protection, we will have insights from the identity part. Finally, with the Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps, we'll also have insights about our cloud apps, either Microsoft 365 cloud apps or third-party cloud apps.

The aggregation of all of these insights into the tool's incident feature will help us have a global vision of the incidents and find multistage attacks at the first steps of the attacks.

Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps is a very good solution that allows you to use a single port or tool to control everything happening with your organization's different cloud applications.

Configuring the default strategies and policies in Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps generates a lot of noise and false positives. Also, the documentation does not have many details about that. The bad configuration and lack of good documentation prevent professionals from taking the most advantage of this tool.

One of the big problems that some customers face is that Microsoft always changes its products' names. For example, four to six months ago, Microsoft Defender for Office 365 was renamed Microsoft Defender XDR. Microsoft comes up with a new name for the tool every one or two years, which sometimes is hard for customers to follow.

Microsoft should improve some integrations in the Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps sub-category. With a specific configuration to Microsoft Defender for Endpoint, we can get logs and insights from network devices and other workloads on our system.

I have been using Microsoft Defender for Office 365 for two years.

I rate the solution an eight or nine out of ten for stability.

We configure the tool for different clients, and thousands of people work with the solution. The tool scales out very well and can cover and monitor devices and users ranging from a few hundred to thousands without any problem. Our clients for Microsoft Defender for Office 365 are medium and small businesses. Microsoft Defender for Office 365 is a scalable solution. There are no issues with the solution's scalability or latency.

I rate the solution's scalability ten out of ten.

The technical support for the solution is very good, and I didn't face any issues with it.

Positive

I have previously used CrowdStrike Falcon. Microsoft Defender for Office 365 and CrowdStrike Falcon are both great tools. Each has its advantages and disadvantages. In my opinion, CrowdStrike is more mature in the endpoint and classic antivirus parts. On the other hand, Microsoft Defender for Office 365 is more mature regarding identity and Office 365.

For artificial intelligence integration, Microsoft 365 Defender is far ahead of others with the integration of CoPilot within the portal. This feature that helps analysts reduce time to analyze and respond to incidents does not exist in CrowdStrike.

The solution's initial setup is very straightforward. You have to go to the portal and click on the incident icon, and the tool will automatically start configuring itself. After that, the integration of the endpoints depends on your workload. For example, 1,000 devices will take much longer than two or three devices.

Automation tools are available within the platform to help us automatically deploy the sensors on different workloads that we will need to cover with this tool. The solution's initial configuration and deployment are very straightforward. A lot of videos and documentation are available for the same.

The initial configuration and deployment of the tool for a specific tenant takes five to ten minutes. After that, it depends on what you want to do. You can implement specific strategies today. Based on the evolution of threats, you will need to configure different things tomorrow.

We tried to solve a lot of issues by implementing the solution. The solution helps us detect problems related to the endpoints, like the detection of suspicious processes or suspicious installation of suspicious software. We will raise an alert, and it will show us a graph of the different entities included in the incident, including users, computers, or endpoints.

If it is related to email, it will show us the initial email and different insights about the incident. We'll go through those alerts and try to check them manually. Sometimes, the tool detects suspicious emails for some incidents and automatically quarantines them.

After that, we, as analysts, will do the manual review. If we find an action suspicious, we use the tool to blocklist the domain that has sent the email. If we find that it's a false positive, we will reject this automatic action by the XDR, and the email will be delivered to the end user.

Unified identity and access management is a new feature on the Microsoft 365 Defender portal. It's all about having a single pane of glass to give you insights into the different identities available on your tenant. Those identities are either on-premises, cloud-based, or synchronized between the on-premises and cloud-based workloads.

The solution's security covers more than just Microsoft technologies. Microsoft Defender for Endpoint and Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps have a specific configuration to get insights from third-party cloud applications or from within the Microsoft Defender for Endpoint sensors. We can also get logs and insights from other network devices present in our perimeter, like routers, switches, or firewalls. All those insights will help us gain some visibility into our security posture.

