Microsoft Defender XDR Reviews

We typically use Defender's default settings and are implementing MITRE ATT&CK use cases on Microsoft Defender this year. We do manual threat hunting and check to see if there is a trending attack. We have the latest IOCs and sweep across the organization looking for them. 

When implementing Defender, we usually use its advanced hunting features to determine particular techniques used across the whole environment. We use multiple Microsoft security products, including Defender for Endpoint, Defender for Cloud Apps, Sentinel, email and collaboration, data loss prevention, and Microsoft Purview.

Defender XDR enables us to prioritize threats according to the algorithm or our custom rules. We can prioritize threats and have the option to automate the response. For instance, let's say we are facing a sticky key hijack. When you press shift several times at the login screen, you can open the command prompt of that particular host. That is a vulnerability of Microsoft Windows. When this happens, we can automate a priority alert and also isolate that endpoint from the network immediately. 

The solution reduces our remediation time by enabling our security analyst to respond quickly, make some automations, and edit the rules to detect any potential threats. The extent to which the solution reduces the remediation time depends on the analyst's skill. If the security analyst is good, Defender XDR will help them.

XDR saves money if you are using Microsoft products. XDR is more inclined toward Active Directory, a Microsoft product. No other XDR can integrate with Active Directory so seamlessly and use it to its fullest potential. Microsoft also offers multiple sub-products. If we purchased third-party solutions for email, endpoint, XDR, cloud applications, etc., and managed them on a single platform, it would be more expensive than Microsoft solutions. When we do a cost-benefit analysis, Microsoft Defender XDR offers a better value. 

I like Defender XDR's automation capabilities. XDR isn't automated by default, but you can automate it to respond. If an attack is performed anywhere within the organization, you can isolate that instance from the network. This is what I can figure out for it. When integrated with Sentinel, you can set up playbooks to automate all the alerts gathered on Sentinel from different Microsoft solutions. Sentinel has a wider range of capabilities than XDR. 

Defender XDR has good threat visibility, but it could be better in some areas, like when we are hunting for a specific host. For example, let's say we are investigating email services, and want to trace an email account to its host PCs and investigate the emails in its inbox. We want more visibility into the email side of investigations. It would be better if these features could be more integrated into the console like you could have a tab for Cloud Apps to see the cloud applications a user had communicated with. 

Microsoft's threat analytics are somewhat helpful for anything related to Microsoft products. For instance, it can update us about any single sign-on vulnerabilities or something along those lines. However, Microsoft was very late in terms of the recent LockBit attacks. LockBit compromised some significant organizations, and Microsoft didn't provide the report fast enough. It was reported on my normal cybersecurity information websites first. The site analytics are a bit weak when it comes to non-Microsoft clouds.

Defender XDR is capable of providing intelligence reports about threats specific to Microsoft components, but if we are implementing a Microsoft solution across an organization, many other products and side factors must be considered. I feel like Microsoft falls behind some other vendors in threat intelligence.

When we do investigations, it would be better if Microsoft could populate the host dashboard more. When we open any host for investigation, we want the entire timeline of what is happening on the host, including all the users logging in, their hardware, Windows version, etc. 

I have used Defender XDR for nearly 2 years. 

We haven't faced issues with stability. XDR doesn't lag during investigations. We've seen a few minor bugs in the XDR console but not often. There have been no major issues that disrupted our operation. 

Defender XDR has good scalability. If you want more endpoint visibility, you don't need to scale your organization much. You only need to integrate that particular endpoint by running a script and deploying an agent to it. 

I haven't contacted Microsoft support about XDR, but my client has. One of the alerts was triggering incorrectly based on a default setting. We asked their team to investigate why the solution was excessively triggering. I just disabled the default rules and made custom policies. Now, everything is working fine.

I previously used CrowdStrike EDR. It's hard to compare the two products because CrowdStrike EDR was focused on endpoint detection, so it cannot investigate emails or have any other XDR capabilities. One is an XDR and the other an EDR. 

We compared Microsoft Defender XDR to Trend Micro's Vision One. Defender's advantage over Vision One is ease of use. Managing and enabling policies is much easier on Microsoft Defender. There's a considerable difference between their default rules. In some cases, alerts will trigger in Defender, but not Vision One. Overall, Microsoft Defender XDR is preferable over Vision One.

I rate Microsoft Defender XDR 7 out of 10. It's a useful product for a professional security analyst who knows how to increase the visibility. You only need to make some front-end changes and put the data on host names into XDR. 

