Microsoft Defender XDR Reviews

Microsoft 365 Defender is an extension of Windows Defender. Windows Defender is an AV that is integrated with Windows OS, and with this extension, you also get the EDR functionality for security purposes. Microsoft 365 Defender gets more access to the device and provides more insights and control over that. Apart from the Windows platform, it also includes other OSs, such as Linux and macOS.

We do have multiple options for deployment. We did deploy it on the cloud. We got the on-cloud license, and we onboarded our devices to the portal. The portal is deployed on the Azure cloud.

It helps us prioritize threats across the enterprise. We also have options to prioritize a specific device and monitor it. We can keep a device on high alert or on the watch out for each and every event. There are different severity levels, such as critical, high, medium, and low. We can set severities on any of the devices. Based on the set severity level, Microsoft 365 Defender can track events, and we can monitor those events from the console.

We get more insights and more information about the devices that we have. Because most of them are Windows devices, we have integrations with Intune or SCCM. It is easy to transfer all the information and see everything in one single portal. If we want to configure anything or control the devices in the whole organization, it is easy because all of them are in the same environment. It is easy to manage and control them.

There are fewer compatibility issues and errors and a better ability to track events. With third-party solutions, I used to see more issues related to compatibility and setting the ports. For each and everything, we had to either go through the support documents or through the support to get information. Most of the Microsoft documentation is publicly available. It is not that you only get that when you open a support case. That's an advantage compared to others.

It helps to automate routine tasks and the finding of high-value alerts. We have KQL or SQL queries that we can set up. We can schedule them so that it automatically queries for a specific device or all the devices and gives us a report that we can simply export.

Its threat intelligence helps to prepare us for potential threats before they hit and take proactive steps. It has helped us to recover a few devices. Because it is integrated with the OS, we get information about failed logins.

It saves time and manual labor. Previously, we used to use a deployment portal such as Filezilla or GPOs. We used to manually update the signatures, but now, it is automatic. It saved me pretty much half a day's work.

It has decreased our time to detect and our time to respond. It has saved half a day's work. The sensor constantly connects to the console. In case of an issue, we get an email immediately. We also get a notification in the console. Previously, we used to manually scan the device or query something and then get the results. Because it is automated, we don't need to manually do that. Previously, we used to manually isolate or block a device, or we used to work with different teams to get the device offline, but now, we can simply search the device name in the console and isolate a device from there, which is convenient for us.

The EDR features are valuable. By getting the EDR features, we have more control over the device. We have information about events in real-time and more protection against zero-day threats and zero-day vulnerabilities. We can monitor every event or action that a device is going through. We can get an idea if it is something malicious or if we have to take any actions.

Because Microsoft 365 Defender is integrated with the OS, we get more insight into the events or threat activities. With a third-party solution, we could have some limitations or compatibility issues with the OS, whereas with Microsoft 365 Defender, there are no compatibility issues for Windows, and we get more insights and more information on the threats simply by logging into the console.

The onboarding and offboarding need improvement. I work with other vendors as well, and they have an option to add a device or remove a device from the portal, whereas with Microsoft 365 Defender, we need to do that manually. However, once you do that, everything can be controlled through the portal, but getting the device onboarded and offboarded is currently manual. If we have an option to simply remove a device from the portal or get a device added from the portal, it would be more convenient. The rest of the features are similar. This is the only area where I found it different from others. I would also like to be able to simply filter with a few of the queries that are already there. 

It has been almost three months.

I would rate it a seven out of ten in terms of stability. It is quite stable but it can be improved for a few scenarios. It is still new for macOS and Linux, and for these OSs, I would rate it a six out of ten in terms of stability.

It is scalable. We are using it pretty extensively. It is for multiple departments, and there are multiple teams handling it. In the tenant I have, there are 2,000 devices that are currently onboarded. We also get information about which devices are not onboarded. I can see that a few hundred devices are not onboarded. We also have a few other clients or partners who are using it but on a small scale. 

