Microsoft Defender XDR Reviews

We are a Microsoft partner and we have clients who are Microsoft 365 administrators in several companies. They are looking for ways to secure their tenants and make sure that their security is top-notch. That's where Microsoft Defender comes in. We use Microsoft 365 Defender for security and compliance to secure tenants from malicious attacks, including spam and phishing attacks. And when it comes to compliance, it is used for data privacy and data protection to ensure that very sensitive data doesn't go out to the wrong location.

It makes security and protection very seamless.

And Defender saves me time. For instance, if I get notified that a user isn't receiving emails from a particular person, I know that the first thing I have to do is a message trace. It saves me time to an extent because I have a go-to location. With message trace, I'm able to trace emails from, for example, abc@givendomain.com over the past two days. It gives me information about what actually happened in the mail flow. I'd rate the time it saves me as a seven out of 10. 

It has also saved us money, on the order of 50 percent. And our time to respond has improved to the level of a six out of 10.

The features of the solution are vast and wide.

The most valuable feature is the content search feature in the compliance portal. It is very useful because it covers both audit log search and content search. The audit log search is very useful because, most of the time, you see several changes within the admin portal and it's hard to keep track of what happened. Our customers want to get to the root cause and see the activity that must have triggered those changes. That's where the audit log search comes in. They've enhanced the feature in such a way that it has a vast range of search options so that an analyst can carry out a full search.

The content search feature has also advanced to a point where you can carry out several searches with your keywords. You can point it to a certain location, such as Exchange Online or SharePoint Online, or Teams Online. You can narrow the search down to a particular individual or group of individuals. When administrators report that they have lost content or accidentally deleted a mailbox or the mailbox content, the content search feature is a good way to recover the content.

Another top feature is threat management. It helps prioritize threats across the enterprise.

In addition, you can navigate to the security compliance portal and set restrictions to block IP addresses from different locations. You can also choose to flag domains that are sending malicious attacks and block them and update the anti-spam policy to make it more strict to prevent attacks from happening in the future.

Many people don't realize that Microsoft Azure, Exchange Online, and the security and compliance portal all sync together. For instance, within the Azure portal, you can set security restrictions and policies to help secure your tenants, but most administrations do not know about that, including things like multi-factor authentication, conditional access policies, and privileged access.

We've had reports from clients about compromised accounts because someone got access to a password that they shouldn't have. Multi-factor authentication helps eliminate this. As for conditional access policies, you can set certain policy restrictions to certain locations or IP addresses so that emails or sign-ins only come from particular locations. That helps secure your environment against malicious sign-ons to your accounts.

The good part of it is that these products have already been integrated. When you sign on as an admin you have global admin rights and that gives you access to all these features. You will see Exchange Online, security and compliance, and Microsoft Azure. All you need to do is click and it takes you to the portals.

Overall, the comprehensiveness of the threat protection is at 95 percent. It's not 100 percent because of updates not being done on the Knowledge Base and technical know-how.

The alert feature allows you to set the severity of alerts. If there is a malicious or suspicious sign-on, an alert triggers immediately letting you know, as an administrator, to check what's going on in that account. For example, there was a time when one of our users' accounts was about to be compromised. We got an email notification which was sent to all administrators on the tenant. I was able to block that activity in real-time and then set the system to trigger more alerts for such sign-ons in the future. I also blocked the IP address. That particular feature has helped. The alert arrived in real time to prevent the account from being compromised.

When changes are done within either the admin or security and compliance portals, there should be a real-time update to administrators about the changes. Many times I'm supporting a case where someone says, "I used to do this like this, but I'm unable to do it that way anymore. What happened?" And I will have to say, "Oh, sorry. That doesn't work like that anymore. It's now done this way." So there should be a way to notify people about changes like that, and prompt information when changes are done within a portal.

I would also like to see regular updates about new features in the Knowledge Base. There are cases where I'm using a Knowledge Base article to try to educate a customer, but when I check the feature on the admin portal, and in the article, they don't look alike. For instance, it's saying, "Go to settings. From settings, go to options." Meanwhile, on the portal itself, I'm seeing "Settings, go to more settings, then go to options." It would help a whole lot if feature updates were updated in real-time in the documentation.