If someone asked me whether a best-of-breed or single-vendor approach is better, I would support mixing different products. Each security vendor has its own intelligence base. By including other vendors, I am gaining visibility into more indicators of compromise. Nevertheless, I would still pick Microsoft Defender XDR and Sentinel together because they are well integrated. All the big companies and banks use Microsoft. Windows is a popular operating system across the world. Defender and Sentinel are better integrated with Microsoft systems. 

We provide services to medium-sized businesses in the banking and administrative sectors. We are also using Microsoft Sentinel and Defender for 365. 

Defender helps our clients protect against any threats from outside the organization. Defender XDR helps our clients save about 25 percent by offloading some on-prem functions to the cloud. It also saves time because the cloud interface is manageable, and we can investigate incidents quickly. It's easy to create reports and share information with other teams. 

I like Defender XDR's threat detection and prevention capabilities. Defender's built-in identity and access management features are critical. The solution's coverage extends beyond Microsoft software. Defender is easy to use. It has a nice console, and everything is all in one place. 

The console is missing some features that would be helpful for a managed services provider, like device and user management. 

I have used Defender XDR for the last two years. 

I rate Defender XDR nine out of 10. 

I rate Defender XDR eight out of 10 for scalability. 

I rate Microsoft support nine out of 10. 

Positive

Some aspects of the deployment were not straightforward. It was moderately complex. I enabled all the connections and onboarding process, then implemented a basic set of configurations. It took about seven to 10 days to deploy. 

My clients have seen an ROI from using Defender XDR.

Defender XDR is reasonably priced but may be less affordable in certain countries. For example, it might be expensive for some customers in India. 

I rate Defender XDR eight out of 10. I would recommend Defender XDR. It's a fast solution, and it's easy to train people to use Defender. 

I use 365 Defender to protect against phishing attacks and filter out our email to pick up certain vulnerabilities. For example, if someone sends out their credentials, it triggers an alarm. 

Features like filtering and phishing simulation increase our email security. The main purpose is to protect employees and sensitive company information. Everything is connected, so an intruder can potentially access sensitive, confidential information by breaching just one account. 365 Defender is a good way to protect the entire environment. 

Defender helped us automate tasks because we had everything preconfigured. We create alerts and automated responses, which save us some time. Threat intelligence is helpful. For example, if there is a suspicious IP address based in Russia, we can block that address. I didn't do much of that, but it's possible.

365 Defender provides solid visibility because we can map out what's happening and get a good overview of the intelligence. The timeline feature is excellent. I also like the phishing simulation. We have phishing campaigns to educate employees and warn them about these threats. 

I also like that Microsoft has a lot of resources online. It's easy to Google information about the tool and what it can do for your organization. 

The interface could be improved. For example, if you want to do a phishing simulation for your employees, it can take a while to figure out what to do. The interface is a bit messy and could be updated. It isn't too bad, but doing some things can be a long process. 

I used Microsoft 365 Defender for 10 weeks during an internship. 

365 Defender is highly stable. I've never had any issues with it. It can be slower at times, but that may not be product's fault. Maybe there's too much traffic or an issue with the connection. 

365 Defender can scale. More than a thousand people work for this company, and some of them have multiple endpoints, like laptops, workstations, phones, etc. 

I've used CrowdStrike and some other tools for endpoint and email security. Microsoft Defender is excellent because it covers everything in one place, including endpoint protection, email security, phishing simulation, spam filtering, etc.  

365 Defender is billed per account. I don't know the exact price, but my supervisor told me that Microsoft Defender is cheaper than the alternatives. It's bundled, so you get all the features in one place. 

I rate Microsoft 365 Defender a nine out of ten. It's an excellent product that protects employees and organizations from attacks. If you have it configured correctly, you should be good. It's an ideal solution for new companies that are starting up and need protection. 

If I were asked to pick between a best-of-breed strategy or getting all of my solutions from one company, I would say that it depends on the product. Many companies have products that offer the same quality as others. The Microsoft family covers so much, but you can also try CrowdStrike for endpoint protection or Proofpoint for email security. 

Each platform offers flexibility, and some can be better than Microsoft, but when it comes to creating configurations, I feel that it's a better option. Also, you can get a better price by purchasing all your solutions from one company. 

One of my largest customers deployed Defender for Endpoint, but they also wanted Defender XDR to get a specific feature. Defender XDR is included in the E5 license, but it's a bit too expensive. Our customer wanted Defender XDR's file integrity monitor tools for compliance. My client is using Defender with Sentinel, but I'm unsure how much they use it. 

My clients like Defender's file integrity monitoring. They're monitoring Windows and Linux system files.

My client would like the solution to be more customizable without using code. You can only build on the default console, but we're not allowed to change it. 

We have a similar tool to Defender's file integrity monitoring. Under the VMware VM properties, there is a change-checking tool, and it will tell us if the extension is in a different location. You can configure checking and do the monitoring. When I log into Defender's file integrity portal, I cannot see that this machine was enabled.  It's the same agent and extension. 

