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SCADAfence is superior to Microsoft Defender since it's is architected with an innovative adaptive baseline technology that delivers the highest detection rate with the fewest false positives. Microsoft Defender typically requires installing higher numbers of sensors that may each generate thousands of unnecessary alerts and a steeper cost. This leads to extraneous noise, “alert fatigue” and makes it harder for genuine alerts to get through, at your expense.
While Defender is a noisy OT security threat detection tool, SCADAfence is an industry-leading accurate tool which was awarded “Cool Vendor'' by Gartner for its highest detection rates & lowest false positives. SCADAfence’s self-tuning baseline also doesn’t require any user configuration and enables customers to remain fully secure at all times.
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Even after an OT security solution has been selected, a POC completed, and the product fully deployed, the relationship between vendor and client continues. The vendor you select needs to provide a robust customer success team to assist you along the way, and to help expand your deployment when you are ready to scale up.
Microsoft Defender is difficult to scale for the same reasons that it is difficult to deploy. Too many meaningless alerts, a long time to baseline, and an underdeveloped customer success team may hinder efforts to increase the scope of coverage. SCADAfence can scale to hundreds of distributed sensors, serving tens of thousands of devices without any performance degradation. This eliminates the need for local sensors and makes deployments practical and easily maintainable. Additionally, SCADAfence’s customer success team is dedicated to providing customized support as you scale.
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SCADAfence provides the only customizable governance portal in the OT security industry, which automates all aspects of compliance and monitors the progress made over time across all sites. To ensure that critical infrastructures organizations comply with Biden's cyber security executive order, SCADAfence customers are easily ensuring they are compliant with their industry compliance standards and organizational policies based on actual network traffic, for standards such as NERC-CIP, IEC-62443, NIST, ISO-27001, NIS NCSC, NIST CSF, CMMC, and even with an organization's own internal compliance standards.
SCADAfence allows IT and OT departments to simply define and monitor the organizational adherence to organizational policies and to OT-related regulations.
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Microsoft Defender can offer "attack vectors” but these only identify where your system is most vulnerable. It doesn’t provide a fully interactive system that maps to MITRE ATT&CK or help with closing the vulnerability gap. Any integrations that can help fill this gap will be overshadowed by Microsoft’s push customers towards Azure Cloud.
SCADAfence has advanced support for MITRE ATT&CK for ICS. All SCADAfence alerts are mapped to the MITRE ATT&CK for ICS model and show how an attack advances according to the MITRE kill chain. The corresponding classification is also presented for each alert. During security incidents, this greatly helps customers to understand the phase of the incident, its extent and impact, and respond in a quicker and more effective way. With Microsoft Defender, organizations will be alerted on different risks that relate to MITRE ATT&CK and what part of the alert it relates to, but they can’t show it.
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Microsoft Defender does not provide organizations with remote access tracking and does not provide visibility into user activities on the network. They also cannot correlate user activities between IT and OT networks, which is crucial due to the rise of remote work. This results in organizations not having or having limited visibility into their OT networks that are being accessed by remote users. Additionally, they do not provide a concrete correlation of remote user connections.
SCADAfence offers this out of the box, providing visibility of remote users’ activities in your network by correlating OT & IT protocols with a remote access connection. SCADAfence’s non-configuration remote access feature does not require any changes in network architecture, does not impact user experience and does not demand manual work of going over session recordings.
| Feature | SCADAfence | Microsoft Defender |
|---|---|---|
| Faster Time to Value | Fast | Intermediate |
| IT / OT Governance Portal |
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| Remote Access Security Without Architecture Changes |
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| False Positive Rates | Low | High |
| Behavioral Baselining Period | 1-2 days | 6-8 weeks |
| Smart Sensors |
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| Total Cost of Ownership / Deployment Costs | Low | High |
