We performed a comparison between Azure Firewall and Microsoft Defender for Cloud based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Microsoft Security Suite solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."Azure Firewall's feature that I have found most valuable is its scalability."
"Azure Firewall is a cloud-native solution that removes the pain of load balancers."
"We secure the entry point to the virtual data center with the firewall."
"The feature that I have found the most valuable is the control over the network permissions and the network."
"It's auto-scalable, which is a great feature."
"Great security and connectivity."
"It provided ease of maintenance. If a new firewall was needed, we only had to run the pipelines for this. So, the maintenance was very easy."
"The most valuable feature is the integration into the overall cloud platform."
"Everything is built into Azure, and if we go for cross-cloud development with Azure Arc, we can use most of the features. While it's possible to deploy and convert third-party applications, it is difficult to maintain, whereas Azure deployments to the cloud are always easier. Also, Microsoft is a big company, so they always provide enough support, and we trust the Microsoft brand."
"Using Security Center, you have a full view, at any given time, of what's deployed, and that is something that is very useful."
"With respect to improving our security posture, it helps us to understand where we are in terms of compliance. We can easily know when we are below the standard because of the scores it calculates."
"The dashboard is very good. It gives our clients a lot of information and allows them to have a complete overview of the system. Everything is visible in one glance."
"Provides a very good view of the entire security setup of your organization."
"We saw improvement from a regulatory compliance perspective due to having a single dashboard."
"The first valuable feature was the fact that it gave us a list of everything that users were surfing on the web. Having the list, we could make decisions about those sites."
"It is very intuitive when it comes to policy administration, alerts and notifications, and ease of setting up roles at different hierarchies. It has also been good in terms of the network technology maps. It provides a good overview, but it also depends on the complexity of your network."
"The threat intelligence aspect of this particular firewall is not at par with other providers."
"The product could be made more customizable."
"It would be nice to be able to create groupings for servers and offer groups of IP addresses."
"For large organizations, a third-party firewall would be an added advantage, because it would have more advanced features, things that are not in Azure Firewall."
"The solution doesn't offer the same capabilities of Fortinet. It should offer intrusion prevention and advance filtering. These are two very useful features offered on Fortinet that Azure lacks."
"An Azure firewall is not a real firewall."
"There should be better monitoring and logging. Currently, it is put in Sentinel. It should be more seamless and from the interface."
"This solution is not mature when it comes to handling perimeter traffic like internet browsing."
"From my own perspective, they just need a product that is tailored to micro-segmentation so I can configure rules for multiple systems at once and manage it."
"Another thing is that Defender for Cloud uses more resources than CrowdStrike, which my current company uses. Defender for Cloud has two or three processes running simultaneously that consume memory and processor time. I had the chance to compare that with CrowdStrike a few days ago, which was significantly less. It would be nice if Defender were a little lighter. It's a relatively large installation that consumes more resources than competitors do."
"Microsoft sources most of their threat intelligence internally, but I think they should open themselves up to bodies that provide feel intelligence to build a better engine. There may be threats out there that they don't report because their team is not doing anything on that and they don't have arrangements with another party that is involved in that research."
"Azure's system could be more on point like AWS support. For example, if I have an issue with AWS, I create a support ticket, then I get a call or a message. With Azure support, you raise a ticket, and somebody calls back depending on their availability and the priority, which might not align with your business priority."
"No possibility to write or edit any capability."
"The initial setup is not actually so complex but it feels complex because there are many add-ons. There are many options and my team needs to be aware of all of these changes happening on the backend which is a distraction."
"Microsoft can improve the pricing by offering a plan that is more cost-effective for small and medium organizations."
"The documentation and implementation guides could be improved."
Azure Firewall is ranked 14th in Microsoft Security Suite with 33 reviews while Microsoft Defender for Cloud is ranked 2nd in Microsoft Security Suite with 46 reviews. Azure Firewall is rated 7.2, while Microsoft Defender for Cloud is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of Azure Firewall writes "Easy to use and configure but could be more robust". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Microsoft Defender for Cloud writes "Provides multi-cloud capability, is plug-and-play, and improves our security posture". Azure Firewall is most compared with Fortinet FortiGate-VM, Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls, Palo Alto Networks VM-Series, Fortinet FortiGate and Check Point NGFW, whereas Microsoft Defender for Cloud is most compared with AWS GuardDuty, Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks, Microsoft Defender XDR, Wiz and CrowdStrike Falcon. See our Azure Firewall vs. Microsoft Defender for Cloud report.
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