Huntress vs. Microsoft Defender for Identity

Huntress is great for a managed service provider to provide a better cybersecurity stack to their endpoints/customers. Some smaller clients cannot afford high-priced SOC services but require SOC-level protection. Along with a couple of other layers of security, Huntress provides peace of mind for the MSP that if a threat were to arise, they would be notified with specific instructions for dealing with that threat.

Incentivized

Microsoft Defender for Identity is a great solution for each company that has an Active Directory. It fills in the blanks for Identity related incidents that are being missed in the XDR platform. To get a full view on identity risks it is an essential component

• Using the latest industry knowledge of threats that have been ongoing, but not previously known and projecting it back in time against their installed endpoints to identify machines that are vulnerable or breached and when it these events occurred
• Very quiet. If they alert, it is a thing.
• Very good at remediation.
• They communicate extremely well when it matters.
• While there are the most extensive products more often than not they are the first to alert us to a threat.

Incentivized

• detect threats and suspicious activities
• pro-active measurements on possible breaches
• identity security posture

• Now that they have EDR capability, they need to fully participate in MITRE testing for direct comparison against other EDR products.
• Now that they are going into Managed Antivirus and EDR with isolation capabilities they need to update their SLA comparative to other vendors
• Support for non-Windows OSes for consistency in a network
• It would be nice to seed canary files in custom shares on servers.

Incentivized

• setup can be complicated, with AD complexity
• Sometimes the load on DCs is pretty high, leading to performance issues
• Better tuning options for preventing false-positive/bening alerts

We dropped SentinelOne in favor of Huntress because the UI was much more simplistic for the tier 1 techs to maintain. It beats the old web design model of three clicks to where you want to go. It is very intuitive. No one needs training to figure out how to navigate its console.

Incentivized

Firstly from a business model, [VMware] Carbon Black [Cloud Managed Detection] was not outfitted for the MSP where Huntress is very MSP-friendly from an affordably easy point to entry to value for money licensing. Carbon Black TS is not bad in anyway, well, that we found, but Huntress is a new layer of security that fits between the OS and AV layers to provide additional information, monitoring, and detection. With Huntress backing the MSP, [it] sure does help as well.

Microsoft Defender for Identity is more specialized on the Identity platform, it is a single solution compared to a multi-solution. The integration is better when using the XDR suite in combination with Sentinel. Microsoft Defender for Identity gives a better overview of the security posture

• We have been able to lower operational costs by shifting to Huntress.
• We've been able to cut costs to our clients by utilizing Huntress over competing products.
• In spite of inflation, we've been able to keep our managed service prices at a steady, below market rate, because of Huntress.

Incentivized

• Cost impact was pretty high
• Learning curve, needed time (money) for training
• Greatly improved detections and gives more insights