Microsoft 365 Defender combines SIEM and XDR capabilities for Microsoft 365 environments, encompassing threat detection, post-breach detection, automated investigation, and response for endpoints. Additionally, it protects cloud apps, emails and documents, and employee identities.
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Splunk Enterprise Security
Score 8.6 out of 10
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Splunk Enterprise Security is an analytics-driven SIEM that helps to combat threats with actionable intelligence and advanced analytics at scale.
Microsoft Defender XDR is well suited for organizations already invested in the Microsoft Ecosystem - including Microsoft 365, Azure Ad and INTune. For example, in scenarios where you need to correlament the fishing attacks with the closing point behavior and identity agreement, Microsoft Defender XDR does a big task of sewing the timeline of a full attack simultaneously and even automatically removing. This hybrid function is also ideal for the environment, where safety visibility in distance tools, cloud apps and email is important. Microsoft Defender XDR provides centralized insight and response in all these domains without the requirement of many devices. However, it is less suitable in the atmosphere with diverse or non-microsoft infrastructure, such as an organization running a mixture of Linux server, Google work area or third-party EDR tools. Cross-platform support is still developing, and integration of the microsoft ecosystem often requires additional configurations or third-party connectors. For companies of that situation, Microsoft Defender XDR cannot give its full value from the XDR box.
Well suited: Splunk ES is highly recommended in an environment with many data sources and experienced computer engineers. It has a steep learning curve, but once that hurdle is crossed, it is absolutely a beast. It is also very expensive, so a company putting a high amount of budget in Security is needed. Not well suited: Splunk ES is not recommended if a company has only a few sources and some non-technical IT users. The price won't justify the fewer data sources and scratching just the surface level. Moreover, non-technical IT users would be better off with something that has a query builder, unlike Splunk.
The software uses advanced AI and machine learning algorithms to monitor activities and detect any anomalies immediately, protecting our financial data.
Automated responses to known threats reduce the impact of possible incidents and improve our security posture.
Microsoft 365 Defender easily combines with other Microsoft 365 services and external security solutions, providing a complete and unified security solution.
Advanced Threat Detection and Correlation: ES stands out in its ability to detect sophisticated threats by correlating data from multiple sources. For instance, it can identify unusual patterns in user behavior, cross-referencing with network logs to flag potential insider threats.
Real-time Monitoring and Alerting: ES offers robust real-time monitoring capabilities. It excels in promptly alerting us to critical security events, such as suspicious network traffic spikes or unauthorized access attempts, allowing for immediate response.
Comprehensive Log Analysis: ES ingests and analyzes an extensive range of log data. It's particularly adept at parsing and making sense of complex log formats, making it a versatile tool for understanding system activities and security events.
Improved algorithms to minimize false positives in threat detection, reducing the impact on security teams and preventing unnecessary investigations into non-threatening incidents.
Advanced User-Friendly Interface:
Streamlined and intuitive user interface for the centralized dashboard, making it more accessible for security professionals with varying levels of expertise.
Greater Third-Party Integration:
Increased compatibility and integration capabilities with a broader range of third-party security tools
ES on the cloud (SaaS) has too many limitations with platform administration.
Supported integrations are not always on par with enterprise support especially when dependent on 3rd-party proprietary APIs.
In later versions, unforeseen glitches seem to show up that have no resolution except version upgrade. This used to not be the case in prior versions which were very stable.
We are pleased with the product and have no plans to look for alternatives. We are deeply invested in Microsoft ecosystem and Defender XDR provides seamless integration to other Microsoft products. For academic institution pricing is also quite affordable. In the contrary, we hope to extend the scope of the product for our entire environment.
Overall the UI is modern and OK to use. Attack story is quite nice visual of incident. Advanced hunting supports autocomplete so that helps doing KQL-queries efficiently. The product is quite comprehensive and one can get lost in the vast UI. Learning curve is quite high and navigation is complex. As product also continues to evolve the UI might change somewhat.