It is good. We do get constant responses and inputs from them whenever we raise a case. They are quite helpful. I would rate them an eight out of ten.

I started working with this solution because I changed my organization. That was the major reason. 

Being able to get the information simply from a single portal and the integration with other portals have been some of the benefits. Previously, we used to get data manually, and then we used a SIEM or event collector to send that data to other portals. Now, we can integrate with other Microsoft portals, such as Intune, and get the same information there as well. That's one convenience I have found.

I am not involved with tenant deployment. I am involved with the onboarding of the devices. If you have the right knowledge, it is completely fine. They do have an admin console. You can deploy multiple tenants and also control through that console, but I don't have access to that. I only have access to my own tenant. I only have control over that. We can also include a tenant for a specific organization from the admin console. That admin console is deployed on Azure.

Most of the maintenance is automatic. Because we allow Windows updates, most of the Defender updates are also included in Windows updates. We don't have to specifically go and check. If we see any alert or we find any suspicious events or something on the console while we are investigating, then it might need manual checks. We do get some recommendations through the console itself for what we can do to improve the device security score. So, it requires some maintenance, but that's only when we detect something or we are investigating something. For maintenance, we have different teams in each section. We have around 15 to 20 people.

I don't have the metrics, but we started to see its benefits within a couple of weeks from the time of deployment.

Its licensing and pricing are handled by someone else. My role is limited to incidents or issues with the portal, but you get what you pay for. It is worth the cost.

We did compare it with VMware Carbon Black and McAfee. We did check Symantec as well, but Symantec didn't have EDR capabilities. So, we dropped it. The final call was Microsoft because we found the integrations and other things easy. It saves time for us because we don't need to go through another team or get a separate team involved just for data transfers.

I would definitely recommend this solution. Getting the product is easy. You simply get the license, but after getting the product, you need to go through the deployment and configuration of the product to match your environment. You can just try out the product and experiment in your own way and learn each and every feature. The documentation is completely public. 

I would rate it an eight out of ten because there are a few areas where it can be improved.

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.

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.

I am a purple teamer in my current job, so I also work with detection response in my organization. My job is to configure alerts and monitor incidents, and to do that, my company uses Microsoft Defender XDR. My company has endpoint detection tools for all the endpoints in the organization, and through Microsoft Defender XDR, we are able to get a top-down view of all the incidents on a daily basis and then actually be able to even customize what kind of alerts we want to look for and what kind of attacks are happening. One of the things that I personally love about the tool is the attack story that it provides. Every time there is a specific incident, it creates a graph and maps it to Mitre Att&ck Framework, so it could be initial access, or you may have malicious activity within the network. The tool can track all of the aforementioned areas, and it gives a confidence level. For example, if it is a high-confidence, high-risk alert, then the tool would probably quarantine that particular endpoint on its own, and then an investigator goes on there and actually verifies it. In my experience in the last six months, the false positive rates have been close to zero. Every time there is a case of high confidence alert, there has never been a case where it was not a malicious activity, and it is something I love about the product.

In terms of the most valuable feature of the product, I think it stems from the way it classifies incidents, as it is the most important area in my field of work. Another valuable feature of the tool is threat hunting. For example, there could be a chain of phishing emails that are being sent to our organization, and it may come up as an alert. Then, I know that I can use the artifacts, after which it gives a list of artifacts, which could be email addresses or IP addresses, to identify the threat actors. I can then go ahead and hunt for them across all endpoints within the network, making it essentially something similar to an SQL query that I can run based on what I am looking for. I get more leads in terms of which other mailboxes this particular phishing attack might have gone to where the user may not have interacted with it. The tool allows us to be more proactive in terms of getting close to the initial compromise. I think the threat-hunting feature is coupled with the alerts that my company has configured, and it allows us to proactively stop attacks, which is probably the most important thing for us.