Also, the message trace feature for investigating mail flow issues should add more detailed information to the summary report. The summary report is what the administrators are able to understand. The extended reports are a very deep dive and the administrators will only understand them if they reach out to support engineers. But if they could extend the summary report a little bit, and make it more descriptive, ordinary administrators could understand what happened and that the emails failed at this or that point. That way they would know the location to go to try to correct it and prevent it from occurring again. Making that summary report more extensive and detailed would be of great help.

I have been using Microsoft 365 Defender for a little over three years.

Overall, it is stable. 

There are a few bugs but they generally don't impact the reliability. The bugs are not the kind that impact the work done by an organization. Processes can continue while they fix the bugs.

It is scalable.

It is used across multiple departments with anywhere between one and 200 endpoints.

Their response time is okay, it works fine, but the time it takes to resolve escalated cases needs improvement. An escalated case is when there is a bug. You could literally have reported a bug and it's still not resolved the following week. Bug fixes take a long time, especially when a very essential feature is not working as expected.

It took me three to five months to understand it because it has a vast number of features. If you do not understand it, one click could mess up a whole lot of things.

Microsoft should provide lower-level licensing options. They should do it in such a way that even an individual could purchase a license, and it should be entirely flexible. An individual should be able to access the solution at a very affordable rate.

Most administrators, in my experience so far, are reaching out to third parties for email filtering and to manage threats in their organization. According to them, Microsoft 365 Defender isn't giving them the information they need. And I realize that this is not correct. What they're missing out on is the proper information or technical know-how to utilize the features.

For example, if someone uses Barracuda as their third-party filtering service, I begin to ask questions such as, "Okay, why did you choose to use the Barracuda service when we have the ability to create good anti-spam policies that could help secure your tenant? You can create anti-phishing policies and rules that will help restrict IP addresses." Often, what they say is that Barracuda is better because it gives them more information and real-time data. At that point, I ask them to let me provide a deep dive into the features of Microsoft 365 Defender. I use the documentation and Knowledge Base articles to explain its features, one after the other, and they begin to say, "Oh wow." They didn't know these features actually exist. They'll begin to look at the possibility of utilizing the Microsoft solution since they have paid for it. Why should they pay additional money to a third party to get services that Microsoft provides? They feel very happy about the information I provide.

So far so good. The Microsoft 365 product hasn't given me a reason to want to check for other products and move to something else.

For the best and most seamless user experience, it's best to go with a single vendor because there could be a lot of complications going with a best-of-breed strategy. It's easier to understand things with a single vendor.

When you don't understand a feature, ask questions and reach out for support. There are some features that are being used wrongly or that are underutilized.

Also, test the product beforehand. They provide trials so you can test the solution and see if it meets your expectations.

Microsoft 365 Defender is one of the first layers to our security. It's our first layer security product, e.g. we use it, then we also use Exchange Online Protection for email, Safelink, etc.

We always recommend these products to our customers, e.g. if the customer is using another third-party product. We are always recommending these compliance and security products, e.g. Microsoft 365 Defender, Cloud App Security, etc.

We usually recommend cloud security because it connects all of these security and compliance products in one center to take logs and make them meaningful, plus you can also create alerts. We are also recommending it because of Microsoft Teams usage, especially because in Microsoft Teams, users sometimes do mass deletion, mass download, etc. We always say: "Let's connect your Cloud App security with your Azure Information Protection, with Microsoft 365 Defender and your Microsoft Teams, your Engula, etc. We find cloud security to be very useful.

What I found most valuable in Microsoft 365 Defender is that it's able to scan emails and protect users from dangerous links or attachments. This is important in a first layer or base layer security product such as Microsoft 365 Defender. You can even combine Microsoft Defender for Endpoint with this solution to get the most benefits.

I also find Microsoft 365 Defender user-friendly, so that's another valuable feature of this solution.

What could be improved in Microsoft 365 Defender is its licensing. It needs to be more consolidated, because there are so many plans for Microsoft 365 Defender, and every other year, there will be new licensing options, e.g. plan one, plan two, etc., that become more and more different from each other. The most valuable product would be the most expensive product, and customers usually say: "We really need the last version, but that's really expensive for us, because we are in Turkey and the currency is very, very high now." Three years ago, this wasn't a problem, because $1 was three or four Turkish liras, but now it's 15.