It's confusing because I don't know how to tell the customer they don't need to pay $15 per month because you already can enable the extension in VMware. Under the Defender account, it all seems like it's high code, and we cannot change it. Every customer has requirements for us to customize those things. 

I have used Defender XDR for about a year. 

Defender XDR is an enterprise-scale solution. 

I rate Microsoft support 4 out of 10. 

Neutral

I rate Defender XDR 3 out of 10. I don't think Defender XDR is ready to deploy in its current state. It has too many solutions inside, and they're not fully integrated. 

Defender XDR can replace multiple security products. It covers everything, including phishing protection, network security, device security, applications, etc. 

The solution has reduced time spent on manual tasks because almost everything is automated. You don't have to do anything. If something happens, you'll get a notification, and it will instantly run the playbook for the incident. For example, a phishing email might take an hour to investigate manually. If you have Defender, you will have all the information you need on the incident page. It's all there, so you can investigate the incident in around 5 to 10 minutes.

Adopting Defender cuts costs. While the solution is a little pricey, you only need two products—XDR and Sentinel—so you don't need to add other security products. You only need to use the Microsoft security stack. 

The advantage Microsoft Defender XDR has over other XDRs in the market is that it's easy to use. You can quickly differentiate between alerts, incidents, devices, software, etc. It's easier to investigate an incident, and you have so many options. You can automate investigations and use playbooks. There's also the live response session, which is something you can't find in any other XDR. 

The identity protection is excellent. It uses some rules, including some built-in rules from Microsoft itself. It identifies risky users and differentiates between a user who is trying to sign in and isn't the actual user. Identity and access management is a valuable component of Defender.

Defender covers non-Microsoft technologies if you're using the full Microsoft stack with Sentinel and Defender. You can ingest logs from other solutions, like Palo Alto and Fortinet firewalls. 

It stops advanced attacks like ransomware and phishing in real time and prevents them from entering your environment. There's a feature called Security Advisory that shows you all the latest threats and vulnerabilities in the market so that you can make rules for them. It helps you understand them more. 

With Sentinel and Microsoft Lighthouse, you can use multi-tenant access. It allows you to connect multiple tenants to one tenant, which you can use to monitor everything from there. Before we had Microsoft Defender, we had to go to each tenant, log n from your account, and investigate the incident if it's there. Lighthouse has one page with all the alerts, and they're all connected together. You can investigate every alert from one page.

The design of the user interface could use some work. Sometimes it's hard to find the exact information you need.

I rate Microsoft Defender XDR 7 out of 10 for stability. There are some performance issues maybe 5% of the time. 

I rate Microsoft Defender XDR 9 out of 10. It's easy to scale. 

I rate Microsoft support 8 out of 10. They answer quickly. If you open a ticket, they will respond immediately. You can chat with them or schedule a call. 

Positive

The setup is straightforward. You only need to buy the product and onboard every device. It's like a script for Microsoft Intune. The process takes a couple of days for a small company, but a larger business may require three or four days. 

Defender XDR is fairly priced. 

I rate Microsoft XDR Defender 8 out of 10. I recommend giving the product a try. If it doesn't work for you, try something else until you find a suitable product. There might be other solutions that are a better fit. It's good for my case, but it might not be right for everyone. 

Microsoft Defender is used for email protection. 

Microsoft Defender helps stop advanced attacks. We use PII disclosure, we track sensitive data in emails, ransomware, and phishing emails.

Microsoft Defender has saved us costs. 

Microsoft Defender has helped save us investigation time.

Microsoft Defender is slow to adapt to evolving threats.

I was using Microsoft Defender for one and a half years until a month ago when I switched to a different team.

Microsoft Defender is stable. 

Microsoft Defender is scalable.

I previously used Rapid7 InsightIDR for Security Information Event Management and Extended Detection and Response. While InsightIDR offered a user-friendly dashboard for managing detected incidents, its limitation of creating only around 25 custom rules restricted our ability to identify emerging threats. With the ever-evolving threat landscape, I believe a solution with a more adaptable defense system, like Microsoft Defender, is necessary to keep up with the pace of new incidents.

Microsoft Defender was straightforward to set up. It came with a lot of useful documentation to help.

The deployment took almost two months. 

Microsoft Defender falls within a mid-tier price range compared to other security solutions.

I would rate Microsoft Defender eight out of ten.

Microsoft Defender is well-documented and we can find answers to our questions from the user community.

I recommend Microsoft Defender for organizations that are already using other Microsoft products. Since they're likely within the same ecosystem, integrating Defender for antivirus protection should be a smooth process.

