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Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps

Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps
Formerly Microsoft Cloud App Security

Overview

What is Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps?

Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps (formerly Microsoft Cloud App Security) is a multimode cloud access security broker.

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Recent Reviews
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Awards

Products that are considered exceptional by their customers based on a variety of criteria win TrustRadius awards. Learn more about the types of TrustRadius awards to make the best purchase decision. More about TrustRadius Awards

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Product Details

What is Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps?

Microsoft's CASB helps customers to achieve Zero Trust security. Defender for Cloud Apps uses an enforcement engine at its core, providing real-time policy evaluation. The engine delivers protection by analyzing signals, applying organization-wide policies and threat intelligence, and ensuring identities are verified and authenticated and devices are safe. It conditionally grants access to data, apps, infrastructure, and networks, providing continuous and comprehensive visibility, analytics, and automation.

Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps Video

Microsoft Cloud App Security Explained

Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps Competitors

Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps Technical Details

Operating SystemsUnspecified
Mobile ApplicationNo

Frequently Asked Questions

Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps (formerly Microsoft Cloud App Security) is a multimode cloud access security broker.

Cisco Umbrella, Zscaler Internet Access, and Netskope CASB are common alternatives for Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps.

The most common users of Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps are from Enterprises (1,001+ employees).
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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(31)

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(1-10 of 10)
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Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps to gain visibility over user actions inside of our environment, as well as assessing the connections they make with third party services. We also use Defender for Cloud Apps to gain limited DLP visibility, as well as understanding data exfiltration to third party applications.
  • Insight into user actions
  • Insight into user connections
  • Cloud file scanning
  • Easier to understand UI
  • Further clarity into user search
  • Better third party cloud connections
Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps should be used and considered if you are within the Microsoft stack, especially using E3 or E5 licenses. While I would not wholly recommend this as a full cloud protection suite, this works perfectly within the stack and relevant SaaS apps. Provides much better visibility into users than most third party tools, given that this is a Microsoft built tool meant to bring in data from primarily Microsoft services.
Daisy Cooper | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
The entire organization depends on Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps to protect all our Cloud Apps that we normally use and helps to identify those Apps our employees are using which are risky and does not comply to our organizational needs, in order to keep our organizations Cloud assets secure from external attacks and shield us from internal accidents with excellent reporting capabilities.
  • Helps to discover and manage shadow IT.
  • Suspicious activity identification.
  • Perfect protections to sensitive Cloud information.
  • In the event of Cloud traffic it is not easy to monitor and identify attacks.
  • Difficult to protect unmatched Cloud devices.
Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps is best suited to organizations using multiple Cloud SaaS and in situations where risky Apps are being used by employees which are not compliant to organizations needs and [it] helps secure sensitive information from external attacks. [It] also shields them from internal accidents and helps organizations with a secure environment when moving information to the Cloud.
Brian Coyne | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We utilize Microsoft Cloud App Security (MCAS) in conjunction with the Defender ATP and Office ATP suite to protect our environment. We utilize it globally for all users to provide insight into cloud activities and abnormalities or user activity as well as to provide insight around in-use cloud applications.
  • Easy automation
  • straight forward dashboard
  • integration with other Microsoft security tools
  • Massive delays between the time an activity occurs and when MCAS alerts, up to 24 hours sometimes
  • Many false negatives due to the way it tracks IP addresses and things like impossible travel
  • Some of the default alerts dont trigger emails or dont even support email
It's great because it's included with other Microsoft tools like Defender, but it's not worth it on its own. It lacks the speed of alerting, and in the world of security 24 hours for an alert to trigger is simply not acceptable. There is some very nice built-in automation around cloud apps with low scores and the ability to outright block these that is really nice.
December 08, 2021