I think that the tool can do a lot of things in a pretty effective way. A lot of times, one of the things I look at is how the false positive rates are, and so far, I see that they have been close to zero. Honestly, I don't think there is a lot in the area of false positives where the tool could improve. I do think that maybe having a feature within my organization where there are three different domains within which we have to operate would be helpful, as there is currently no unified view within the domains. Within a specific Active Directory, you can have Microsoft Defender XDR running, and so everything, including all the endpoints in that domain, are areas you are able to look at from one particular user interface, but there is no feature in which you can merge two different domains. For example, if there are xyz.com and abc.com, all of the endpoints within each of the domains, our company will have a separate UI from Microsoft Defender XDR, and because of it, we have to monitor three different UIs at each point in time. There is also a lot of automation that I have put in place, so every time there is a high-risk alert, our company gets an email in our InfoSec mailbox essentially. I think having a feature where you can merge everything onto a single dashboard would be something from which my company would definitely benefit because it's just a lot of sifting through different user interfaces and then collating data from it. In our company, we should just make sure that we are able to respond immediately, especially whenever there is a security issue within the organization.

I have been using Microsoft Defender XDR for six months. My company is a customer of the product.

I have been in the company for six months, and I think there has only been one time where I remember there was a bit of a slowdown which was associated with the antivirus server and it was not related to Microsoft Defender XDR. Considering the aforementioned issue, my company had to raise a ticket for support, but it has only happened once.

So far, the scalability offered by the product has been fine because it serves as an internal tool managing essentially all of the endpoints within the network, which essentially includes all of the employees, servers, access points, and all of that. In the last six months, my company has not really scaled up the use of the tool that much, and so the numbers have been constant, more or less. If my company ever plans to double up in size in a short period of time, it will probably be the time when the tool's scalability will be tested. I don't think I have the data points right now to answer questions related to the tool's scalability feature.

I have contacted the product's support team. I feel that Microsoft offers a very good support team, as they are usually well-equipped, and the support team members are currently the ones who set up the tool from scratch. The support team has complete visibility of the environment. Every time there is an issue, it gets resolved within 30 to 45 minutes, sometimes more if it is a bit complicated. For example, if the server is slowing down for some reason, the support team is able to sort it out pretty quickly. I think my experience with the tool's support team has been pretty good. I rate the technical support a nine out of ten.

Positive

Before Microsoft Defender XDR, I used some other solutions of the past. In one of my previous organizations, we used to use an SIEM solution like Splunk. The company had a lot of open-source tools, so we used Microsoft Defender XDR and ELK stack to generate alerts from a network monitoring point of view. The company also had Snort rules running on the same endpoint, which was like a blue team device for monitoring the network, and we also had a Splunk Universal Forwarder on the endpoint that was connected to Splunk's server, which was useful for visualization. Splunk was not an XDR tool; it was more about monitoring alerts that we had configured within the organization, customizing them, and making sure that we were able to catch threats based on signatures. There was less automation in the sense of how you can react to an incident. For example, in Microsoft Defender XDR, the moment there is a high-risk and high-confidence alert, it quarantines the endpoint or that particular mailbox and sends an alert to our company, and in such a manner, it stops the attacks, and also lets the investigators know that it is not a false positive, which is something I was missing in a SIEM solution that I used in the past. Alerts were being generated from Snort, and the company where I used to work had an ELK stack running, so we configured the alerts on it. The company also had a Splunk Universal Forwarder that would forward the alerts to a Splunk interface, and it is where we used to visualize all the alerts. In general, it was a combination of different tools that allowed my previous company to have the aforementioned process in place.

The solution is deployed on the cloud model, and our company has opted for the cloud services offered by Azure. In our company, we have Microsoft Access Control Service in place, so everything is controlled through Azure. If there are new members in the team, we give them read-only access to XDR through Azure, so it helps manage the identity and access, and then you can access Microsoft Defender XDR's portal. Our organization also creates specific IDs for every investigator to access Microsoft Defender XDR.

