Microsoft Sentinel

A few weeks ago, I released an article about why you should consider Microsoft for your IT Security. I talked about how Microsoft’s solution has matured and how it can help organisations do more with less. Now I would like to talk about what that solution could look like as an end-to-end suite of tools that can help protect your identities, endpoints, data, applications, and infrastructure.

To do this, I aim to release a series of articles that introduce each pillar of the Microsoft Security Suite, with an overview of its capabilities, features and what role it performs in the solution.

The Microsoft Security suite of products contains the following:

• Microsoft Defender 365 – Defend across the Attack Chain to protect against external threats.
• Microsoft Sentinel – Collect, analyse, and respond to alerts and incidents picked up by your security tools, such as Defender, Entra and Purview.
• Microsoft Entra – Identity and Access Management platform that can protect your identities and access to your corporate resources.
• Microsoft Intune – Endpoint Management platform that manages and secures all endpoints in your estate.
• Microsoft Purview – Secure your sensitive data and protect against internal threats.
• Microsoft Priva – Manage the risks of handling sensitive information within Microsoft 365.

The second pillar is Microsoft Sentinel. My colleague Hasseb Ahmad has written a post to introduce and explain the benefits:

Discover the Power of Microsoft Sentinel for Cloud-Native Security

As cyberthreats grow in frequency and impact, modern organisations need security solutions built for the cloud era. Microsoft Sentinel fulfils this need as an intelligent security information and event management (SIEM) and security orchestration automated response (SOAR) platform purpose-built for the cloud.

As organisations adopt hybrid environments across on-premises and multi-cloud infrastructures, security teams need visibility, analytics, and automation that seamlessly span this diverse landscape. Microsoft Sentinel provides this through its flexible, cloud-native architecture.

Powered by trillions of Microsoft threat signals, advanced AI, and Microsoft cybersecurity experts, Sentinel enables proactive, efficient security operations. The platform ingests petabytes of data across dispersed sources, leveraging machine learning to detect emerging threats missed by other solutions.

Sentinel’s contextual dashboards, automated playbooks, and native integrations with Microsoft security solutions allow exhausted security teams to move from reactive firefighting to proactive threat hunting and response.

By combining a powerful cloud-based SIEM with AI-driven SOAR in one solution, Microsoft Sentinel is designed to help modern security teams be more pre-emptive, collaborative, and resilient. Sentinel moves organisations toward risk-adaptive cybersecurity models that keep pace with today’s threat landscape.

Unlocking the Full Potential of Your Security Data with Microsoft Sentinel’s Robust Capabilities

Microsoft Sentinel provides a powerful set of capabilities to ingest, analyse, hunt, investigate, and respond to threats across massive volumes of security data from diverse sources.

Sentinel can ingest terabytes of log data daily from on-premises, multi-cloud (other Azure Tenants, AWS, and G-Suite), and hybrid environments, retaining this information for up to 18 months. This empowers your security team with long-term access to critical historical data for threat hunting, investigations, and compliance needs.

Advanced analytics and AI-driven hunting tools deeply mine this massive dataset to proactively identify emerging threats and suspicious activities that would likely be missed through manual review alone. Customisable queries and notebooks allow your hunters to leverage Sentinel’s resources to efficiently uncover hidden risks.

When incidents do occur, Sentinel provides access to interactive dashboards that visually summarise the attack sequence, enabling swift triage. Contextual graphs and centralised timelines equip analysts to thoroughly investigate the scope of impact through visual drilldowns into granular events.

Playbooks built into Sentinel then allow your team to automatically initiate responses like isolating compromised assets, blocking malicious IP addresses, disabling breached user accounts, or sending notifications to relevant stakeholders. Step-by-step runbooks provide guidance to enact the appropriate response for detected threats.

Throughout the ingestion, hunting, investigation and response workflows, Microsoft experts and a vibrant Sentinel community forum offer guidance, best practices, and assistance. APIs and PowerShell cmdlets enable programmatic management and custom integrations aligned to your organisational needs.

With this combination of flexible deployment, massive retention, advanced analytics, automation capabilities, and community support, Microsoft Sentinel enables your team to maximise the value of your security data to detect more threats faster and respond more effectively.

Achieve Truly Holistic Security and Compliance Coverage with Microsoft Sentinel

Microsoft Sentinel enables organisations to achieve truly holistic security and compliance by leveraging its tight integration across Microsoft’s end-to-end security solutions and compliance capabilities.