It takes real effort to make it smooth. The interface is fine once you know your way around but it's not something a new guy can hop into and start using confidently. I guess the main reason for that is how much fine tuning it needs. We spent weeks customizing correlation searches and filtering false positives before it started working the way we needed.
In our experience there has been very little downtime for Microsot Defender XDR. For us there hasn’t been any single incident where we needed the product and it was not available.
Most of the time the product is as responsive as you might expect from cloud product. Occasionly the product is little slugish, this has been at most a slight irritation. Reports generate quickly ennough for our needs. We also not have found that Defender XDR slows down systems that it is integrated with
It takes a long time for items to load if you are just generally searching through logs. It is best to use the data models which load faster but can be strange in terms of what is coming from which logs where. Yes, you can look it up, but this also requires familiarity with where things are and how to look them up.
Their support throughout our onboarding of the product was fabulous. They not only took the time to carefully explain to teams not as well equipped with the lingo but explained to the tech team how to teach the other teams to be successful. They never once seemed impatient or annoyed with basic questions and didn’t pretend to know something when they needed to research an answer
It's good when it's responsive, but I've had times where I had to wait quite a while for a response. But these are typically the exceptions rather than the rule. When you do get a response it is always well-informed and appropriate. I would say they've been trending better over time with this.
I experienced only on-line training, but the trainers were very professional and competent. Maybe it could be more useful if they also have an experience in projects because sometimes they didn't have a real project experience to communicate to the students. Anyway, it was very interesting and I learned many thing that's very difficoult (or maybe impossible!) to have by myself, aven if I have more than 10 years of Splunk activity experience.
Microsoft Provides a good training for the Microsoft 365 Defender and has a good learning paths to learn and take the exams and get your Certifications.
It was very interesting and I learned many thing that's very difficoult (or maybe impossible!) to have by myself. The only problem was that, when I worked with the Splunk Professional Services, I found some difference between the training contents and the information from PS. In addition is required a long experience on Splunk Enterprise for the data ingestion part, in other words I'm able to work with ES because I'm worling on Splunk since 11 years, otherwise I'd some problem.
seemless and almost transparent. can be deployed by script if needed so every endpoint on our system get's it. if you have intune it gets dumped on the the endpoint by policy so nothing escapes it
Our product in that area, for instance as a security platform and for us it is for the moment really bad point. We started to move in that direction that there is that disconnect from the client management. So if there is some action that needs to be executed detected by security team, there is not an easy way to make that available to the team that is responsible for managing the identities as users, as the devices
Splunk enterprise is the only solution that we’ve been able to identify that provides risk based alerting, which allows our SOC to reduce analyst fatigue which would be a huge problem without it. Before RBA, there were thousands of alerts a day and it was impossible to review all of them
for my exterience, unit pricing and billing frequency are correct. As I already said, I hint to have more discount flexibility, expecially with new customers, because there are competitors less expensive and very aggressive that are dangerous. In addition the possibility to don't pay the license for the development period could be a very interesting feature for the final customers.
Azure cloud provides techical power to scale the product for whole organization. From organizational point of view scaling Defender XDR for various IT teams needs good collaboration and clear norms that all teams must agree to and follow.
- 8 out of 10 and took 2 for the data pipeline and administration part. Even if you'd like to improve yourself or your team, you have to pay a lot of money and it could be more than GIAC education + cert. - Normalization for Data models and CPU-based searches can be a problem sometimes.
I had a fantastic experience with Splunk Professional Services: they worked with us in our last SON project (a SOC migration for a very large customer) and helped to build a multi tenent environment even if ES isn't a multi tenant platform. Th Splunk PS was a very professional and competent people, he is italian and was able to speak with our italian customers.
ES has highly impacted ROI because as the customer of the ES the work we do for creating use cases for clients in terms of security-related aspects by their logs has given more return than investment.
The correlation searches we run to get detailed results from the Data models are very less time-consuming than Splunk Enterprise itself we can get quick responses to the use cases and dashboards populated because of ES.
The CIM compliance feature is ES has made more jobs easy in the terms of finding more Authentication related data we can get data onboarded in the Email data model from O365 and search is email data model instead of searching for particular indexes.
