The best cybersecurity platform for large enterprises with a vendor consolidation plan

Palo Alto Networks' product catalog lists physical PA-Series firewalls, VM-Series virtual firewalls and CN-Series containerized firewalls alongside Prisma Access, Prisma SD-WAN, Cortex XDR and Cortex XSIAM. That network and SASE range is why we crown Palo Alto Networks for the large enterprise whose consolidation plan starts with branch and data-center firewalls, SASE and Cortex security operations, provided the proposed order confirms the required product licenses, the supported migration objects, the coexistence and cutover plan, and the identity deployment scope.

Microsoft is the better pick for an enterprise that already holds Microsoft 365 E5, which includes Defender for Endpoint Plan 2, and plans to replace Splunk or QRadar and a non-Microsoft endpoint product through Microsoft's documented migration steps. CrowdStrike suits the enterprise that keeps Microsoft Defender on its endpoints and brings that telemetry into Falcon Next-Gen SIEM without another endpoint sensor, with module quantities and commercial commitments confirmed in the order.

What should a large enterprise weigh in a consolidation platform?

Azure Firewall is a network firewall delivered as a cloud service for Azure workloads, and CrowdStrike's Falcon Firewall Management sets host-firewall policy on Windows, macOS and Linux machines. A plan that lists firewall as one line hides those differences. Map every control you intend to keep to a named product in the quote, with the sites and devices it covers, before an existing tool is switched off.

NIST's configuration-management guide for federal systems includes a sample change request that records an implementation date and a back-out plan. A consolidation needs that discipline for four separate jobs: converting firewall policy, mapping SIEM detection rules, translating saved queries, and running or removing endpoint agents. Ask each bidder which objects its tooling converts and who restores the old configuration if a cutover fails.

Cortex XSIAM's license documentation marks the Cortex XDR endpoint agent as an add-on in the NG-SIEM tier and as included in the Enterprise and Premium tiers. The same documentation lists identity threat detection and data retention as add-ons in every tier, so a tier name does not settle what the price covers. Request a line-item schedule showing the unit and quantity for each required product, and tie each line to the control map.

MITRE's evaluation data lists Palo Alto Networks and Microsoft among the Enterprise 2024 participants and CrowdStrike among the Enterprise 2025 participants, and neither round includes all three. MITRE says its evaluations do not rank vendors. Ask each bidder for the scenario and product build behind any result it quotes, and keep detection, noise and protection results apart, because MITRE reports them as separate measures and a label applies to one substep in one run.

The Federal Acquisition Regulation, which governs federal negotiated purchases, has evaluators weigh how current and relevant a past-performance record is and where the information came from. The same test fits a vendor's customer story. Ask for a reference of your scale, the name of each product it retired, the period, and how any saving was measured.

Palo Alto Networks, Microsoft and CrowdStrike on consolidation scope

Palo Alto Networks: network firewalls, Prisma SASE and Cortex

The Palo Alto Networks catalog carries Cloud NGFW for AWS and for Azure next to its hardware and virtual firewalls, with Panorama and Strata Cloud Manager for management. Its SASE entries include Prisma Access, Prisma SD-WAN, Prisma Browser and Enterprise DLP, and Cortex XDR and Cortex XSIAM cover endpoint detection and security operations. Strata Cloud Manager and the Cortex products are separate named products in that catalog, so the order should say which management product runs each part.

Palo Alto Networks documents a firewall configuration migration from Panorama into Strata Cloud Manager. It is available on request through the account team, and it needs an XML configuration export and a Superuser role in both systems. It copies and translates supported security policies, network configuration and objects, and it flags the items it supports only partly or not at all. For firewalls from another maker, have the order list the policy objects the migration covers and the party converting the rest.

Palo Alto Networks' XSIAM comparison page says an assistant maps existing Splunk or QRadar correlation rules to XSIAM analytics and produces a confidence-scored migration plan. Ask for the procedure behind that statement and the rule languages it supports before the plan counts on it. On endpoints, the Cortex XDR compatibility tables name CrowdStrike Falcon and Microsoft Defender among the Windows products that run beside the agent, with passive mode recommended for Defender on Windows Server. Palo Alto Networks says there that it has not tested products outside its tables, so the cutover plan should name who removes each old agent and when.