Security Review of MCAS

Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Microsoft Cloud App Security to protect against data breaches or data theft. Currently, we use it to protect data within Office 365. We have a lot of documents and files within OneDrive, Work, Sharepoint, and other O353 tools. The problem we were facing [was] team members [used] their personal machines to download data and remove it as part of their separation from the company. MCAS was able to help us detect and alert on such occurrences
  • Integrates with Microsoft Products
  • Has a fair share of popular SasS connectors
  • Is constantly releasing new connectors for new SaaS platforms
  • They need more Saas integrations
  • Some of the integrations are lacking data or feeds that are needed
Currently, we have an Enterprise license with Microsoft so MCAS is included. For a tool that is "free" to us, it works well. This compares to a tool that we would have to purchase and then put in a lot of time to configure. For us, there is a cost savings component that makes this worthwhile use.
Sneha Sharma | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We Use Microsoft Cloud App Security in our Microsoft Technology Department like Azure, Power apps, and .Net department. We use MCAS for threat detection vulnerable checkpoints in web applications, mobile apps, or servers. As it is mostly used in the Saas category. Mostly our clients want to switch to azure and apply MCAS for security purposes.
  • Security and Auto check for integrations
  • Detail distinguish according to severity of threats
  • Work well with Microsoft tools and Azure
  • filters are also good
  • Not smooth working with other cloud service provider like aws
  • sometimes not updated with latest threat or very late threat detection.
  • Can be more UI side attractive
  • Not a cheap price
  • slow with real time data
It is well suited if your team is working with Microsoft tools and Azure services. but if you are using other cloud service providers and don't want to spend efforts in learning integration with third-party software then this is not a great fit for you. overall we are very satisfied with the product. If your corporation with Microsoft tools then I would recommend it.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
ResellerIncentivized
Our organization started to expand further with more people joining and diverse types of devices being used, as the world shifted due to the pandemic, and with employees need to use their own personal devices for work, we relied heavily on Microsoft Cloud App Security (Now Called Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps), we were concerned with app security, what type of apps are people using? are these apps secure? are these apps compromising the device security? should this app be trusted? are there any invalid attempts by this app? all these questions were answered with Cloud App Security. Not only that, the visibility provided by the Cloud App Security connector for internal network authentications and activity were invaluable to our secure operations, the out of the box recommendations for our overall security posture helped us optimize/fine-tune the configuration of our network devices and domain controllers, the product works really well!
  • Application Usage Monitoring
  • Security Posture of Internal Domain Controllers
  • Policies and Templates to control apps
  • Threat investigation and remedy
  • Alerts and Notifications on suspectious app behaviors
  • Refining Search and Drill Down in the Management Portal
  • Better Filtering UI, Locating Right Events/Activities is Relatively Difficult
  • More Policy Templates to Cover Wider Scenarios
  • Better Guidelines on How to Rectify a Problem/Security Issue
Overall, I think that every organization with Windows-based devices need Cloud App Security, especially in these times, CAS is very useful for such organizations, it would give you very detailed and comprehensive insights on your overall app security posture, types of apps, sensitivity, whether there are recent breaches for a specific app, etc... Cloud app security becomes less useful if most of your users are macOS based users, although it can detect apps regardless of the OS, some features are tailored around windows networks that cloud security does a great job at, nonetheless, in both scenarios, CAS still provides value and great insights that are truly invaluable.
November 25, 2021

Good for storage

Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
The Microsoft Cloud App Security is used in my organization to store documentation and forward documentation between staff and clients. The App allows us to take documents off our servers and easily transfer and edit them between staff and clients. My team routinely stores documents on the cloud and can easily organize and access them.
  • Organization
  • Communication
  • Storage
  • Features
  • Details
  • Graphics
Microsoft Cloud App Security is well suited for companies that create and store documents to share between staff or other clients and which to keep them organized. I would say it would be good to store a medium amount of trafficked files. Large files may be better suited for another program.
Sai karthik Satyavarapu | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Provides visibility into the access of apps and data.
Monitors users’ activities.
Classifies and protects sensitive information.
Ensures compliance.
  • Detect threats based on user activity logs.
  • Set manual and automatic alert remediation.
  • Implement activity policies.
  • Detect threats based on user activity logs.
  • 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
The feature that helps us in detecting the sensitive information being shared has been very useful. In addition, the feature that allows [Microsoft Cloud App Security] to apply policies with SharePoint, Teams, and OneDrive is being used predominantly. It is a kind of unified solution. As compared to other solutions such as Netskope, Symantec, or McAfee, it provides a more unified reporting structure. It also integrates with other technologies. We have Azure Information Protection, and it goes well with the solutions that we are already using.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Microsoft Cloud App Security has been integrated to provide users a comprehensive platform in the cloud, which has allowed us to leverage a whole bunch of integration options thereby increasing productivity and efficiency. We can now administrate policies and safeguard organization data.
  • Audit
  • Enterprise Security
  • Integration
  • Intermittent bugs related to policies turning off
Setting policies on apps is easy with this software. You can get real-time alerts and logs as notifications. You can then use monitoring dashboards to view and take corrective actions.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use MCAS - Microsoft Cloud App Security for data protections, DLP and Threat Detections in our known and approved SaaS applications. It allows us to inspect the content of data at rest, as well as in use, and enforce security policies. MCAS brings a set of security capabilities that I cover a huge gap we had prior - Security visibility and enforcements in SaaS apps.
  • DLP content inspection of SaaS file stores.
  • Auto detection and classification of content in SaaS File stores.
  • Threat detection for data ex filtration and identity related threats.
  • Cloud SaaS discovery.
  • Cloud discovery throws away found services not found in the MCAS database of SaaS apps.
  • Many panes of glass required for a fully enabled implementation to administer, configure and utilize 100% of the product.
  • Room for improvement in the reporting realm - not enough records are visible and exportable for high record count policy reports.
Excellent cloud discovery capabilities that can help you better understand what apps your users are using and the relative risks of each. Data protection and DLP use cases work as advertised and are exactly what our company needs to replicate DLP implementations already in the SaaS problem space. MCAS does a good job of identifying content that meets a number of pre-built types and templates for PCI and other related governance frameworks. It's a good CASB and can solve a lot of problems - it might be right for your organization and you should certainly evaluate the tool in you need CASB.
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