Microsoft Defender delivered 242% return on investment over three years

The Forrester TEI study found that organisations using Microsoft Defender delivered a 242% return on investment over three years, with a net present value of $12.6 million. It shows Defender helps consolidate tools, reduce licensing overhead, and streamline operations, freeing up budget and staff time.

The study also highlights significantly faster cyberthreat remediation, with mean time to acknowledge dropping from 30 minutes to 15 minutes and mean time to resolve reducing from up to three hours to less than one hour in many cases. In total, Defender delivers about $17.8 million in benefits to the business over three years, including up to $12 million in reduced costs from vendor consolidation, $2.4 million in savings from SecOps optimisation, and $2.8 million in reduced cost of material breaches.

It also notes that organisations paid back their initial investment in less than six months, on average. Defender is described as enabling SecOps teams to remediate threats faster, thanks to built‑in automation, AI‑powered threat detection and response, and close integration with Microsoft Sentinel for coordinated defence. According to the Forrester TEI study, Defender helps unify security across multicloud and hybrid environments while reducing alert fatigue and strengthening security and compliance postures.