Cortex XSIAM is licensed in tiers named NG-SIEM, Enterprise and Premium. NG-SIEM covers analytics, data collection, detection and automation, and the Enterprise tier adds one Cortex XDR agent per endpoint. Cloud posture and cloud runtime security come with Premium, and forensics and DLP join identity threat detection and data retention as add-ons in every tier. On the network side, Enterprise DLP is also sold inside bundles such as CASB-X.

Palo Alto Networks announced the completion of its CyberArk acquisition on February 11, 2026, and its catalog lists Idira for human, machine and agentic identities. The release says CyberArk's identity products stay available as a standalone platform, and the Idira FAQ tells existing CyberArk customers that cross-platform capabilities with the rest of the portfolio arrive over time. Treat identity as its own line in the order, with the Idira products named and Cortex identity threat detection priced as the add-on it is in the XSIAM license table.

Palo Alto Networks' Enterprise 2024 entry ran through scenarios MITRE names DPRK, CL0P, LockBit and Protections. In MITRE's record for that entry, noise substep 8.09 in the CL0P scenario is marked Reported, which MITRE defines for that round as an alert that treats the benign activity under test as malicious. In the protection scenario, Test 1 shows substep 1.04 as Not blocked and substep 1.05 as Blocked.

Autodesk rolled out Prisma Access company-wide after a pilot and retired its on-premises VPN products, and all of its 60-plus campus offices moved in under seven months, according to a November 2024 Palo Alto Networks customer story. Autodesk already used Prisma SD-WAN. The State of Louisiana's story describes more than 430 legacy firewalls replaced with Palo Alto Networks firewalls across 26 agencies over five years, followed by Cortex XSIAM in place of an older SIEM. Both accounts are published by Palo Alto Networks, and neither names the product it replaced.

Microsoft: E5 entitlements and a documented path off Splunk or QRadar

Microsoft 365 E5 includes Defender for Endpoint Plan 2, and Microsoft's Entra licensing page lists E5 among the offers that include Entra ID P2. An enterprise on Microsoft 365 E3 reaches the same endpoint plan through the Defender Suite at $12.00 per user per month, paid yearly, which also includes Defender for Identity, Defender for Office 365 Plan 2, Defender for Cloud Apps and Defender for IoT. That page's FAQ says one Defender for Endpoint user license covers up to five devices and that servers are licensed separately.

Microsoft's SIEM migration experience for Sentinel analyzes exported Splunk and QRadar detections, custom ones included, and recommends Sentinel analytics rules, Defender XDR native detections and Content Hub data connectors. It requires Sentinel in the Defender portal and Security Copilot enabled in the tenant, and the article states that the tool itself creates no Security Compute Unit charges. The tool maps to out-of-the-box content and reports the rules that have no good match. Installing connectors and enabling rules stay with the customer.

The endpoint move is documented in three phases: prepare, set up and onboard. Defender Antivirus goes into passive mode beside the existing product, the two products get mutual exclusions, devices are onboarded and tested, and then the non-Microsoft product is uninstalled. For help with that uninstall, the third-phase article directs the customer to the other vendor's support team, and Microsoft's guidance on running beside other security products describes its own support in that situation as commercially reasonable.

Microsoft's security service edge consists of Entra Internet Access and Entra Private Access, and branch connectivity through its remote networks needs a combined total of at least 50 licenses from Entra ID P1 and Entra Internet Access. Sentinel and Defender for Cloud have their own billing. Sentinel is billed on data ingested, and Defender for Cloud plans are enabled on Azure subscriptions under Azure pricing.

Microsoft entered Defender XDR in the same Enterprise 2024 round. MITRE's record for that entry keeps the initial run apart from results that carry a configuration-change modifier. Substep 6.02 in the CL0P scenario is labeled None on both, and substep 1.02 in the DPRK scenario moves from General on the initial run to Technique after a detection-logic change.

MVP Health Care, a regional health insurer, had begun converting from Splunk to Azure Sentinel in a Microsoft customer story dated February 2021, with Defender for Endpoint deployed from late 2018 and the rest of Microsoft 365 at E5. A December 2025 story about TriNet describes Microsoft 365 E5 phased in over several quarters and timed to vendor renewals. On PeerSpot, a cyber security consultant supporting about 1,200 to 1,500 users wrote in a January 2026 Sentinel review that the product centralized monitoring and incident correlation and that cost visibility and control was the biggest pain point.