The product has gone through a lot of improvements, especially in the last few moments. It will be like a SOC unified platform with the integration of the Microsoft Sentinel tool within the Microsoft 365 Defender portal. This tool is available to cover all the perimeters. Even third-party solutions and workloads that do not have any security tools from where we can get insights, we can directly use something else to install the low connectors and get visibility about those.

Also, the most significant evolution is the integration of artificial intelligence with Microsoft Copilot for security. This is also a big added value that will help analysts investigate and minimize the meantime needed to respond to advanced threats.

The solution stops the lateral movement of advanced attacks, like ransomware or business email compromise, in a good way. Specific measures and configurations are implemented within the tool that will help us detect advanced attacks in the early stages. We can set configurations for business email compromise.

With the help of artificial intelligence, we'll get insights about emails that may be starting a business email compromise based on specific keywords. It's the same for ransomware and other advanced attacks.

The solution's integration into a company will help it be more resilient to cyber attacks. It will help the company prepare for attacks at an early stage and respond quickly, which will help it be more secure.

Being an XDR, the solution has detection and response capabilities. With adequate configuration, we can configure the required measures to stop or at least quarantine attacks and isolate the assets involved with the attacks in the early stage upon detection. After that, the manual site comes into the picture, and we do the manual review. Based on our review and feedback, the tool will learn from us and behave better in the next similar incident.

I saw a demo about the solution's multi-tenant management feature, and it's a very good feature. It will help big companies with multiple tenants and MSSPs that deal with multiple tenants for users. It will help them to work with multiple tenants by flipping a switch.

I'm a big fan of the solution. Having a Microsoft E5 license will help you to cover all the different types of security, including the identity, the endpoint, the email, and even the cloud. I'm just an engineer and work with whatever tool the client provides me. I noticed that many customers have a Microsoft E5 license, but they don't know a lot about the capabilities that come with it.

They buy or add other tools from third parties when they have that feature or capability included within the E5 license. Microsoft needs to talk to different customers and show them the capabilities that come with these types of licenses, which cover a lot of features.

The integration of Copilot has helped us a lot in concentrating on a single portal to get different insights. This will help a lot to reduce the meantime to respond to incidents by 50%.

The configuration of the Copilot assistant is very straightforward and doesn't take more than 30 minutes. After that, when the tool automatically detects incidents and you go to the analysis page of a specific incident, you will find an initial analysis of the whole incident by the Copilot security assistant.

You may also interact with it using chat, and it will help you if you haven't understood any specific terms from the initial analysis. It can be configured to automatically respond to specific incidents based on workbooks, which will help us automatically apply the measures to respond to specific incidents for remediation.

Microsoft Defender for Office 365 is a cloud-based solution. Since it's a cloud-based solution, Microsoft does all the maintenance for the tool. We are notified via email if there is a shortage or a problem. The SLAs are usually very good, and I have not noticed any problems in the last two years where we could not access the tool.

I would recommend the solution to other users because it's a very good solution and one of the best XDRs in the world right now. If you go through reviews from Gartner or other companies, you will see that Microsoft Defender for Office 365 is a leader in the XDR market. It has the capability to collect and aggregate insights from different sources, either cloud-based or on-premises.

The integration of artificial intelligence will greatly help final users and security practitioners respond to incidents adequately and efficiently.

Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

365 Defender is a critical tool for mitigating attacks and preventing threats. We use it for email filtering and blocking phishing attacks throughout the entire enterprise. We have around 1,500 users. 

365 Defender has improved our security across multiple categories. It's effective against advanced attacks like phishing and ransomware. Defender's attack disruption works well if you have a strong policy configuration. It will automatically block threats and filter them in most cases without the need to investigate. It will remedy the threat immediately. 

The automated response reduces the manual work, saving our security team time. I would estimate it saves about six hours per day. 

Defender is a SaaS platform, so it offers more flexibility. Managing the permissions is easier. The solution's automated detection and response features are scalable. It's a unified solution that doesn't just cover Microsoft products. We're a multi-cloud shop, and having that coverage is critical. It also includes the latest IAM features like two-factor and multifactor authentication, giving us the most robust solution.

You should be able to deploy Defender for every subscription without the need to add servers. 

I have used 365 Defender for almost six years

I rate Microsoft 365 Defender nine out of 10 for stability.

