We performed a comparison between Microsoft Defender for Identity and Microsoft Defender for Office 365 based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."The basic security monitoring at its core feature is the most valuable aspect. But also the investigative parts, the historical logging of events over the network are extremely interesting because it gives an in-depth insight into the history of account activity that is really easy to read, easy to follow, and easy to export."
"Defender for Identity has not affected the end-user experience."
"One of our users had the same password for every personal and company account. That was a problem because she started receiving phishing emails that could compromise all of her accounts. Defender told us that the user was not changing their password."
"The feature I like the most about Defender for Identity is the entity tags. They give you the ability to identify sensitive accounts, devices, and groups. You also have honeytoken entities, which are devices that are identified as "bait" for fraudulent actors."
"The most valuable aspect is its connection to Microsoft Sentinel and Defender for Endpoint, and giving exact timelines for incidents and when certain events occured during an incident."
"This solution has advanced a lot over the last few years."
"The best feature is security monitoring, which detects and investigates suspicious user activities. It can easily detect advanced attacks based on the behavior. The credentials are securely stored, so it reduces the risk of compromise. It will monitor user behavior based on artificial intelligence to protect the identities in your organization. It will even help secure the on-premise Active Directory. It syncs from the cloud to on-premise, and on-premise modifications will be reflected in the cloud."
"It automates routine testing and helps automate the finding of high-value alerts."
"The initial setup was easy."
"The basic features are okay and I'm satisfied with the Defender."
"The product's scalability is good."
"The solution is very easy to use. All you have to do is to assign the license to the end-user and it's done. The customer will only have the feature activated, and the solution will monitor the emails to determine if they are a threat or not."
"Threat Explorer is one of the features that I very much like because it is a real-time report that allows you to identify, analyze, and trace security attacks."
"At the moment we are satisfied with this product. It's a stable, scalable, and resilient solution for us."
"I like its investigation capabilities, as that is what is most important to me. It is fairly simple with a user-friendly interface."
"The good part is that you don't have to configure it, which is very convenient."
"The tracking instance needs to be configured appropriately."
"Microsoft should look at what competing vendors like CrowdStrike and Broadcom are doing and incorporate those features into Sentinel and Defender. At the same time, I think the intelligence inside the product is improving fast. They should incorporate more zero-trust and hybrid trust approaches. They need to build up threat intelligence based on threats and methods used in attacks on other companies."
"The impact of the sensors on the domain controllers can be quite high depending on your loads. I don't know if there's any room for improvement there, but that's one of the things that might be improved."
"The technical support needs significant improvement. Documentation for more minor issues in the form of guides or walkthroughs could help to resolve this issue. The number of tickets raised would decrease, removing some pressure from the support team and making it easier to clear the remaining tickets."
"We observe a lot of false positives. Sometimes, when we go for a coffee break, we lock our screens. Locking the screen has a separate Windows event ID and sometimes I see it is detected as a failed login."
"And when you are working in a priority IP address, Identity is not able to know that those IPs are from the company. It sees that the IPs are from Taiwan or from Hong Kong or from India, even though they are internal IPs, resulting in a lot of false positives."
"There is no option to remedy an issue directly from the console. If we see an alert, we can't fix it from the console. Instead, we must depend on other Microsoft products, such as MDE. That is a significant drawback. It simply works as a scanner, which can sometimes put enough load on the sensors. Immediate actions should be possible from the dashboard because. It can prevent issues from spreading further."
"I would like to be able to do remediation from the platform because it is just a scanner right now. If you onboard a device, it shows you what is happening, but you can't use it to fix things. You need to go into the system to fix it instead."
"Microsoft wants its well-paying customers to finish testing some of its half-baked products, find bugs, and report bugs back to Microsoft's team, which is a little frustrating for those who have to manage it and roll it up to thousands of people across the organization."
"The visibility for the weaknesses in the system and unauthorized access can be improved."
"Too many false positives and lacks an accurate capability to detect malicious SharePoint sites."
"The custom alerts have to improve a lot."
"Microsoft sometimes has downtime, and we'll get several incidents coming in back to back. We have a huge backlog of notifications, many of which may be false positives. However, there might be serious alerts, so we can't risk dismissing all of them at once."
"I'd like some additional features any product can give me to protect our environment in a better way."
"In one of the reports I can get the exact place where a vulnerable file resides. But for that, I need to explicitly go into the device and check. If they could include that file part in the report, without my having to go to the device itself, that would help."
"One area for improvement is integration. For example, when it comes to external SaaS platforms, we were not able to get a lot of information on integrations with such apps for security and authentication."
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Microsoft Defender for Identity is ranked 6th in Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) with 13 reviews while Microsoft Defender for Office 365 is ranked 1st in Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) with 41 reviews. Microsoft Defender for Identity is rated 9.0, while Microsoft Defender for Office 365 is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Microsoft Defender for Identity writes "Offers robust protection from insider threats, but the customer support is poor". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Microsoft Defender for Office 365 writes "Allows for easy reporting of problems, valuable anti-phishing, and anti-malware support". Microsoft Defender for Identity is most compared with Microsoft Entra ID Protection, Microsoft Entra Verified ID, Splunk User Behavior Analytics, Microsoft Defender for Endpoint and Microsoft Entra ID, whereas Microsoft Defender for Office 365 is most compared with Proofpoint Email Protection, Mimecast Email Security, Microsoft Exchange Online Protection (EOP), Cisco Secure Email and Avanan. See our Microsoft Defender for Identity vs. Microsoft Defender for Office 365 report.
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