CrowdStrike: Falcon Next-Gen SIEM for an estate that keeps Microsoft Defender

Falcon Next-Gen SIEM ingests Microsoft Defender telemetry through the agents already deployed. CrowdStrike's SIEM page says the product is sold for third-party security and IT data without other Falcon modules, and that telemetry from licensed Falcon modules carries no additional SIEM ingestion charge.

Falcon OverWatch for Defender is a separate, sensor-based route. CrowdStrike's May 2026 launch post describes the Falcon sensor running alongside Microsoft Defender for managed hunting, without requiring Defender to be replaced. The two routes are different purchases, so the order should say which one is quoted.

For the SIEM being retired, CrowdStrike's March 2026 post describes a Charlotte AI Query Translation Agent that turns Splunk queries and natural-language investigative requests into CQL. Query translation is a different job from converting detection rules. A Falcon Platform Services data sheet offers expert-led migration from a legacy log-management tool, and the order should list the detection rules and other objects that service will move.

Falcon Firewall Management manages host-firewall policy through templates and reusable rule groups. CrowdStrike's SASE explainer presents Falcon endpoint detection, Zero Trust Assessment, identity threat detection and Cloud Security as components that support a SASE architecture. A plan that also replaces network firewalls or SD-WAN should map those controls to a named product before it counts them as covered.

CrowdStrike's licensing FAQ counts endpoint products by sensor and identity products by account, and it meters SIEM by data volume and retention. Its Falcon Plus Advantage Bundle F example lists 500 endpoints, 120 server endpoints, 625 privileged-identity accounts and 50 GB a day of Next-Gen SIEM with 365-day retention, plus 40 GB a day of additional ingestion. Falcon Flex lets customers swap modules during the agreement, and its page routes buyers to sales.

MITRE's Enterprise 2025 round ran Scattered Spider and Mustang Panda detection scenarios and a separate set of protection tests. CrowdStrike's Mustang Panda page shows 7 noise steps and 0 reported false positives. In Protection Test 1, CrowdStrike's result is Protected at the ingress-transfer stage and N/A at a later data-staging stage.

Encore Capital Group, which CrowdStrike's customer story lists at 7,300 employees, lined up its expiring EDR, MDR and SIEM contracts with a Falcon Flex proof of concept. CISO Konrad Fellmann says there that three products were consolidated immediately and three more were planned over the following two years. A TrustRadius reviewer working in IT at an organization listed at 10,001-plus employees described an EDR deployment in January 2026 and noted limits in policy tuning and offline protection.

Which platform fits a large enterprise consolidating security vendors?

We crown Palo Alto Networks for the large enterprise whose consolidation plan starts with branch and data-center firewalls, SASE and Cortex security operations, provided the proposed order confirms the required product licenses, the supported migration objects, the coexistence and cutover plan, and the identity deployment scope. Its catalog puts hardware, virtual and containerized firewalls, Prisma SASE and the Cortex products with one vendor, and those are the controls this buyer replaces first. The condition matters because a catalog names products, and the order fixes which are licensed and which migration work the vendor takes on.

For a buyer whose first project is leaving Splunk or QRadar, Microsoft's Sentinel workflow takes priority: it has published prerequisites and stated limits, and Palo Alto Networks describes its rule-mapping assistant on a comparison page. For the buyer defined here, we give Palo Alto Networks' network, SASE and Cortex range priority because the consolidation plan begins with those controls.

Microsoft is the better pick for the enterprise that already holds qualifying Microsoft 365 E5 licenses and whose plan retires Splunk or QRadar and a non-Microsoft endpoint product. That buyer reuses endpoint and identity entitlements it has paid for and follows a migration sequence Microsoft has written down, with rule enablement and the old agent's removal assigned in its own project plan.

CrowdStrike is the better pick for the enterprise that keeps Microsoft Defender on its endpoints and wants that telemetry in Falcon Next-Gen SIEM without deploying another endpoint sensor. Confirm module quantities and the commercial commitment in the order, and treat OverWatch for Defender as a separate sensor-based purchase.

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