In the licensing options, it would also be better if there can be some optimizations, similar to what Power BI Pro offers. There are two options in Power BI: user-based and capacity-based. It would be good if there can be another option for one consolidated product for the whole company with a higher price, but you cannot depend on user count.

What I'd like to see in the next release of Microsoft 365 Defender is for them to provide more details in the alerts and notifications they send out.

We've been a partner for Microsoft for 10 years.

I found that the stability of Microsoft 365 Defender is good.

Scalability is good in Microsoft 365 Defender.

What we have is Premier Support from Microsoft, e.g. we are a CSP partner, so we were required to buy Premier Support and Cloud Consulting from Microsoft. We are really happy with the support we've been receiving for Microsoft 365 Defender, but on the customer side, they don't have Premier Support, and sometimes, depending on the case, they're not very satisfied with the support. 

Our satisfaction is five out of five, but our customers would only have three or four out of five, in terms of their satisfaction with Microsoft 365 Defender support.

The initial setup for Microsoft 365 Defender is really easy. It's not very complicated. I didn't see any other difficulties with setting it up, but customers sometimes think it's not very easy. They purchase consulting services from us, so it doesn't bother us, but sometimes the customer says: "I don't know how to start, but I use Microsoft Security." Microsoft is very late in the security niche, so customers sometimes say: "We have Symantec", or they would mention that they have other products from other vendors, and these vendors are very reliable for many, many years.

In the last three or four years, though, customers start to depend on Microsoft Security products, but they are not early adopters, because they usually tell us: "When we buy the product, some policies cannot be used, but after sometime we can use it." It's not really a problem, but I wanted to relay some of the feedback we get from our customers.

The most valuable licensing option is expensive, so pricing could be improved. Licensing options for this solution also need to be consolidated, because they frequently change.

We've been dealing with the latest version of Microsoft 365 Defender.

For an average project, deployment of Microsoft 365 Defender can take a week, but we do need some change management models, because we still need to train the users about safe links and attachments, so we sometimes have to expand the average time, but implementation is not very hard. If we only do the implementation, one week is more than enough.

We rely on just one to two persons, particularly engineers, for the deployment and maintenance of Microsoft 365 Defender.

My recommendation to others looking into implementing Microsoft 365 Defender is that reading the documentation is really good. If you are a Microsoft partner, you'll also have benefits, e.g. CDS tenants and demo tenants that are free to you for one year, so you can test the products first, before you implement. If you are a partner, my advice is to use your Microsoft partner benefits.

I'm giving Microsoft 365 Defender a rating of eight out of ten.

We use the solution for endpoints. 

What I like most about the product is its all-in-one solution. With Microsoft Defender XDR, we get coverage for various aspects like endpoint security, cloud security, and image-related cases, all within a single platform. This eliminates the need for multiple products or technical controls to address incidents. The main benefit became evident immediately after deployment, especially in its ability to analyze files and phishing emails quickly. By submitting suspicious files or emails, we receive quick results on whether they are legitimate, suspicious, or malicious, saving time. 

The solution could enhance the threat Intelligence feature by making it more relevant to specific industries. Much of the threat intelligence information isn't directly applicable to our environment. It would be beneficial if the threat intelligence were tailored to the industry, such as healthcare or fintech, where the solution is being used.

Additionally, the MDCA feature could be improved to provide more accurate data on how much data is uploaded or downloaded from the cloud. This might involve better implementation from our infrastructure team, but clearer and more precise reporting on cloud data activities would be valuable.

I have been using the product for eight to ten months. 

The solution works smoothly. 

The tool's scalability is good. 

If we open a case on the Microsoft portal, a support person from Microsoft helps resolve the queries. From our side, it usually involves two or three people. The Microsoft support person sometimes brings in another expert to resolve technical queries.

We've submitted our queries, and a tech support engineer comes through on a chat, a Zoom call, or another type of call. We discuss the queries with them, and they usually resolve the issues in one or two sessions.

Sometimes, if one engineer can't resolve the query, they will bring in another engineer, which can take an additional one or two days. 

Neutral

We chose Microsoft Defender XDR because it provides a one-stop solution. Everything related to endpoint security, email security, or cloud applications is integrated and visible in a single window. If we were to use other solutions, we would need to implement three different products to achieve the same level of integration and functionality.

