Microsoft Defender XDR Reviews

Our primary use case for Microsoft Defender XDR is to serve as our email security solution, offering file protection, scanning, alerts, and incident management. It is a part of every Microsoft 365 deployment we do.

The integration of Microsoft products simplifies management, reporting, and investigations. It offers capabilities that other solutions don't offer.

The feature I find most valuable is Defender for Endpoint. It's because endpoint management is my primary focus, and this feature integrates well with my other skills.

The licensing process needs improvement and clarification, as it is currently difficult to understand which features are licensed to which users.

I've been using Microsoft Defender XDR for about ten years since it was known as Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection.

I have no concerns about the stability of Microsoft Defender XDR.

We are only a small organization, and our operations don't even challenge Microsoft Defender XDR's capabilities.

The customer service and support have been good. Whenever it is needed, they are fast to respond.

Positive

We used various solutions over the years, but since then, we've been using the Defender variants.

The initial deployment was straightforward.

We implemented Microsoft Defender XDR ourselves in-house.

There are no issues with pricing, but sometimes, the clarity in licensing is a concern. I still need to verify what's included with each license occasionally.

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

Defender XDR is a solution that protects your enterprise systems and devices.

Defender XDR has helped a lot in terms of capturing all kinds of activities happening on the endpoints where it is. If you want to know what happened at a point in time, you can go to the history and search everything. This helps you investigate exactly what happened if you have a security breach. It doesn't take much time, but I don't have anything to compare it to because Defender is the only XDR we've used. 

Defender XDR has a feature called the timeline that lets you track all activities. It helps a lot with investigations. Microsoft has many identity management features and products that complement each other.

It covers the weaknesses and vulnerabilities of non-Microsoft solutions, but it will not help you to do the remediation. You need another third-party tool to do the remediation. 

Defender protects against advanced attacks like ransomware or email phishing. The protection Defender provides is excellent. It's a great product for preventing attacks and reducing risks for organizations. 

There are a few technical issues with Defender XDR that can be improved. Sometimes, the endpoint devices are not reporting properly to the Defender 365 portal. When you're getting all the information from the Microsoft portal, the devices are sometimes not in sync. We have hundreds of endpoint devices, some needing to be onboarded again. 

I have used Defender XDR for three years.

I rate Microsoft support nine out of ten. It's excellent. 

Positive

We did a POC for a McAfee product. There weren't many differences, but Microsoft Defender was included with our E5 license. The major difference is that we saved money by not purchasing another product. 

Defender XDR is a cloud-based solution. You can access it and see all the information you need inside the Microsoft portal. 

Defender XDR is not expensive. It's average compared to other products. 

I can get Defender bundled with the E5 package. We had considered replacing it, but after evaluating some competing products, we decided there was no significant difference between the third-party products and Defender. 

I rate Microsoft Defender XDR eight out of ten. I think there is room for improvement in terms of its coverage of non-Microsoft technologies. 

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.

We use 365 Defender to manage organization-level devices and vendor security compliance. We are a retail-focused organization that offers cloud services through Azure, GCP, and AWS, but we manage all the security through 365 Defender. Some of our users are based in other countries, and everything is centralized. We operate in multiple regions. 

We can easily track any other malicious activities or additional applications that will prevent it. We can get it here. It will be a helpful tool once we create policies for DLP and third-party programs. 

365 Defender stops the lateral movement of advanced attacks. It prevents something that happens on the device level from affecting us on the organization level. The solution enables us to track all the details, like the IPs and the device types. 

365 Defender helps us deal with unknown threats by creating custom policies, which enable us to block access by specific unknown sources and unsafe links. 365 Defender has multi-tenant capabilities, and we have multiple tenants, but I'm only involved in the retail part, so I don't have authority over other tenants. 

We were able to discontinue some of our other security products when we implemented 365 Defender, but there are some exceptions. We can use non-Microsoft solutions when the customer requires it. Mostly, we use cloud solutions. We've saved some costs on the security side at the organizational level by reducing equipment costs. Using 365 Defender's automation capabilities, we can cut our vulnerability management time by about 40-50 percent. 

I like 365 Defender's advanced threat hunting. The dashboard is user-friendly with templates for site policies, etc. The most important use case is evaluating the risk links and applications. 

The cost can be high if you want to build custom license packages. Another area for improvement is the policies. In Azure, we need to implement policies in JSON format, but in 365 Defender 365, it would be helpful to use a different format so we can customize the platform.

I have used 365 Defender for more than two years. 

365 Defender can have some performance issues during enrollment. It can take a while at times, but sometimes it's duplicated immediately. That's an issue with some other cloud-based programs like Intune and Azure products. 

I rate Microsoft 365 Defender support nine out of 10. Their support representatives provide solutions based on priorities. They prefer to follow the proper SLA part. 

Positive

The deployment is quick, straightforward, and involves only two people. 

Sometimes 365 Defender is expensive, but it can be moderate, depending on the organization's size and the license type. We're satisfied with the cost because it gives us a product that protects our entire environment with DLP. To compromise some cost, of course, we are to complete the most secure environment. 