It's the main tool that we use for the customer that we support. We don't use any other tools to monitor the environment.

It helps us prioritize threats.

In addition, Microsoft Sentinel enables you to ingest data from your entire ecosystem. One of the main reasons we use Sentinel is to receive logs from different sources and create analytical routines to generate alerts. Sentinel enables you to investigate threats and respond from one place and that is also very important because it becomes part of the monitoring team.

Microsoft 365 Defender has also helped eliminate looking at multiple dashboards, giving us one XDR dashboard. That means we don't have to spend too much time checking different pages. We just have one specific portal with all the information.

The solution has saved us time, although we haven't measured how much. It has reduced our time to detection and time to response by about 20 percent.

The most valuable features are the 

• integration among all the Microsoft tools
• details of the alerts.

We also use Microsoft Sentinel, Defender for Cloud, Defender for Identity, and Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps. They are all integrated and it was very easy to integrate them. In my experience the with the integrations, it was just a click of a button and things were integrated. It's just a button.

They work natively together to deliver coordinated detection and response across the environment. We get more details when we integrate more tools, so it's relevant to have integration enabled. When it comes to monitoring an environment, this is very important, because you get different perspectives and points of view on the same alert.

I have a positive impression of the visibility into threats that the solution provides. It brings a lot of information and details related to the alerts or any security threat.

There are other SIEM solutions that are easier to use, mainly based on the creation of rules, use cases, and groups.

There could also be an improvement on the customization part. Sometimes we need to customize a few configurations but we can't.

I have been using Microsoft 365 Defender for a year and a half.

We have never had any problem with downtime.

The scalability is good.

Sometimes, they still take too much time to reply. But when they do reply, it's positive support.

Neutral

I was not involved in the initial setup, but there is no maintenance involved now.

My advice would be to have someone from Microsoft involved in the deployment part to help. There are a lot of details that they have information about, and it's impossible to know everything.

It is an integral part of our security infrastructure, primarily serving to monitor both our server and client environments comprehensively.

Its strength lies in providing a holistic view of the protection it offers. When a threat is detected, the system not only identifies the nature of the threat but also provides valuable insights into how and why it was detected. This thorough understanding empowers us to take well-informed steps to remediate the threat effectively. The unified Microsoft environment enhances overall ease of use, making it considerably simpler for our team members to collaborate and work efficiently, given our familiarity with Microsoft products. Unified identity and access benefits stand out as crucial, especially as we delve deeper into compliance considerations. The increasing importance lies in having a centralized view, streamlining visibility through a single interface rather than navigating across various sections in Defender.

The incident threat response and its ability to facilitate effective remediation against threats are the standout features. I haven't encountered a similar level of comprehensive incident response in other solutions before.

Perhaps there's room for visual enhancements to make the platform more appealing. Stability could be improved by avoiding frequent changes to the interface.

We have been working with it for approximately a year.

It has proven to be scalable within our organization, which, while not exceptionally large, consists of around eight hundred users globally. It strikes a balance, meeting our needs effectively without being overly complex.

The technical support is generally good, but we sometimes find the first-line support process a bit cumbersome. After initiating a case, we, as experienced professionals, go through the standard script diligently (ABC), only to find that first-level support requests the same steps again. While I understand the need for thorough troubleshooting before escalation, it can be time-consuming. I would rate it six out of ten.

Neutral

Compared to antivirus or security products such as Trend Micro or McAfee, Microsoft Defender XDR appears notably more user-friendly and offers a clearer interface. The adoption of Microsoft Defender allowed us to phase out the use of other security products, including our long-standing reliance on McAfee and Trend Micro. The transition was prompted by the effectiveness of Advanced Threat Protection offered through Microsoft Defender 365. The decision to consolidate under Microsoft's umbrella proved advantageous, making the adoption process smoother and more efficient for our organization.

The initial setup wasn't overly complicated. We only needed to create a few scripts, which were then executed on our local machines within the environment. This process seamlessly integrated the machines into Defender within our tenant.

We use a third-party software tool for executing scripts and deploying software packages.

We've achieved significant cost savings, primarily in the realm of security. As Microsoft continues to enhance Defender, we anticipate further opportunities to streamline and consolidate various aspects of security monitoring and software under the Microsoft umbrella. I'd estimate the savings to be in the tens of thousands of dollars annually.Considering our relatively small team of around thirty IT professionals, especially those at the first level primarily using security products like Defender, the streamlined access within the same application prevents them from having to navigate through multiple applications. This efficiency translates to a potential saving of around a dozen hours per month per individual.

Understanding the subscription model has been a bit challenging, as every feature or requirement comes with an additional cost.

Overall, I would rate it eight out of ten.