We had some issues while deploying the tool's on-prem version. Support helped us resolve them. The cloud version is easy to deploy, while the on-prem version takes one month and doesn't require any maintenance.  

I rate the overall product an eight out of ten. If a new customer is going to buy Microsoft Defender XDR, they should clearly state their needs in front of the Microsoft team. They need to specify what they want and what features they require. It's good for the Microsoft team and the customer to understand all the requirements before deployment clearly. This way, any potential issues can be addressed beforehand, making the deployment smoother.

We use Microsoft Defender XDR to secure data. 

Microsoft Defender XDR has reduced our security staff. 

The product integrates security into one tool instead of having third-party security tools. 

The solution does not offer a unified response and standard data. 

I have been using the product for three years. 

Microsoft Defender XDR is stable. 

The solution is scalable. 

It takes weeks for the support to respond. They are not helpful. 

Negative

Microsoft Defender XDR's deployment was very easy. 

We have seen ROI with the tool's use. 

Microsoft Defender XDR's licensing is complicated. 

Microsoft Defender XDR has helped us reduce two full-time employees. 

The solution is our identity source, which protects our identities through Microsoft Intra ID.

The solution helped us save time by not flipping between the systems.  

I rate it an eight out of ten. 

We use Microsoft Defender XDR for malware detection and browser protection. We have around 500 devices to protect. We use it to get reports for each of these devices. 

We are connected to Microsoft and have every laptop enrolled. This acts as an endpoint. The tool helps me check security and compliance. I can also check what a device is doing. 

We should be able to use the product on devices like Apple, Linux, etc. 

I have been working with the product for three to four years. 

The tool's scalability is good. 

I research in forums or contact support whenever I encounter issues. We have four types of support plans available. I rate the cheapest plan a two or three out of ten since responses are slow. I rate ten out of ten for an expensive support plan. 

Neutral

We have a vendor who gives us a better price. The product is expensive. Selecting the entire Microsoft suite is cheaper than using random services or products. 

Bitdefender costs around five dollars per month per device. However, Microsoft Defender XDR costs 2500 dollars per month. 

We are evaluating Bitdefender for Windows. 

Microsoft Defender XDR helps us save time for clients. 

Microsoft Defender XDR provides unified identity and access management. It is installed on every computer and checked from the Microsoft security admin center. 

The tool is easy to use. You can use one account to log in to any Microsoft service. 

We are aware of our compliance. We can now check the devices and get reports about it. 

The product can adapt to evolving threats. We use it to manage only one tenant. We have Mac devices where Microsoft Defender XDR cannot help us. 

We have the tool deployed across different locations like Germany and Denmark. 

I rate the product an eight out of ten. You need to follow its guidelines.

We make use of Microsoft Defender for Office 365 for endpoint security and email and we use Defender umbrella for impersonation and sales. Under Defender umbrella, we use a lot of products depending on the customer requirements. As a company, we use Defender for email as well as for endpoint security.

We are able to consolidate licences and make use of many Microsoft products using this solution. If we have any Microsoft customers, we encourage them to use this solution for enterprise defence. 

This solution could be improved if it included features such as those offered by Malwarebytes. 

We have used this solution for many years and we are a Microsoft partner. We use this solution on a daily basis.

This is a stable solution. 

This is a scalable solution.

We have not yet needed to contact Microsoft for support with Defender. 

We have previously used a number of different solutions including Trend Micro, Symantec, Sophos Intercept X and Malwarebytes. Overall, we are more comfortable using Defender.

The initial setup was straightforward. 

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten. 

We have many clients that have large companies in the south region of Mexico. They use the solution for security.

 Microsoft 365 Defender is a good solution and easy to use.

I have been using Microsoft 365 Defender for approximately 15 years.

Microsoft 365 Defender is a stable solution.

The scalability of Microsoft 365 Defender has been good.

The support from Microsoft could improve. There are times I have to wait for a response from a qualified specialist.

If the solution is deployed using a good specialist with the correct configuration it works very well for normal users.

The amount of people needed for the deployment depends on the number of licenses the customer has. if it is a large company as we have with approximately 8,000 to 12,000 people, we need more people to do customer service in this case. However, for small to medium companies, we have two people that do the implementation.