I rate Microsoft 365 Defender nine out of 10 for scalability.

I rate Microsoft support nine out of 10. Their support is excellent. 

Positive

We migrated to 365 Defender from a McAfee solution.

365 Defender is a cloud-based solution deployed on Azure. You can set it up in two days with some help from Microsoft support using two people.

365 Defender is worth what we paid for it. 

I rate Microsoft 365 Defender nine out of 10. It's the most economical product you can buy, offering a range of features for safeguarding your enterprise. 

We primarily use Defender for 365 for email protection.

My company receives 100,000 emails daily. We implemented Defender to supplement our Broadcom anti-spam solution. Our Broadcom solution wasn't analyzing the server or the body of the messages. 

Defender for 365 is a comprehensive cloud-based solution. The value of the cloud is that you aren't alone. Threat intelligence and analytics are shared in the cloud. We don't have to find the solution alone. If you face an unknown threat with traditional solutions like Trend Micro and Symantec, you need to open a case and send your information to them to analyze forensically and identify the source of the attack. 

The certification training for Defender for 365 needs to be deeper and incorporate Sentinel. I took all the security courses except one, and Sentinel isn't included. 

I have used Defender for three years.

Defender for 365 is stable. You can subscribe to all the alerts and notifications of every service in the cloud, and it won't affect the stability. Your devices will be seamlessly updated from the cloud automatically with no problems. 

Defender for 365 is scalable because it's in the cloud. It will give you more resources as needed, whereas the scalability of an on-premise solution is determined by your processing power and other hardware limitations. 

Deploying Defender isn't complex. You only need to buy the license and connect your devices to the cloud. 

Defender for 365 is reasonably priced, but it isn't cheap. I think the price per user is $3 or $6, depending on the license.

I rate Microsoft Defender for Office 365 nine out of 10. Before deploying Defender, you can compare its engine with that of Symantec, Trend Micro, and other brands.

We're an MSP, and we deploy security solutions to our clients based in the UAE. We are currently implementing the product ourselves and developing the capacity to deploy it to our clients. We have around 200 total end users. 

In addition to Defender for Office 365, we also use Defender for Cloud and Microsoft Sentinel. The products are integrated.    

The integration was straightforward, as most of our clients and we operate an Azure environment, so integration is usually as simple as a few clicks.

Defender for Office 365 helps automate routine tasks and find high-value alerts, which we can do using Azure Logic Apps. We can create operations, automate them, and make a workflow using automation. One of our clients didn't have the budget to invest in a SOC team, but we deployed the solution for them, and they now run a SOC with only one analyst. They can achieve this kind of maturity through the product's automation.   

The solution's threat intelligence helps prepare us for potential threats before they hit and take proactive steps. Sentinel also features robust threat hunting, which provides indicators of possible attacks and is beneficial information to have.   

Defender for Office 365 saved us time, we have seen many improvements to the product, and Microsoft regularly brings out new features. The tool is at a good point right now and is on the path to improvement. Time saved is in the region of 30-40%.  

It decreased our time for detection and response, especially with its SOAR capabilities. We can activate automated runbooks in a few clicks and block a malicious or unauthorized user in a single click. We rapidly receive alerts, which reduces our response time such that what once took at least an hour can now be resolved in minutes.   

The email protection is excellent, especially in terms of anti-phishing policies. 

The solution's information protection around sensitive labels and compliance-related security features are also very valuable.

Defender for Office 365 provides excellent visibility into threats; we can see the attacks and phishing campaigns running against our users from the portal.  

The product helps us prioritize threats across the enterprise, which is essential because most of our clients come to us with alert fatigue. They have so many alerts they often need help determining which ones to work on, and the solution's threat prioritization helps us narrow that down.  

The comprehensiveness of the threat protection provided by Microsoft security products is excellent; we wouldn't use any other third-party security solutions, and it all comes packaged with Azure or an E5 license.    

Microsoft Sentinel enables us to ingest data from our entire ecosystem, which is vital because when we deliver security products for clients, one of their primary requirements is to collect all the on-prem logs and put them in the cloud. Sentinel is capable of this and requires some expertise to operate in this way. 

