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Microsoft Defender for Endpoint vs Microsoft Entra Permissions Management [EOL] comparison

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Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Microsoft Defender for Endp...
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
212
Ranking in other categories
Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) (2nd), Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) (4th), Anti-Malware Tools (1st), Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) (3rd), Microsoft Security Suite (3rd), Agentic Endpoint Security (1st)
Microsoft Entra Permissions...
Average Rating
7.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Featured Reviews

Robert Arbuckle - PeerSpot reviewer
Security Analyst III at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees
Automatically isolates threats and integrates with logging to reduce response time
Overall, I would evaluate the Microsoft support level that I receive at probably about a seven, but that depends on the day. It has been spotty. We have had issues where the urgency level of the Microsoft support is not as high as ours, especially during a data breach or potential data breach situation. We have had issues with some of the offshore support being lackluster. One specific thing that comes to mind is we were on a support call with our CISO on the call, and the Microsoft agent, who did not actually work for Microsoft, is one of the vendors that Microsoft uses for support, said, "Just to set expectations, my lunch break is in an hour and I am going to go away then." For us, it was already ten o'clock at night and we had been working on this for a couple of hours, trying to get a security engineer on with us. For him to tell us that he was going to go away and have lunch, it was, "Okay, but go find somebody else if you need to." It was just the lackluster approach, and it seemed like he did not really care. We seem to get a lot of this when we get non-Microsoft support. I can identify areas for improvement with Microsoft Defender for Endpoint, as it is kind of a convoluted mess to try to take care of false positives. Especially when they have been identified as false positives but they keep going off over and over again. It is great for my pocketbook because it generates a lot of on-call action, but I would really prefer more sleep at two o'clock in the morning than dealing with false positives. I would say that the unified portal for managing Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is suitable for both teams as they are all in there. It would be great if they would stop moving things around and renaming things, which makes sense. The new XDR portal is pretty nice. Being able to have it central again inside of the regular Security Center without having to open up two windows is helpful. Overall, I think it is pretty good. There is always going to be something that could be improved, such as alerting and the ability to modify alerts would be a little bit helpful to have. Being able to add more data into the alerts and turn off alerts that are not as useful would be beneficial. It is hard to say what the quantitative impact the security exposure management feature has had on our company's security, because a lot of it is kind of subjective. I think we are sitting at around a fifty percent score still, and a lot of it is just kind of unusual circumstances that we cannot really implement without breaking the organization.
Sameer Bhat - PeerSpot reviewer
Vice President at Goldman Sachs
Provides resource-based access and security, but time-bound access can be a problem
Entra ID is the core of the identity management that we have. This is the key product that we are using. I am currently also looking into Entra Private Access because we are planning to deploy about 50,000 desktops into Azure and use Azure Virtual Desktop. We would like to give access to the users from the desktop to on-premises applications. I learned that Entra Private Access is a good solution. That is not yet GA, but that is what we are looking for. Entra provides a single pane of glass for managing user access, but because our company also integrates with Nebula API, only administrators use Entra's pane. A normal person who wants to get onboarded can do self-service using Nebula. The features for whitelisting and other things are definitely there. That is what we use specifically. Application IDs, enterprise applications, and all those things are already there, so we have more efficiency. There is also security because we usually do not allow user identities to get direct access to Azure resources. Usually, we use the service principles from Entra ID, so this way, it increases security. Entra has helped to save time for our IT administrators. We tend to automate a lot of things. We can do automation using Graph APIs and save time. It is hard to quantify the time savings, but there has been a medium amount of time savings. Entra has helped to save our organization money. We care about security and risk more than money, but it also saves money. We are premium customers, and because we have a commit-to-consume contract with Microsoft of multi-million dollars, the money does not come into it because we have to consume those resources.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"The primary advantage is that you don't need to install it, because it's included in the Windows 10 delivery and is integrated as part of the Microsoft 365 suite."
"Defender for Endpoint has significantly reduced our SOC team's workload by automating threat detection and response, allowing them to focus on other critical projects."
"Stability-wise, I have not had another product that has been as stable and has had fewer issues."
"The patch management is very easy, as it can be done automatically or added to a schedule."
"The most likable feature of Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is the sheer number of features and data it provides."
"Microsoft Defender for Endpoint has helped free up our SOC team to work on other projects or tasks."
"The initial setup is quite simple and quite straightforward; it's not overly complex or difficult, the deployment is fast and only takes a minute or so, and you only need one person, an engineer, to manage the product once it is up and running."
"The comprehensiveness of Microsoft threat-protection products is great."
"The solution integrates well with our infrastructure and other systems without any issues."
"Multifactor authentication is valuable."
 

