Praxis Navigator + Microsoft Defender

Microsoft Defender + Praxis Navigator: Measure Security Behavior

Microsoft Defender protects your Microsoft 365 environment from threats. Praxis Navigator measures whether your people are actually working securely inside it. Together, they give you both threat protection and behavioral evidence.

Microsoft Defender: Built-In Protection for Microsoft 365

Microsoft Defender is Microsoft's integrated security suite, protecting email, endpoints, identities, and cloud applications across the Microsoft 365 ecosystem. Included in many Microsoft 365 business and enterprise plans, Defender is often the first layer of security protection organizations have in place.

What Microsoft Defender delivers:

  • Defender for Office 365 — Protection against phishing, malware, business email compromise, and malicious URLs/attachments across Exchange Online, Teams, SharePoint, and OneDrive. Safe Links, Safe Attachments, and anti-impersonation policies protect users in real time
  • Defender for Endpoint — Endpoint detection and response (EDR), attack surface reduction, and automated investigation and remediation across devices
  • Defender for Identity — Detection of identity-based threats, compromised accounts, and suspicious authentication activity across Active Directory and Entra ID
  • Defender for Cloud Apps — Cloud access security broker (CASB) providing visibility and control over SaaS application usage, shadow IT discovery, and data governance
  • Microsoft Defender XDR — Unified cross-domain detection and response that correlates signals across email, endpoints, identities, and cloud apps into a single incident view
  • Attack Simulation Training — Built-in phishing simulation and training capabilities in Defender for Office 365 Plan 2, including AI-powered simulation recommendations
  • Security Copilot — AI-powered security assistant for threat investigation, incident triage, and response acceleration (E5 plans)

Microsoft Defender is particularly well-suited for organizations already invested in the Microsoft 365 ecosystem that want integrated, native security protection without adding third-party tools to their stack.

Threat Protection ≠ Behavioral Measurement

Microsoft Defender is one of the most capable security platforms available — especially for organizations already running Microsoft 365. But Defender is built to protect, detect, and respond. It's not built to measure how your workforce behaves:

Microsoft Defender can tell you:

  • Which threats were blocked at the email gateway
  • Which devices have vulnerabilities or security misconfigurations
  • Which users triggered identity-based alerts or suspicious authentication events
  • How simulated phishing campaigns performed (Plan 2)
  • Which incidents occurred and how they were investigated and resolved
  • What shadow IT applications are in use across the organization

Microsoft Defender can't tell you:

  • How employees handle file sharing across SharePoint and OneDrive as a behavioral pattern over time
  • Whether collaboration behaviors in Teams are becoming more or less secure week over week
  • How MFA adoption and identity hygiene are trending as measurable behaviors, not just policy compliance
  • Whether a training rollout, policy change, or awareness campaign produced measurable behavioral improvement
  • What your organization's security culture looks like as a quantified metric you can track and report on

Defender tells you about threats and incidents. It answers "what happened?" and "what was stopped?" Praxis Navigator answers a different question: "how is the workforce behaving — and is that improving?"

See What Defender Can't Show You

Praxis Navigator connects to your Microsoft 365 environment via the Graph API and monitors actual employee security behaviors across five data sources: Exchange Online, SharePoint, OneDrive, Teams, and Entra ID.

Instead of measuring threats and incidents, Praxis Navigator measures what employees do — every day, in their normal work.

What Praxis Navigator shows you:

Behavioral baselines — How your employees handle security before any intervention, calculated from historic Microsoft 365 data available from day one
20+ behavior indicators — Real security behaviors across email, file sharing, collaboration, and identity management
Intervention tagging — Tag when you roll out a new Defender policy, update conditional access rules, launch an awareness campaign, or make any other change
Before/after comparison — Automatic behavioral comparison showing whether each intervention produced measurable change
Security culture scoring — Quantified culture maturity metrics based on the Security Culture Framework adopted by ENISA
Stakeholder reports — Board-ready evidence that your security investments are working

Setup takes 15 minutes. No agents, no endpoint software, no data export. You see historic behavioral data from day one — no waiting months to build a baseline.

Microsoft Defender + Praxis Navigator: The Complete Picture

Enterprise security needs two things: technology that protects the environment and visibility into how people behave within it. Microsoft Defender covers the first. Praxis Navigator provides the second.

Microsoft Defender Praxis Navigator
Primary function Threat protection, detection, and response across email, endpoints, identity, and cloud apps Security behavior monitoring
What it measures Threats blocked, incidents detected, vulnerabilities found, simulation results Actual daily security behaviors in Microsoft 365
Data source Email gateway, endpoint telemetry, identity signals, cloud app activity, threat intelligence Microsoft 365 Graph API (Exchange, SharePoint, OneDrive, Teams, Entra ID)
Key question answered "What threats were stopped and what incidents occurred?" "Are employees behaving more securely in their daily work?"
Time to value Immediate (included in M365 plans) Historic behavioral data visible within 15 minutes of connecting M365
Best for Protecting the environment, detecting and responding to threats, enforcing security policies Proving that security investments change behavior, measuring culture, identifying behavioral risk patterns

The workflow:

1

Baseline

Connect Praxis Navigator to Microsoft 365 and see your current behavioral baseline

2

Protect

Microsoft Defender blocks threats, enforces policies, and detects incidents

3

Tag

Tag Defender policy changes, conditional access updates, simulation campaigns, or any other intervention in Praxis Navigator

4

Compare

See automatic before/during/after behavioral comparison

5

Prove

Generate stakeholder reports showing whether your security program is producing measurable behavior change

This is the loop that turns a security deployment from "configured and running" into "demonstrably changing behavior": Baseline → Intervene → Compare → Prove.