I rate 365 Defender nine out of 10. 

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.

Neutral

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.

The solution is primarily used for security response. We work with many government ministries that use Microsoft, Microsoft 365, or security tools like Azure XDR. This solution integrates with other products, helps with detection, and offers quick response times.

The threat-hunting and incident investigation capabilities are very strong. It can investigate and block phishing attacks and monitor them effectively. We can even do endpoint behavior analysis. 

The solution's XDR platform provides unified identity and access management for customers. If the customer is using a Microsoft Enterprise XDR solution, it does. We do have Microsoft Defender for Identity. It's part of the suite itself. Customers can have Defender for Endpoints, Defender for Identity, and Defender for Cloud. All these things combined form the XDR. The main use cases are around identity - to understand whether there is identity hacking, privilege escalation, or some malicious user in the environment. It helps us respond to those events very quickly.

From a coverage point of view, it's good. We are quite happy with it. If we have users with multiple devices, the solution provides comprehensive coverage.

While the solution does cover technology beyond Microsoft, it's strongest when monitoring the Microsoft Suite. We do have servers, and it can monitor them. They don't necessarily have to be Windows servers.

Defender XDR can stop advanced attacks, like ransomware or business email compromise. It depends on how the solution is configured. It does a lot of monitoring and helps the SOC team or the analysis team find issues. 

The solution has the ability to stop attacks and can adapt to evolving threats. It can ingest a lot of threat intel data, which actually gives us the latest information about how the threats are happening. It does a quick analysis of that. 

Some customers use Defender XDR's multi-tenant management capabilities. That said, most of the time, they might not need a multi-tenancy. In one or two cases, customers may have done it, but not very frequently. The multi-tenant management capabilities for investigating and responding to threats across tenants are pretty decent. It provides a very unified view. That's one of the core capabilities of Microsoft XDR - the unification of the view. In a security situation, I might have solutions in multiple places. However, our tenant will be protected, and we will receive alerts. It helps a lot with individual client monitoring. It will help me hunt other tenants as well. It makes it so we have a very cohesive environment. 

Defender XDR has enabled some of our customers to discontinue the use of other security products. However, it's not always based on capabilities. In Qatar, for example, it's a government mandate to use Microsoft as much as possible, so we move a lot of customers over exclusively to Microsoft in those cases. That doesn't mean the other product wasn't performing. It just means there is a heavy preference towards being solely on Microsoft. 

The Microsoft XDR solution has helped some customers to reduce costs. One of the major cost reductions is on the resources side (not on the technology side). As a service provider, we can move to a much leaner team with the XDR setup than with a non-XDR setup. When you have different environments to monitor and different alerts coming in from different devices, then you need more people to do the monitoring and analysis. However, when you have a unified view of the environment, then you can reduce the team to a certain extent. We can do a 25% reduction on a team, which is a considerable reduction since resources are expensive. How much a company can save depends on the environment. If it's small, the reduction in cost may not be significant. It can be as low as 10% or as high as 25%, depending on the size of the environment. 

It's helped us save time. It's difficult to specify how much; however, it's likely up to 25% thanks to the reduction in the analysis needed. 

From a performance standpoint, improvements could be made. 

I've used the solution for one and a half years. 

I'd rate the stability eight or nine out of ten. If it's just a Microsoft environment, the reliability is very good. If it's a mixed environment, I'd rate the stability seven out of ten. 

The solution is highly scalable. 

Technical support is good. We have enterprise support and they are responsive.

Positive

I do not handle the initial setup process. The customer may deploy it across multiple locations. The size of the environment can vary from 100 users to 1,000.

There isn't really any heavy maintenance. You just have to renew the licenses. If it's a small environment, one person can handle that. If it's bigger, there may be two or three people. 

My understanding is that Microsoft is trying to change the pricing. However, right now, it's bundled together. If it could be decoupled a bit, it would help customers be able to afford the solution. 

We are service providers, and we resell Microsoft solutions. 

XDR is basically used for unification. It's more of a dashboard. When you have an XDR, you can monitor the entire environment. You can also see and take actions across the entire environment, which is actually a very big advantage when it comes to a particular software analyst's day-to-day job. They can be monitoring one screen. Typically, if an issue is found, a ticket needs to be made, and that's passed onto an engineer, but with XDR, a lot can be automated. It can help reduce costs related to manpower and make the process more efficient. 

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten and recommend it to others. Smaller companies may not need it; however, if a company is growing fast or is already sizable, it's a good option—especially if it is a mostly homogeneous Microsoft environment.

We use Microsoft Defender XDR for our Microsoft 365 email service.

It helps protect us against ransomware. We were a victim of a malware attack in 2018 before implementation.

Email protection is the most valuable feature of Microsoft Defender XDR.

The price has room for improvement. The price should be adjustable by region.

I have been using Microsoft Defender XDR for almost 5 years.

Microsoft Defender XDR is stable.

Microsoft Defender XDR is scalable.

The technical support is good.

Positive

Microsoft Defender XDR is priced high.

I would rate Microsoft Defender XDR 8 out of 10.

No maintenance is required from our end because it updates with the OS.

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.