Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps (formerly Microsoft Cloud App Security) is a multimode cloud access security broker.
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Microsoft Sentinel
Score 8.7 out of 10
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Microsoft Sentinel (formerly Azure Sentinel) is designed as a birds-eye view across the enterprise. It is presented as a security information and event management (SIEM) solution for proactive threat detection, investigation, and response.
Many of the competitors who started in the CASB space have expanded into the SASE category. If organizations do not need the additional controls provided by a SASE solution, then Defender for Cloud Apps is pretty good. If an organization needs a true SASE solution, you would be …
Elastic seems to have a much better interface for log search and is able to filter out noise. Microsoft Sentinel also appears to generate a lot of false positives.
Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps is well suited when working with other Microsoft Applications. For example, if you are working with Microsoft Office 365 it works very well when implementing CASB features. It works when implementing monitoring or blocks on Sanctioned applications however customizing the message to users is not that great.
Specifically for Microsoft Sentinel, it's going to have what's next to no value if you're not on Azure. You have to be in as your customer. If you want greater insight into what is going on in your cloud environment, turn Microsoft Sentinel on, but focus on where you enable it. You're not going to turn it on to see everything because it's not like focus on the areas where you are at risk or you believe you're at risk or something that you're, depending on your environment, do you have multiple subscriptions? Do you have a Microsoft Sentinel subscription that you just turned on, but it's not getting the visibility, and then you can alert on stuff that goes out of trend, etc.?
The integration to Microsoft Entra ID is seamless, which allows Conditional Access to redirect the session to Microsoft Defender for Cloud App for it to take actions (Block or Monitor).
Tracker users' activity is very good when troubleshooting or running an investigate.
Detecting risky users through tight integration with Microsoft Entra ID is a very good feature.
Detecting mass downloads and blocking the download of files from non-manage company devices is a very good feature as well.
Strong integration with the Microsoft security ecosystem allows seamless connection to services such as Microsoft Defender, Microsoft 365, and Azure. This makes it easy to bring together identity, endpoint, and cloud signals to support investigation and detection scenarios.
Effective correlation of alerts and incidents in collaboration with Microsoft Defender XDR helps combine related signals into higher‑fidelity incidents. This reduces noise and improves visibility into attack context, making investigations more efficient.
High scalability for data ingestion and processing enables large volumes of security telemetry to be handled efficiently.
It takes some time to scan and apply the policies when there is some sensitive information.
After it applies the policies, it works, but there is a delay.
It doesn't provide any way to scan Microsoft Teams when an external exchange of images is happening. You can always do the filtering on the documents during the chat, but if there is an image, then some kind of OCR capability is required to detect it. At present, there is no way [Microsoft Cloud App Security] can go and detect those kinds of images and alert us
I think it's primarily going to be cost, since Microsoft Sentinel uses Microsoft Log Analytics as its base, right? So storing the logs and log retention is very expensive. That might result in users not adopting it as quickly. Second, I think Copilot for security can just do summarization and not many remediation tasks. In the future, we would like to see Copilot create many playbooks, including all box playbooks, to remediate many security issues.
The interface is pretty simple and easy to use; however, you will need to do a lot of investigative research on your own to get comfortable with it. Originally, many of the Microsoft security tools had their own seperate consoles. Overtime, they have blended into one interface which is the ideal state. In some cases it is clear Microsoft had to pick which console a certain feature or setting was going to reside in and this leads to some confusion. For example, DLP is managed through Defender for Cloud Apps but you will also need to jump into Purview. For things like reverse proxy on your M365 tenant, you will need to go into Azure and setup conditional access rules. Not a big problem and I can understand why the settings are located where they are but for someone just starting out with Defender for Cloud Apps, it will take some time to figure out.
The Microsoft Azure Sentinel solution is very good and even better if you use Azure. It's easy to implement and learn how to use the tool with an intuitive and simple interface. New updates are happening to always bring new news and improve the experience and usability. The solution brings reliability as it is from a very reliable manufacturer.
I have not utilized actual support but the Sales and Product teams have been super helpful in moving our implementation forward and showing us the best practices.
More flexible and more features with easy integration with cloud services like Microsoft Azure and other cloud services. Overall both gives similar features but we prefer Microsoft cloud app security due to its high threat detection rate. mostly we have been able to stop the threat in very very less time.
Microsoft Sentinel excels in cloud-native scalability, Microsoft ecosystem integration, and AI-driven threat detection with UEBA and Fusion rules, offering faster deployment and lower costs (48% cheaper per Forrester) than Splunk, QRadar, Exabeam, SentinelOne, Securonix, and Wazuh. It lags in third-party integrations and syslog parsing. Organizations choose Microsoft Sentinel for its cost-effectiveness, automation, and Microsoft synergy, especially in Azure-heavy environments, though Splunk and Exabeam lead in flexibility and UEBA, respectively.
Cloud App Security saves us thousands of dollars finding and rectifying apps security issues
Identity Security Posture helps the organization identity stay in shape, saving thousands of dollars on security consultations
The cost of suffering a breach cannot be quantified, CAS helps minimize the chances of the attackers succeeding, with excellent historical logging for most operations
As any cybersecurity product, this has to be more with risk to avoid loss in case of a ransomware that more than relate to a productivity increase. Maybe the impact could be that instead of having people that are checking 24/7 the dashboard, you could implement Sentinel and have less people checking that or people with less expertise. So the saving will be a minor but will be a saving in the cost of your team.
