Armor vs. Cloudflare One (SASE) vs. VMware AppDefense (discontinued)

Armor gives you what you need to be successful regardless of technical ability. If you can maintain the systems yourself, you are definitely ahead of the game with their service. If you're not prepared to configure and maintain the systems, they do a pretty good job of getting it set up during the onboarding process so that you don't need to dig into the technical guts too much. If you find yourself in over your head, their support staff can handle it for you in most cases.

Incentivized

I wanted to securely connect to my servers without getting tracked by malicious attackers, even though I was on public Wi-Fi. Security was my top priority, and I also wanted a setup that was easy and quick to start and provided great network performance. Cloudflare's Zero trust matches my criteria for becoming my first choice.

Incentivized

Being a VMware product, AppDefense has the advantage of compatibility with all of the VMware product feature updates and patches ( ESXi, NSX, vCenter, etc.). Paired with Carbon Black, it's resource overhead is well-tuned compared to traditional antivirus products.

Incentivized

• Security - we have requirements met right out of the box and the implementation of new resources is done with security in mind.
• Speed - We can scale resources easy and the infrastructure is fast and efficient.
• Responsiveness - Support tickets are handled very fast with almost immediate solutions.

Incentivized

• Block access to known bad, risky, or unwanted destinations at the DNS or HTTP level.
• Excellent protection for remote users.
• Best in class browser isolation techniques.

Incentivized

• I think that the AppDefense approach is clever and sets it apart from other products. Having a baseline of normal behavior that I can see is something I haven't seen in another product before.
• AppDefense doesn't overload my systems with performance draining agents.
• AppDefense integrates with VMWare products I have or plan to purchase.
• Access to AppDefense support has been better than any other VMWare products.

Incentivized

• Authentication and access against the secure messaging portal is overkill when the response I'm logging in to see merely says, "yes, we have your message. An agent will respond shortly". There should be an option to receive updates like this through email.
• The online portal that allows us to clone servers is very slow to respond. More than once I've spun up an additional server due to the lack of visual feedback on the initial request.
• The web application firewall does not seem to be sophisticated enough to differentiate between logged in administrators and end users. We use a CMS system which allows admins to create scripts. These often get barred by the WAF even though they are not malicious.

Incentivized

• Cloudflare still need to improve CASB direction to complete set of SASE tools.
• More integrations with the third-party agents to check device posture in the Zero Trust framework.
• More granularity in firewall rules for full replacement of on-premise solutions.

Incentivized

• PowerShell functionality.
• Sorting results in some areas are not applicable.
• Email alerting through AppDefense Manager does not exist, but support has said it is a feature to come.

Incentivized

Within a few hours, new engineers are trained in basic tasks and are quite happy they are able to resolve issues independently. After SSO is configured, onboarding is as simple as signing into m365 via a web browser popup.

Incentivized

Approximately 50% of all messages we receive are automated. Either that an agent will be assigned, has been assigned, or a ticket is closed. I'd like to see more 'real' interaction, and less box ticking, though I appreciate process has to be followed. That's the one point off. Everything else is very good.

Incentivized

Good chat support from the portal for basic questions and minor issues. The enterprise support line is provided as well.

The product is still quite new, and there seems to be a lack of technical information available for both the E.U. and support staff. That being said, the support staff that I have worked with have always been very knowledgeable and ensure that they see a ticket through to completion.

Incentivized

Cloudflare was both the most feature-rich and cost-effective of comparisons. Presales engagement understood our challenges and was keen to solve them.

Incentivized

We have several security applications, but none exactly like VMware AppDefense. That is one of the reasons I like it, as it seems to take a different angle on monitoring and protection. The other apps monitor different things, but one thing AppDefense seems to have over them is a streamlined interface and not a lot of false positives.

Incentivized

• The cost of Cloudflare Zero trust is much lower, hence reducing spending on infrastructure security.
• The Network performance is improved thanks to Warp protocol.
• Requires less maintenance and hence saves time.

Incentivized

• As with everything now, automation is key. AppDefense effectively monitors the activity on all our VMs, freeing administrators to work on more projects
• Makes it much easier to diagnose issues when system are not running as intended

Incentivized