As a core part of the Microsoft security portfolio, Sentinel can seamlessly ingest and correlate insights from solutions like Microsoft 365 Defender, Azure Firewall, Microsft Entra ID Protection, Microsfot Defender for Cloud Apps, and more. This provides your team with an integrated view of threats and risks spanning endpoints, identities, data, cloud apps, and infrastructure.

By consolidating and connecting threat intelligence across this ecosystem of security solutions through a single Sentinel workspace, your organisation benefits from maximized threat visibility, minimized blind spots, and reduced complexity for analysts.

Sentinel further strengthens compliance coverage by interoperating with Microsoft compliance solutions like Microsoft Purview Information Protection, Communication Compliance, and Insider Risk Management. This enables unified policies, detections, investigations, and protections that bridge across both security and compliance domains.

Native integrations with Power BI and Power Automate also allow you to build dashboards, reports, and workflows that provide visibility and drive actions across the broader organisation beyond just the security team.

Realise the Multi-fold Benefits of Adopting the Cloud-Native Microsoft Sentinel Platform

As an intrinsically cloud native SIEM and SOAR solution, Microsoft Sentinel delivers compelling benefits that allow security teams to transform their operations, analytics, and response capabilities.

By leveraging the elastic scalability of the cloud, Sentinel eliminates the constraints of on-premises SIEM solutions. Your team can ingest growing volumes of diverse data across on-premises, cloud, and hybrid environments without limits on scale or costs imposed by hardware capacity.

The cloud-hosted architecture also provides inherent advantages like automated failover and quicker disaster recovery that remove points of failure. Your team gains access to limitless analytics compute for threat hunting across petabytes of historical data.

Sentinel’s extensive gallery of pre-built connectors and single-click integration with Microsoft solutions allows your team to get up and running quickly. The platform immediately starts aggregating critical security data from across your technology ecosystem.

This includes tapping into Microsoft’s trillions of threat signals and security research to feed real-time threat intelligence into Sentinel. Advanced AI and machine learning aid the detection of hidden threats across the deluge of data.

While providing an extensive set of out-of-the-box capabilities, Sentinel also offers unparalleled customisability to tailor to your organisation’s needs. Your team can create custom detections, hunting queries, notebooks, and response playbooks aligned to your environment and use cases.

Native integration with automation solutions like Microsoft Power Automate enables your team to instantly trigger response actions like ticketing, notifications, quarantines, and more when threats arise.

All this is delivered at a fraction of the cost of traditional SIEM solutions through a pay-as-you-go model based only on your log volume. The savings realised allow you to invest in improving capabilities rather than maintaining infrastructure.

With its cloud-native architecture, rapid time-to-value, and closed-loop analytics and response workflows, Microsoft Sentinel enables security teams to realise immediate and lasting benefits from day one.

Conclusion: Proactive Cloud Security with Microsoft Sentinel

With its rapid time-to-value, flexible deployment options, and tight integration with Microsoft’s security portfolio, Sentinel enables modern organisations to transform their security operations. Backed by Microsoft’s cloud scale, AI, and threat intelligence, Microsoft Sentinel allows security teams to detect threats faster, investigate more thoroughly, and respond more automatically.

Frequently Asked Questions About Microsoft Sentinel

What kind of data can Microsoft Sentinel ingest?

Microsoft Sentinel can ingest terabytes of data per day from diverse sources including logs from Microsoft solutions, endpoints, network, apps, IoT devices, and more. Any log or event feed in a supported format can be connected.

How is Microsoft Sentinel priced?

Microsoft Sentinel is priced based on data ingestion volume through a transparent pay-as-you-go model starting at $2.30 or £1.88 per GB per month approximately. All platform capabilities are included with no additional charges.

What are some key use cases for Microsoft Sentinel?

Key uses cases span threat detection, threat hunting, incident investigation and response. The platform delivers value for security teams in organisations of all sizes across industries.

What skills do I need to get value from Microsoft Sentinel?

Sentinel is designed for security analysts of all skill levels. Drag-and-drop query builders require no coding. Playbooks also use intuitive graphical interfaces. Experienced SOC teams can further customise with KQL, PowerShell, and API integrations.

How does Microsoft Sentinel compare to other SIEM solutions?

As a cloud-native SIEM, Microsoft Sentinel eliminates SIEM infrastructure costs with usage-based pricing. Natively integrated AI and automation capabilities further enhance Sentinel’s value proposition against on-premises SIEMs.

Does Microsoft Sentinel meet regulatory compliance needs?

Yes, Microsoft Sentinel helps organisations meet compliance requirements for log retention duration, cross-system visibility, threat detection, and incident response through its extended retention, unified insights, advanced analytics, and automation capabilities.