Defender for Cloud is a worthwhile investment of your teams time with excellent documentation.
May 06, 2022
Defender for Cloud is a worthwhile investment of your teams time with excellent documentation.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Azure Security Center
We use Azure Security Center (now called Microsoft Defender for Cloud) for its security management across multiple clouds. It gives us a great overview of where security gaps are with easy-to-understand remediation or single-click automation fixes in some cases. The reason we went with this product over others is that we are already using most of the Microsoft stack and this compliments it.
- Generates a "secure score" that gamifies the remediation process.
- Automation of some of the remediations that can be done. "Fix it" button.
- Defending hybrid or other-cloud resources and easily onboarding them.
- Just-in-time VM access
- You need to spend time learning the platform as it's not a simple 'subscribe and start'.
- Firewall manager is a bit complicated, it could be simplified and not another portal link.
- Microsoft could do a better comparison job against this product and others that do similar features/overlap.
- Recommendations could be more descriptive of the possible outcomes after resolution.
- Gamification of 'security score' actually works really well for us or team building, if you can believe that!
- Hardening resources can be really easy.
- Integration with our existing Microsoft products.
- User interface, once you understand it, is easy to use.
- The only negative is another portal to learn/use. But that comes with the Microsoft territory.
- Having insight into multi-cloud and hybrid is really great.
- Being able to automate the findings saves lots of time on our already limited-time team.
- Auto-provisioning for a multitude of extensions (vulnerability, log analytics, defender for endpoint) gives our team time back to focus on what matters.
Defender for Cloud is definitely less complex a solution and more turn-key. We found that it was easier to grab the information we needed, faster than the Palo solution. In addition, accounting loved the fact that it was less expensive. At the time of implementation, Palo's solution (like some of its other products) has very poor documentation compared to Defender for Cloud. We also found that Prisma was more difficult to integrate with our other products.
Do you think Microsoft Defender for Cloud delivers good value for the price?
Yes
Are you happy with Microsoft Defender for Cloud's feature set?
Yes
Did Microsoft Defender for Cloud live up to sales and marketing promises?
Yes
Did implementation of Microsoft Defender for Cloud go as expected?
Yes
Would you buy Microsoft Defender for Cloud again?
Yes
Evaluating Azure Security Center and Competitors
Yes - We replaced our Prisma Cloud with Palo Alto Networks because of the price point, alignment with our existing infrastructure and applications as well as its documentation and support which we found lacking with Palo Alto's Prisma. While we do have another product by Palo Alto that is very good it was worth the investment in our time to make the switch and we are very happy with the outcome and time savings this Defender for Cloud offers our team.
- Price
- Product Features
- Product Usability
There is not a single major factor that made us switch but rather lots of little ones that added up. Once we made the switch, which was mostly painless after we reviewed implementation documentation and best practices, all of the little things added up to saving our team time and gaining insight.
Perhaps we would evaluate more solutions however everything takes time, and it's hard to deny the fact that with an existing Microsoft stack that this product wouldn't work for us. The other solution would be outsourcing the application to an MSP or similar but we would rather build our team's knowledge and invest in them.