Sentinel allows us to investigate threats and respond holistically from one place; that's what it's built for. We work offsite as we aren't in the same region as our clients, so the ability to respond remotely is essential to us.  

Several simulation options are available within 365, and the phishing simulation could be better.

I want to see improvements that will make the tool easier to operate. 

We've been using the solution for one year. 

The product is stable. 

Defender for Office 365 is scalable. 

We never had to contact technical support. When we encounter an issue, we can search for a solution on the internet or YouTube, for example, for specific configurations. There's excellent community support available.

We didn't previously use a different solution. When I joined the company, we were and remained Microsoft Gold Partners, so we don't have any other third-party tools.

I wasn't involved in the initial setup, and the solution is lightweight in terms of maintenance. A yearly configuration review is sufficient. 

Defender for 365 comes in various plans and licenses, along with other Microsoft security solutions. Purchasing this kind of package or security bundle gives good value for money, and that's what I recommend.

To a colleague who says it's better to go with a best-of-breed strategy rather than a single vendor's security suite, in terms of pricing, it's better to get a good package for security solutions from one vendor rather than multiple vendors.  

I rate the solution eight out of ten.

Multiple integrated Microsoft solutions work natively together to deliver coordinated detection and response across our environment, and we Microsoft Sentinel to our clients. It's a SIEM tool, and once we configure Defender, we can push alerts to Sentinel, which is valuable.   

We leverage Sentinel's SOAR capabilities with the help of Logic Apps, and many libraries are available to make automation easier. However, some complexity is involved in developing Logic Apps, so it requires some expertise.

We are using Microsoft Defender for Office 365 primarily for security purposes.

The integration with Office 365 is seamless, and we don't need a large IT team to manage it. It helps in maintaining the basic security functions without additional complexity.

Since we are using the basic version, we find that it covers most of our requirements without needing additional configurations. It’s easy to handle integrations, and we don't need a lot of people in our IT team.

Sometimes, phishing emails manage to pass through the filter, so the system needs to enhance its phishing email detection capabilities. We also need alerting features for abnormal actions like unusual logins or abnormal activities in the mailbox.

We have been using Microsoft Defender for Office 365 for seven to eight years.

Stability is generally good; I would rate it an eight out of ten.

Scalability is also quite good. I would rate it an eight out of ten.

Technical support from Microsoft is reliable and meets our expectations. I would rate it an eight out of ten.

Positive

We chose Microsoft Defender as it integrates easily with our existing Office 365 setup, and we do not need to pay extra for security functions.

The setup was easy and not time-consuming. We didn’t need to set up much as it was integrated with Office 365.

The installation was handled by two engineers in our team.

Since we are using the basic functions, we don't need to invest a lot of money. It does help in cost reduction.

The pricing is reasonable since it comes integrated with our Office 365 license.

In our current situation, we are not considering other vendors for this purpose.

Integration with Office 365 is one of the strongest points. I recommend it for easy handling and less need for additional IT resources.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

We use Defender with Sentinel to investigate user activity on Office 365 applications.

Defender enables us to secure all 365-related activity from a single place. It gives us visibility into everything happening in Outlook, protecting us against phishing and other email-based threats. Defender helps us detect any suspicious behaviors.

The solution helps us automate some tasks. For example, instead of going through alerts one at a time, we can ping using Sentinel, and everything will be reduced to one group because it is already done in Defender. I don't need to write a KQL or investigate everything. It reduces the time spent and helps me to prioritize. Sentinel usually resolves the low-level alerts on its own, so I don't need to spend much time. 

Defender lets us consolidate dashboards, so we can see all the information we need in one place. It's time-consuming to switch between multiple dashboards to find what you need. 

The solution's threat intelligence helps us stay on top of new attacks. Novel threats are flagged in Microsoft Defender. It will show you what to look for, and you can learn the recommended remediation steps, so you can take steps to mitigate risk before the issue occurs.

It reduces the work we need to do for our clients because we can quickly find the information we need and take action. Every alert takes some time to respond to. If we see something suspicious, we can gather all the details and provide them to the client. We do about 90 percent of the work; the other 10 percent is the client's responsibility. 