I don't think I can speak much about the pricing model of the product because it is not something I work with, and so I don't know the amount of money being burned by the company for the solution, making it an area beyond my visibility. With the little idea I have about the costs, I can say that XDR tools tend to be a bit expensive. If you are using Microsoft Defender XDR, then you need to go for a subscription-based pricing model. In my organization, which is a relatively large company with close to 3,000 employees, the solution works out well for us. For example, if I had a startup, it probably wouldn't be cost-effective to have an XDR solution in place, and that is where I would probably look at more open-source tools to work with and maybe have a SIEM solution which was a startup, a reason why we had to rely on open source tools. My previous organization also had opted for a subscription to use Splunk, which was expensive, but it was better than getting an XDR tool.

Speaking of whether I started to see the benefits of the product immediately after its deployment or if I had to wait for some time, I would say that Microsoft Defender XDR has been in place from the time I joined my current organization. I immediately saw the benefits of using the product. I wasn't present in the organization at a time when they had moved initially to Microsoft Defender XDR, so I can't speak about the time point during which others in the company saw the benefits or effects of the use of the solution. I think the tool has been very efficient because I have worked in other organizations where they were not using Microsoft Defender XDR, as they preferred SIEM solutions. I have seen that in scenarios where SIEM-based tools were used, it was more of the investigator who had to figure out what was happening because you just had a ton of data coming in from the bottom up. In my previous companies, we had a Splunk interface through which we could indulge in monitoring. I see a stark contrast between the previous products and Microsoft Defender XDR, and it is because the latter-mentioned tool not only allows you to get that bottom-up view where whatever is happening on an endpoint level, I am able to monitor while also being able to push things from the top to down. For example, if I wanted to quarantine a particular file on a subset of endpoints, I can do that from Microsoft Defender XDR, where I can put it on a block list and mark it to a particular Active Directory group, after which I am able to then block that out. The tool is quite effective from a detection and response point of view.

If I consider whether it is better to have just one solution instead of a combination of tools, I would say that it is always better to have a combination of products. The SIEM solution I had used previously was quite efficient in collecting data and in being able to process large amounts of data from where we had a lot of endpoints within a particular network, which I think was fast in many ways. Microsoft Defender XDR internally does the same thing as an SIEM solution. If you ask me, it is always best to have an SIEM solution integrated with an XDR tool because most SIEM products are very good at handling large amounts of alerts, and if you have configured it properly, then you can have a very precise view of what is happening at any given point in time within the network, and once you have it, you can have that database forwarded to XDR that can push down. The XDR tools are very good at classifying events. If you have actions in place as to what needs to be done, then, for example, if an email is marked under the phishing category, you would want to get rid of it from the inbox first. Ideally, it shouldn't even land in the inbox, but if it does, then you want to quarantine it. Pushing a certain action down to the affected devices, I think XDR tools do it brilliantly. I think it is always good to have a match between a SIEM tool and an XDR product or a customization between different tools to help achieve your goals.

The product does require maintenance. With the cloud instances that host the server, our company continuously monitors the health, as we have health checks in place that generate alerts in case something goes wrong, a major reason why we use Microsoft Defender XDR. My company also has Kaspersky's antivirus server, which is essentially hosted on a different server. Sometimes, because of the number of endpoints we have in our company's network, the server does slow down due to resource constraints. It is not my job to maintain the servers in my company, but we have a different team that deals with it. In our company, we do have a couple of instances where the servers are internally managed.

I think Microsoft Defender XDR is one of the best detection and response tools I have worked with as it is quite effective in flagging serious threats for the organization. In our company,we have faced multiple attacks over the last few months, but none of them have been successful, and I think Microsoft Defender XDR has played a major role in it.

