Microsoft Defender for Endpoint (formerly Microsoft Defender ATP) is a holistic, cloud delivered endpoint security solution that includes risk-based vulnerability management and assessment, attack surface reduction, behavioral based and cloud-powered next generation protection, endpoint detection and response (EDR), automatic investigation and remediation, managed hunting services, rich APIs, and unified security management.
$2.50
per user/per month
Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM)
Score 8.4 out of 10
N/A
Microsoft's System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) is a monitoring and application performance management option, with the core datacenter and cloud-based systems monitoring.
I can definitely tell you where it’s more suited, because we haven’t come across any less appropriate scenarios. But definitely in regard to how we centrally manage our user space and our endpoints, it’s been beneficial from an API perspective and is really transferable, with strong collaboration with our Azure stack. It works very well.
Definitely on the threat action and response. We didn't have a stress-response option before, but the dependent brand point provided it instantly. Also, it's doing UVA and machine learning, which we didn't have before. So it's definitely providing more sophisticated threat-detection capabilities than we had before.
The only thing is sometimes, because Microsoft has so many platforms, it gets a little confusing, like am I in the security platform? Am I in Purview? Where am I at right now? Because there's so many sites that are kind of doing a lot of the same thing, and so that does get a little confusing from time to time, but outside of that, it's a pretty good product.
One of the biggest drawbacks to SCOM is the sheer scope and complexity of the system. This can be a pro and a con. The system is very customizable, what you put into it is what you'll get out of it. That said, the learning curve is fairly steep. An organization needs to be committed to putting time and resources into SCOM to get the most out of it. I've heard stories from colleagues of several different companies that invested in SCOM and then abandoned it due to the excessive time and care required.
SCOM is expensive. Not only is the enterprise licensing costly, SCOM requires it's own servers, operational and warehouse databases to be maintained.
The OOB SCOM reports are a bit clunky and feel outdated.
Cost add-ons for Security features is nickel and diming the process to keep pace with cybercrime. Limited Education budgets require us to be more pro-active in finding cost-effective measures to protect our devices, staff and students. Defender is a strong, well-featured product that is pricing itself out of the education market
Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is a great EDR to have that works quickly and silently in the background and it integrates well with other Microsoft services. As an IT manager, I can appreciate that I do not get bombarded by alerts for every small detail. On the flipside, the management site can use some work in being more clear and should be more streamlined so I'm not clicking through multiple pages to figure out what happened
Microsoft Defender for Endpoint chugs along just fine no matter what we throw at it and what systems it's running on. It doesn't take up a lot of resources either, so that's welcomed.
The first time I tried to onboard my macOS endpoints to MDE I struggled for quite a bit. I had to reach out to Microsoft's MDE support team. The tech was very helpful in walking me through the steps during a screen share session
Deployment was handled by our team here and everything went pretty smoothly. We did have a few hiccups in our test group, but that only took a bit to get ironed out.
Previously, we've used Sophos. We've used, way back when, McAfee, Norton, Symantec, all those. And we finally settled on Microsoft Defender for Endpoint. We're a Microsoft technology stack shop. So obviously it was natural. It's built into Windows, so we're not adding additional agents. Some of the other vendors and their agents, for a while, would compete with CPU usage. And so it actually slowed down the machines. Because Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is built into the Windows product, Microsoft is going to ensure that it does not affect the other productivity tools that a user may use.
We used Altiris and WSUS and in the beginning Altiris had the better admin interface than SCOM, but it is no longer the case as SCOM has refined their admin interface. Altiris still has better and more robust group assignments for management roles and those two other tools can better manage non Windows OS devices than SCOM but for a large enterprise Windows shop, if you can afford it, SCOM is the way to go.
