Microsoft Defender for Identity vs. Microsoft Entra ID

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

It is especially good for organizations that are otherwise in the Microsoft ecosystem (Microsoft 365 applications). Microsoft Entra ID is really well supported sign-in method in various SaaS-applications and they often have step-by-step guides how to deploy the SSO with Microsoft Entra ID. It's less suitable for organizations that might use other productivity tools than M365 or do not have Windows-based computers.

Incentivized

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

• Single Sign-on helps ease the user experience, allowing users to avoid typing multiple passwords.
• The identity and management are straightforward to use and easy to connect to other applications, as well as third-party applications.
• The support of remote work. Nowadays, many people work from home and need to access their accounts. Microsoft Enterprise ID gives secure access to the company data.

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

• Probably the most primary thing is just the interface itself. It's frequently changing and so oftentimes we kind of have to go back and redocument our processes for our IT staff because the steps that they would take to perform a task one month. Now it's a totally different staff, new dashboard, even a new name for the product or the feature. So it would be nice if that stuff was a little bit more consistent.

Incentivized

MSFT Entra ID has been essential for managing our geographically dispersed team. We're confident that it will scale with us as grow, and we'll be able to take advantage of additional security and ID management features as they become necessary. Being able to centrally manage our user access from anywhere with a small support team is such a relief.

Incentivized

I mean it's pretty good. It is click, click. I mean, oftentimes I can go to the expert or layer two support to get help. Suddenly I go to them. So it has to be pretty useful to be honest. I do a lot of, and there's a lot of, you could do research quickly online to find out how to do certain things. I think that's the only thing we can improve to in terms of kind of a best practice path is setting up it. But because I'm it profess of tons of years in co-management services, I can figure it out. But for others they may not be able to figure it out. You still need an IT person of course to translate all of that. But to me pretty straightforward. I come from the days of directory from 2008, 2000, Microsoft server 2000.

Incentivized

There has been a handful of outages but they have been either minimal or rarely severe

Incentivized

I could probably rate this a 10 but I'm always conservative on giving out perfect scored bt performance has not been a problem for us using Entra ID.

Incentivized

I have not needed to engage support for anything at this time. I have been able to find the answers either online or in a knowledgebase. I tried to skip the question but it would not let me, so I rated a 9 based on other interactions with Microsoft support I have had

Incentivized

Most training was internally produced

Incentivized

Make sure you use a good partner. Our implementation was a bit longer and more problematic than we expected. Our partner got it done, but, in my opinion, some of their inexperience and staffing issues were evident.

Incentivized

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've used other Microsoft products and we've also used some standalone products, like each application you can have its own identity, so we've looked at some of those too, but we try to use the Entra ID as much as possible because it offers a wider range of reliability.

Incentivized

The features are getting addresses per requirements and their value for Money. The proposed ROI and actual ROI build confidence.

Scalability is pretty trival for Entra ID. It's not difficult to manage a few or many accounts.

Incentivized

Microsoft Professional Services' technical knowledge is appreciable as consultants design the solution as per customer requirements. Mapping of features per user specifications and assisting Customer IT engineers to implement so they can manage and administer the services.

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

• I think it's had positive. It's enabled us to make authentication easier and more streamlined across the organization from frontline workers to back office workers.
• It's allowed us to really adopt authentication policies and methods that suit that user and their work environment.

Incentivized