Firstly, potential users of the solution should consider that the tool comes with a lot of already customized alerts for any Active Directory environment, but it is always good to understand, especially if you are a new user of the tool. Even if someone is new in the security team, I think it is that person's job to analyze the business, the kind of attacks you could expect coming in, and the kind of visibility that the organization provides on the internet. Once a person gets a good idea about the aforementioned areas, you need to customize alerts and create custom alerts for your organization because that is an area that is going to be unique and different for each and every company, so it won't ever be the same. Microsoft Defender XDR certainly helps with mapping the seven steps of the cyber kill chain, and if the product sticks to it and looks at every single step, lists down the kind of threats, and then customizes the alerts according to that, I believe the users will have a successful time in being able to detect threats before they happen or even while they are happening.

I rate the overall tool a ten out of ten.

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. 

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. 

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.

I've been using it for endpoints and for Microsoft 365, along with Microsoft Defender for Identity. I use it to create policies for anti-spam, anti-malware, anti-phishing, as well as safe links.

I also use it for the security score, making sure that our company achieves a good security score across the organization.

It has helped us increase our rules and policies, protecting our users, information, and data.

When I deploy a policy for anti-spam or anti-phishing, the solution automatically helps us mitigate those kinds of attacks that could expand across the organization. The automation stops those attacks and emails and sends the emails to a secure place where the admins can accept or eliminate them.

It has also eliminated having to look at multiple dashboards, which not only makes things easier, but helps us detect, and see for ourselves, the threats that are happening across the organization.

In addition, the threat intelligence helps prepare us for potential threats, providing us with security steps to take based on what other experts have done, the steps and recommendations, to prevent those threats. It collects information from the website that Microsoft has where security experts provide information.

And with our endpoints, it has helped us save time because, before we installed Microsoft 365 Defender, we had an antivirus solution that took our time. In addition, by using Defender for Identity, we have been saving time with the password self-reset, because we no longer need IT members or administrators to help reset users' passwords. They can do it by themselves. And with Microsoft Defender for Cloud, we're no longer installing the software on their computers, so there are time-savings as a result.

And one of the greatest characteristics of 365 Defender is that it natively helps you coordinate, detect, and prevent threats, and it provides investigations across the organization's domain. And with the responses across the endpoints and various resources in the cloud, it has many sophisticated solutions integrated to protect against cyberattacks. It has absolutely helped us to save money because it is just one solution, rather than paying for multiple services at the same time.

The security score and the threat intelligence are really good features. I also like the Exchange message trace.

The visibility into threats is also very impressive because Microsoft helps you predict things and provides analytics to help you really improve your security. And all of this technology works across the domain, so it is pretty helpful in terms of threat analytics. It immediately detects and tells you what you can do, with recommendations.

The solution also indicates threats as high, medium, or low priority. When the priority is high, that is when I put all of my effort and knowledge into it, and focus on it, because it is valuable for the enterprise.

We also use the solution's role-based access control across the organization. Because, as a company, we work remotely, we make sure that our users have access to what they need and we better protect our company from intruders and cyberattacks.

Intrusion detection and prevention would be great to have with 365 Defender.

I've been using Microsoft 365 Defender for nearly a year.

The stability has been great so far.

It's very scalable. That's one of the benefits of the cloud. You can scale or downsize it whenever you want.

We have many locations and departments around the world. I'm located in the Dominican Republic, but there are people in Europe and the United States.

Their technical support is great because they mostly provide responses in less than 24 hours.

We were facing downtime with our Outlook email, and they told us what was happening with our data center. After they responded to us, we provided the information to the head administrators. After two hours, they restored our services.

Positive

The solution doesn't require any maintenance, as far as I have seen.

Between a single- and a multi-vendor security solution, it depends on whether you are using multiple technologies. Microsoft solutions are pretty much integrated, and help you with the pre- and post-breach. If you are using Microsoft, I would absolutely recommend Microsoft 365 Defender. But if not, I would recommend something else because, with just Microsoft, you probably would not be getting the best solution. There would probably be latency.