We have a lot of problems in Latin America regarding the price of Microsoft 365 Defender, because the relationship between dollars and the money of the different countries, it's is a lot. Many customers that have small businesses say that they would like the solution but it is too expensive. However, large companies do not find the cost an issue.

I rate Microsoft 365 Defender an eight out of ten.

We use Microsoft 365 Defender to help secure threats of the Office package, such as Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Additionally, it can fix issues.

Microsoft 365 Defender is simple to upgrade.

The user interface of Microsoft 365 Defender could improve. They could make it simpler.

I have been using Microsoft 365 Defender for approximately one year.

Microsoft 365 Defender has been a stable solution.

We have approximately 1,000 people using this solution in my organization. If we expand then we will increase usage.

The support for Microsoft 365 Defender is good.

The installation of Microsoft 365 Defender was automatic when we did the installation of Microsoft Windows.

My internal IT team does the supporting of the solution.

I would recommend this solution to others.

I rate Microsoft 365 Defender a nine out of ten.

We are using it for incidents and alerts. It is helpful for threat hunting.

We have tied it to Azure AD or Microsoft Entra, and we are trying to implement it for Linux.

It saves the investigation time. There is a lot of information about the threats and other things.

Advanced hunting is good. I like that. We can drill down to lots of details.

It is user-friendly. It has a lot of parts. For me, it was pretty quick to get a sense of it.

It protects from phishing emails, but sometimes, some of the emails are not detected. They are getting delivered into the inbox, not in a junk folder or spam folder. Users are reporting them as phishing emails.

At times, when we have an incident email and we click on the link for that incident, it opens a pop-up, but there is nothing. It has happened a couple of times. 

In terms of additional features, it is too early for me. I am still learning all the parts. I am just scratching the surface of the tool. One year is not enough to get every detail of it.

I have been using Microsoft Defender XDR for about a year.

It is stable, but sometimes, we experience an issue. Clicking the link in an incident email opens a small window, but we cannot find anything there. This has happened a couple of times. There is a bug.

Other than that, we have not experienced any downtime or any big issues. It is pretty stable.

We have plans to maximize its usage. We are trying to see how to get the most out of it, but my older colleagues would know more about it. I am still learning it.

I have not contacted them.

I am not sure. I am relatively new. I have only been working here for a year. They already had it in place.

I have not worked on a similar tool before. This is my first XDR tool.

It is on the cloud. I am not aware of its deployment because it was already deployed before I joined.

I cannot recommend it because this is the only tool for XDR that I have used. I have not used any other tool, but it is a good tool.

I would rate Microsoft Defender XDR a nine out of ten.

We rely on Microsoft 365 Defender for workstation detection across a number of categories, including virus detection, potential unknown application detection, and monitoring for suspicious website interactions, including clicks and access attempts.

I have used Microsoft 365 Defender in the cloud.

We have experienced significant advantages from implementing Microsoft 365 Defender, as it provides enhanced visibility into workstations and the ability to automatically remediate threats. This means that not every incident requires manual intervention, as certain tasks can be handled automatically, often in conjunction with Microsoft Sentinel.

We are able to ingest collected data from our entire ecosystem. This is an important feature.

We are able to prioritize threats accounts our whole environment.

The solution has helped automate routine tasks and help automate high-value alerts.

The threat intelligence has helped prepare us for potential threats before they hit and we took proactive steps. We are able to check our workstations are well.

We have saved some time by using the solution.

I have found that having solutions from multiple vendors is more helpful than from one.

The most valuable features of Microsoft 365 Defender are the combination of all the capabilities and centralized management.

The support could be more knowledgable to improve their offering.

I have been using Microsoft 365 Defender for approximately one and a half years.

The solution is stable.

We have a few thousand people using this solution in my organization.

The scalability of Microsoft 365 Defender is scalable.

I have used the support and they do not know how to fix the issues. Their knowledge could improve.

I rate the support from Microsoft 365 Defender a seven out of ten.

Neutral

We have used Microsoft Sentinel. Microsoft Sentinel enables us to investigate threats and respond holistically quickly from one place.

The comprehensive features of Sentinel Security Protection are impressive, particularly its integrated SOIR and UEBA functionalities, as well as its robust threat intelligence capabilities.

I have used McAfee previously and Microsoft 365 Defender is much better.

I rate Microsoft 365 Defender a ten out of ten.