Feature Comparison

Capability Defender Praxis Together
Email threat protection (Safe Links, Safe Attachments) ✓ — Defender blocks threats
Endpoint detection and response ✓ — Defender protects devices
Identity threat detection ✓ — Defender monitors identity threats
Cloud app security (CASB) ✓ — Defender governs cloud apps
Attack simulation training (Plan 2) ✓ — Defender tests phishing awareness
Automated investigation and response ✓ — Defender remediates incidents
Security Copilot (E5) ✓ — Defender accelerates investigation
Unified XDR incident view ✓ — Defender correlates signals
Microsoft 365 behavior monitoring — ✓ Praxis measures real daily behavior
Behavioral baseline from historic data — ✓ Praxis provides instant baseline
Intervention impact measurement — ✓ Praxis proves what worked
Security culture scoring — ✓ Praxis quantifies culture
Stakeholder/board reporting on behavioral change — ✓ Praxis generates evidence
GDPR compliance ✓ ✓ Both compliant
Setup time Included in M365 plans 15 minutes Praxis operational alongside existing Defender deployment

Legend: ✓ = Core capability | — = Not the platform's focus

This comparison reflects each platform's primary purpose. Microsoft Defender is a threat protection and detection platform; Praxis Navigator is a behavior monitoring platform. They serve different functions in a security program.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Praxis Navigator a replacement for Microsoft Defender?
No. Praxis Navigator does not provide threat protection, endpoint security, email filtering, identity detection, or incident response. It monitors actual employee security behaviors in Microsoft 365. Organizations use Praxis Navigator alongside Microsoft Defender to add a behavioral measurement layer — Defender protects the environment, Praxis Navigator measures the people.
We already have Defender. Isn't our Microsoft 365 environment already monitored?
Defender monitors for threats, vulnerabilities, and incidents. It answers "what threats are targeting us?" and "what needs remediation?" Praxis Navigator monitors something different: behavioral patterns. It answers "are employees sharing files securely?", "is MFA adoption improving?", "did that policy change actually shift how people work?" Defender watches for bad things happening. Praxis Navigator watches how people behave every day — whether or not a threat is present.
Defender for Office 365 Plan 2 includes Attack Simulation Training. Isn't that enough?
Attack Simulation Training is a useful tool for testing phishing awareness. But simulation results only tell you whether employees recognized a simulated phish — they don't tell you whether employees are handling real email, files, and collaboration more securely day-to-day. Praxis Navigator measures those real-world behaviors across the full Microsoft 365 environment, not just responses to simulated scenarios.
Doesn't Defender already use the same Microsoft 365 data?
Defender uses Microsoft 365 signals to detect threats and incidents — malicious emails, suspicious sign-ins, compromised accounts, risky app usage. Praxis Navigator uses Microsoft 365 data via the Graph API to measure behavioral patterns — how employees handle file sharing, email, collaboration, and identity management as ongoing behaviors. Same underlying environment, completely different lens. Defender looks for threats. Praxis looks for behavior.
How does Praxis Navigator get behavioral data?
Praxis Navigator connects to Microsoft 365 via the Graph API with read-only access. It monitors security-relevant behaviors across Exchange Online, SharePoint, OneDrive, Teams, and Entra ID. No data is exported or stored outside your environment — Praxis uses a zero-storage architecture for maximum data privacy.
How quickly can I see results?
Within 15 minutes of connecting your Microsoft 365 tenant, you'll see your first Employee Pulse with behavioral data. Because Microsoft retains historic activity data, you get a behavioral baseline from day one — no need to wait weeks or months to start measuring.
What does Praxis Navigator cost if we're already paying for Microsoft Defender?
Microsoft Defender is included in many Microsoft 365 plans (Business Premium, E3, E5) at no additional standalone cost. Praxis Navigator pricing starts at €199/month for up to 100 employees (Core plan), with per-employee pricing for larger organizations. Since the platforms serve entirely different functions — Defender for protection, Praxis Navigator for behavioral measurement — they don't overlap in budget or purpose.
Does Praxis Navigator work alongside third-party security tools too?
Yes. Praxis Navigator is platform-agnostic. While it reads data from Microsoft 365, the interventions you tag can come from any source — Defender policy changes, third-party training platforms like KnowBe4 or MetaCompliance, internal awareness campaigns, or anything else. Praxis Navigator measures the behavioral impact regardless of what tool or process triggered the change.
Who built Praxis Navigator?
Praxis Navigator is built by Praxis Security Labs, founded by Kai Roer. Roer is the author of Build a Security Culture and co-author of The Security Culture Playbook (Wiley). He created the Security Culture Framework, which has been adopted by ENISA and is used by organizations worldwide to measure and improve security culture.

Already Running Microsoft Defender?

Your environment is protected. Now measure the people inside it.

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