The main use case has been for threat hunting, not in the sense of actively looking for the threat, but in terms of analyzing the ongoing process within clients' machines. I was looking into what kind of changes happen when you install any new software and it asks for so many permissions. I wanted to analyze the criticality of the permissions being asked and so on. Usually, when we install any software, we just click next, next, and next. We don't look at the details. So, my role was to check how it behaves within a system. For that reason, I used Microsoft Defender. 

I used the query language to do advanced threat hunting. I ran different queries to collect the data. The data was then brought into Power BI. We had data coming from different channels. So, we used Power BI to collect it at a single point.

My usage of it was on a very small scale. I am not aware of its overall impact on the organization, but it did help us a lot to know and achieve what we wanted to achieve. Without Microsoft 365 Defender, the detection for our use case would have been impossible.

It provided more visibility into threats, and it came with some of the default functions from Microsoft, which was an advantage. They had already defined different tables in advanced threat hunting, which was very helpful. I am not aware of other vendors providing that.

Its threat intelligence helped to prepare for potential threats before they hit and to take proactive steps. That was my target for that project. We were actively looking for vulnerabilities inside the software, and we wanted to detect the software supply chain aspect. That was a difficult task, but we wanted to be ahead before any attack happened. That's why we were using Microsoft 365 Defender.

It saved time. They had already defined different tables to identify different artifacts within the system, which saved about 50% of our time.

Within advanced threat hunting, the tables that have already been defined by Microsoft are helpful. In the advanced threat hunting tab, there were different tables, and one of the tables was related to device info, device alert, and device events. That was very helpful. Another feature that I liked but didn't have access to was deep analysis.

I liked its portal a lot. I am currently using a different vendor, and there is a big difference between them. Microsoft had a very good portal, and its user interface was good. Irrespective of where I was, with a click, I could see comprehensive details about something on the right side. The related information was always on the right side. So, I didn't have to jump over different tabs and functionalities. The information was always there on the right side, which is something I liked in Microsoft 365 Defender portal.

The documentation on their website is somewhat outdated and doesn't show properly. I wanted to try a query in Microsoft Defender 365. When I opened the related documentation from the security blog on the Microsoft website, the figures were not showing. It was difficult to understand the article without having the figures. The figures were there in the article, but they were not getting loaded, which made the article obsolete. They should refresh all their articles and see that the steps and figures aren't missing. They can also provide more documentation.

I used it just for four months in a previous company.

I never had any problems with it. It was always stable.

It's scalable. You can query each and every machine in the company.

I was working for a client, and that client had more than 50,000 people.

I never contacted them directly, but based on what I heard during the meetings, they seemed to be quite helpful and good.

I didn't use any other similar solution before Microsoft 365 Defender. That was the first time I used Microsoft 365 Defender. That was my first experience. Now, I'm using a different product, and I can see that Microsoft 365 Defender was much better than the current product.

Microsoft 365 Defender is very good for analyzing something. There are multiple types of data and multiple ways to utilize that data. With a single click, you can have all the related data for a particular topic. That's really good, and that is what I'm missing in the current product.

I did not use Microsoft Defender for Cloud, but I saw the cloud part for monitoring cloud applications. It was nice, and it had some added functionalities. For example, application risk scoring was very good. It shows what data has been considered to give a particular risk score, which is useful for a new learner like me. It was helpful to know the criteria for scoring. They also included so many applications. There were more than 24,000 cloud applications inside their catalog. That's a really good catalog.

To a security colleague who says it’s better to go with a best-of-breed strategy rather than a single vendor’s security suite, I would agree that multiple vendors are better than a single vendor because every vendor has different capabilities. It's always better to use the best products from different vendors than to use all the products from the same vendor.

I would rate Microsoft 365 Defender a nine out of ten.