Defender provides all the details and evidence we need about an incident, so you don't need to look for it. Once you enter the tab, you get all the information about the user's activity and everything you need to know within the alert. 

It also helps us identify vulnerabilities. When a new threat is discovered, Defender will flag the client's vulnerable assets and tell us what needs to be patched. That is helpful information to share with our clients. They can patch the vulnerability before being affected. 

Microsoft Defender enables us to prioritize threats. It's crucial because if we ignore critical alerts, we might miss a severe vulnerability, and the user host could be affected if that happens. We must prioritize alerts to address the ones with the highest risk first. Next, we move on to the medium or low-risk alerts and the purely informational notifications. 

We use Defender for 365 with Defender for Cloud and Sentinel. Microsoft Defender for Cloud is primarily for checking the client's security posture. Sentinel ingests data from our entire ecosystem and helps us correlate events from the logs to understand user activity better. 

We can run queries on user behavior or check the logs for any activity related to the alert. Integrating Sentinel and Defender is vital because getting the information from the logs is much easier. We don't need to look at the metadata because we can see the events in a structured format. A few of the alerts can always be resolved by SIEM analysis. If it isn't a high-priority alert, Sentinel can clear it. 

Having everything available in one place is helpful for our investigation. We can forward those details to our clients so they can take action. All the information is in the logs. 

Sentinel allows us to analyze user behavior and assign user risk based on patterns. For example, we can see if a user attempts to log in with an abusive IP. It detects the behavior, so we don't need to search the logs or look through the threat intel. Sentinel gives us a report of all the risky users. The sign-in logs and audits are neatly formatted so we can click through instead of searching manually.

Microsoft sometimes has downtime, and we'll get several incidents coming back-to-back. We have a huge backlog of notifications, many of which may be false positives. However, there might be serious alerts, so we can't risk dismissing all of them at once.

A few days ago, we had an issue where everything that came into the user's mailbox was flagged. We got hundreds of notifications. It was problematic for us, but the investigation was easy. 

I have used Defender for 365 for around six months.

I rate Defender for 365 an eight out of ten for stability. 

I rate Defender a nine out of ten for scalability. 

I rate Microsoft's support a nine out of ten. 

Positive

I rate Microsoft Defender for Office 365 a nine out of ten. We work in more of an investigative role. Defender helps us automate many tasks. It's better to go with a single vendor instead of a best-of-breed strategy. 

We are using Microsoft Defender for Office 365 to avoid spam, malware, and similar threats.

Microsoft Defender for Office 365 helps us prioritize threats across our enterprise. I am able to let the system fix the malware while I focus on other tasks.

Microsoft Defender for Office 365 automates routine tasks and highlights critical alerts, significantly improving our security operations. This automation saves us time by reducing repetitive tasks, allowing us to focus on developing new services instead of solely on security operations.

The threat intelligence feature helps us take proactive steps to prevent threats.

Microsoft Defender for Office 365 saves us time and money and has helped decrease the time to detection and response.

It has helped us to avoid malware in the system and prevent unwanted emails from entering our system.

The most valuable aspect of Microsoft Defender for Office 365 is its ability to protect us from malware. This has effectively helped us avoid malware in the system and keep out unwanted emails. It allows us to spend less time on repeated tasks, enabling us to develop new services.

The changes to customer service, specifically the new model for support agreements, are not favorable. We have to pay $600 for every instance, making it too expensive. We might need to look at other support options.

I have been using Microsoft Defender for Office 365 for over ten years.

Microsoft Defender for Office 365 is stable. It's doing what it's supposed to do.

The solution is scalable. Microsoft Defender for Office 365 is flexible with other security products we use. Our usage depends on Microsoft adding features.

We have a premier support agreement. Initially, it worked well, but the new model, where we have to pay for every instance, is not satisfactory.

Positive

We used alternative solutions prior to implementing Microsoft Defender for Office 365. We selected it due to its superior integration with our existing security infrastructure.

The implementation was completed in-house.

We evaluated other solutions before switching to Microsoft Defender for Office 365.

I would rate Microsoft Defender for Office 365 ten out of ten.