Microsoft Defender delivered 242% return on investment over three years​​

The latest Forrester Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) study reveals a 242% return on investment (ROI) over three years for organizations that chose Microsoft Defender. It helps security leaders consolidate tools, reduce overhead, and empower their security operations (SecOps) teams with operational efficiencies powered by AI and automation. In total, the study found Microsoft Defender delivers $17.8 million in benefits and paid for itself in less than six months. The results are for a composite organization based on interviewed customers.¹

We know security teams today are navigating a landscape of escalating cyberthreats and operational complexity. But the real opportunity lies in transformation—not just defense. At Microsoft, our mission is to help organizations consolidate fragmented security capabilities and apply intelligence to deliver better outcomes. With integrated tools and AI-powered insights, Microsoft Defender, powered by Microsoft Sentinel, empowers SecOps teams to strengthen their security posture, accelerate response, and build lasting resiliency across hybrid and multicloud environments.

The Forrester Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) study also shows the consequences of under-equipped and disconnected security teams are costly. Toxic team dynamics and insufficient tooling correlate to higher breach rates and inflated incident costs. Organizations without robust incident response capabilities spend an average of $204,000 more per breach and suffer nearly one additional breach annually, on average. These findings underscore the critical need for integrated, intelligent security solutions—which can unify detection, investigation, and response—empowering SecOps teams to operate with resilience, precision, and speed.

Organizations face increasing security challenges

Many organizations have already made significant investments in cybersecurity to keep pace with evolving cyberthreats. Despite these efforts, they continue to face persistent challenges. One major issue—the proliferation of security tools across hybrid and multicloud environments—has led to excess costs, complexity, and risk. Additionally, legacy on-premises infrastructure demands high overhead and convoluted workflows, often resulting in poor visibility and inefficient threat detection. Security teams also struggle with alert fatigue and false positives, delaying incident response and increasing the likelihood of breaches. Security operations center (SOC) engineering teams are stretched thin and some lack the advanced coding skills needed to build effective detections. These gaps leave organizations vulnerable to cyberthreats like ransomware and phishing, with some experiencing costly breaches that disrupt operations and erode profitability.

In response, organizations set clear investment objectives. They need a solution that scales securely without adding complexity—one that can integrate seamlessly with existing Microsoft and third-party tools and reduce the cognitive load on analysts.

How Microsoft Defender delivers ROI, speed, and simplicity

Microsoft Defender and Microsoft Sentinel integrate to provide a unified security operations platform, delivering cost effective storage for security data with full security information and event management (SIEM) capabilities. The integration allows security teams to correlate incidents, hunt cyberthreats, and respond faster by combining Defender’s deep endpoint and identity insights with Sentinel’s scalable analytics and automation.

The cohesive user experience of Microsoft Defender, lower false-positive rate, and ability to surface meaningful insights with fewer steps makes it a compelling choice for customers. They also value its support for Kusto Query Language (KQL), which enables sophisticated detections without requiring deep engineering expertise. Ultimately, organizations looking at Defender hope it can help them consolidate tooling, improve visibility across their environments, and mitigate the risk and cost of breaches—empowering their security teams to respond faster, smarter, and more effectively.

According to the Forrester Total Economic Impact (TEI) study, organizations using Microsoft Defender realized a 242% return on investment over three years, with a net present value of $12.6 million. That’s not just cost savings—it’s strategic value creation. It’s money for future product innovations or salary for more SecOps team members. Microsoft Defender helps consolidate tools, reduce licensing overhead, and streamline operations, freeing up budget and bandwidth for innovation. Key statistics shared by Forrester include:

• Significantly faster cyberthreat remediation: Speed is the new currency in cybersecurity. The study found that Defender enabled security teams to remediate threats faster, dropping mean time to acknowledge (MTTA) from 30 minutes to 15 minutes and mean time to resolve (MTTR) from up to three hours to less than 1 hour in many cases. That improvement in speed can mean the difference between a contained incident and a costly breach. With built-in automation and AI-driven insights, Microsoft Defender empowers analysts to act decisively—before cyberattackers can gain a foothold. 

• $17.8 million in benefits to the business: A breakdown of the benefits over three years to businesses using Microsoft Defender include up to $12 million in reduced costs from vendor consolidation, $2.4 million in savings from SecOps optimization, and $2.8 million in reduced cost of material breaches. 

• Less than 6 months to investment payback: Organizations that invested in Microsoft Defender found their investment paid off in less than six months, on average. 

What surprised me was how interconnected it is with Microsoft’s tooling, and not just their security tooling but [also in] the way you manage your devices. I can see everything about [Microsoft] Intune. I can see all of the audit logs for everything that happens in [Microsoft] Azure, everything like that—it’s just there. I didn’t have to intentionally turn it on.

—Manager of Cyberdefense, Consumer Packaged Goods

What can security leaders take away from this research?

• Defender delivers measurable ROI and cost efficiencies through consolidation of security tools, reduced licensing and managed security service provider (MSSP) costs, and streamlined operations that can free up both budget and staff time. 

• Defender helps modernize security operations and enables SecOps teams to remediate cyberthreats up to 30% faster, thanks to built-in automation, AI-powered threat detection and response, and close integration with Microsoft Sentinel for coordinated defense. 

• Defender unifies security across multicloud and hybrid environments, helping teams reduce alert fatigue, prioritize cyberthreats effectively, and strengthen security and compliance postures. 

Read more detail about the Forrester Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) study or visit AI-powered security operations to learn more about how Microsoft Defender can help your organization today.

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To learn more about Microsoft Security solutions, visit our website. Bookmark the Security blog to keep up with our expert coverage on security matters. Also, follow us on LinkedIn (Microsoft Security) and X (@MSFTSecurity) for the latest news and updates on cybersecurity. 

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​​*Total Economic Impact is a methodology developed by Forrester Research that enhances a company’s technology decision-making processes and assists solution providers in communicating their value proposition to clients. The TEI methodology helps companies demonstrate, justify, and realize the tangible value of business and technology initiatives to both senior management and other key stakeholders.

¹The financial results calculated in the Benefits and Costs sections can be used to determine the return on investment (ROI), net present value (NPV), and payback period for the composite organization’s investment. Forrester assumes a yearly discount rate of 10% for this analysis. 

These risk-adjusted ROI, NPV, and payback period values are determined by applying risk-adjustment factors to the unadjusted results in each Benefit and Cost section. 

The initial investment column contains costs incurred at “time 0” or at the beginning of Year 1 that are not discounted. All other cash flows are discounted using the discount rate at the end of the year. Present value (PV) calculations are calculated for each total cost and benefit estimate. NPV calculations in the summary tables are the sum of the initial investment and the discounted cash flows in each year. Sums and present value calculations of the Total Benefits, Total Costs, and Cash Flow tables may not exactly add up, as some rounding may occur. 

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Source: Microsoft Security