Cons

"If you have multi-cloud like Google and AWS, the native solutions are better for those particular cases."
"Microsoft Defender for Endpoint can have more options and more AI capabilities in the future, because everything keeps changing."
"Microsoft Defender in the basic form is not very useful for managing the security environment. The free version is not capable of covering the needs of centralized management, EDR, and behavioral analysis. If you don't have the commercial version, you can't have centralized management and set up the policies and other things. Each client is a standalone installation, which is not useful for security in an enterprise model."
"There are some areas in the proactive threats that are just overwhelming the SOC, so we've had to turn those off until we can figure out how to filter out the false positives."
"Its user interface (UI) can be improved. Currently, in the console, you have to dig down for certain things. They've got many different layers to get to things instead of having it all on the surface. You have to go three folds lower to get to specific functionality or click a particular option. It would be good if we can manage the console through menus and instead of three clicks, we can do things in one click. They need to change the UI and work on it in terms of a better user experience."
"Its interface can be improved a little bit. We would like to have some sort of centralization."
"The solution has minimal customization options, especially compared to Mandiant, so we want to see more scope for customization. A single portal for customization would also be a welcome addition."
"The only issue I would say is our mobile endpoints do not have Defender installed for part of them. An additional feature that could be included in the next release is free Copilot."
"We use a third-party API called Nebula API to integrate the account for authorization. The time-bound access area in Entra can be a problem. It can be improved in terms of the granularity of the permissions."
"The solution's pricing and support services need improvement."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"You need a license to use this solution."
"Its price at the moment is very good because you get a lot of value for your money, especially with the subscriptions. If you have the E1, E3, or E5 enterprise subscription, you pay per month per user, and you get almost an infinite number of solutions. If you compare the price to the number of solutions that you get, it is a very good deal."
"It came with Windows."
"Microsoft has different plans for buying this product. The price depends on the configuration of the full set of products that you buy and on the licensing program in your contract."
"Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is more affordable compared to some other endpoint solutions."
"There is not a license required for this particular solution."
"We went for Microsoft Defender once we were informed that it would be part of our Office 365 package. So, we combined the licensing for the OS with Office 365. Yeah. We thought it was a good bargain."
"Licensing fees are paid annually through a partner."
"The product cost is in the mid to high range."
"We are a Fortune 500 company, so we always negotiate with Microsoft."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Outsourcing Company
8%
Computer Software Company
20%
Financial Services Firm
17%
Outsourcing Company
7%
Comms Service Provider
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business82
Midsize Enterprise44
Large Enterprise97
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

How is Cortex XDR compared with Microsoft Defender?
Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is a cloud-delivered endpoint security solution. The tool reduces the attack surface, applies behavioral-based endpoint protection and response, and includes risk-ba...
Which offers better endpoint security - Symantec or Microsoft Defender?
We use Symantec because we do not use MS Enterprise products, but in my opinion, Microsoft Defender is a superior solution. Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is a cloud-delivered endpoint security s...
How does Microsoft Defender for Endpoint compare with Crowdstrike Falcon?
The CrowdStrike solution delivers a lot of information about incidents. It has a very light sensor that will never push your machine hardware to "test", you don't have the usual "scan now" feature ...
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Also Known As

Microsoft Defender ATP, Microsoft Defender Advanced Threat Protection, MS Defender for Endpoint, Microsoft Defender Antivirus
CloudKnox Permissions Management
 

Interactive Demo

Demo not available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Petrofrac, Metro CSG, Christus Health
Information Not Available
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