According to Microsoft's 2024 report¹, cybersecurity threats have surged tenfold over the past year. This increase isn't just in volume but also in sophistication. Adversaries continually evolve their cyberattack strategies, using advanced techniques and targeting multiple workloads to cause more significant damage.

Meanwhile, security teams struggle with outdated technology and fragmented tools, leading to inefficiencies and security gaps. Managing security requires processing vast amounts of data, forcing many customers to choose between comprehensive coverage and budget constraints, contributing to burnout among security professionals. They strive to keep up with the rapidly evolving threat landscape but struggle with current solutions, leading to understaffing and reduced organisational security.

These challenges are extremely difficult to overcome without a modern SIEM solution like Microsoft Sentinel.

What is SIEM?

Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) is a tool designed to help organisations identify, analyse, and respond to security threats in real time. SIEM systems gather and consolidate data from multiple sources within an organisation’s IT infrastructure, including servers, applications, and network devices. This collected data is then examined to detect potential security incidents and vulnerabilities.

What is Microsoft Sentinel?

Microsoft Sentinel is a cloud-native SIEM solution that allows organisations to collect, analyse, and respond to security threats across their entire IT infrastructure by gathering data from various sources, utilising AI to detect anomalies, and providing tools for investigation and automated response capabilities. It enables an organisation’s security operations centre (SOC or SecOps) to keep up with the evolving threat landscape by empowering them to:

1. Catch emerging threats faster. Generic detections that require heavy tuning are not enough as they put too much burden on the SOC teams and do not adapt to the quickly evolving threats fast enough.
2. Protect everything with a single pane of glass to drive efficiency, allowing SecOps to connect and bring all the relevant data for security from all their workloads, be it applications, infrastructure, cloud, etc.
3. Scale security coverage to eliminate the trade-off organisations must make between efficient security coverage and keeping on budget.

What does Microsoft Sentinel do?

1. Collecting data. Sentinel gathers data from various sources, including users, devices, applications, and infrastructure, both on-premises and across multiple clouds.
2. Detecting threats. It uses advanced analytics and threat intelligence to identify security threats and minimise false positives.
3. Investigating threats. It leverages AI to investigate threats and hunt for suspicious activities, providing deep insights and contextual information.
4. Responding to threats. Sentinel offers built-in orchestration and automation to respond to incidents quickly and efficiently.

What are its key features and benefits?

1. Enabling ‘no blind spots’. Sentinel collects data from all users, devices, applications, and infrastructure, providing SecOps with comprehensive visibility into an organisation’s entire digital estate.
   
   
2. Automated threat response. Sentinel allows SecOps to automate and orchestrate the response to security incidents, performing various actions such as blocking IP addresses, isolating compromised devices, notifying security teams via Microsoft Teams or email, and enriching incident data with additional context from threat intelligence sources. This can help streamline and accelerate the incident response process, ensuring that threats are addressed promptly and efficiently.
   
   
3. Hundreds of connectors. With over 350 connectors available out of the box, SecOps can configure content discovery in several clicks to get them up to speed and running quickly. Microsoft Sentinel’s content hub, now with generative AI-enhanced search, makes it easier to find what you are looking for. Using natural language will point you to the exact solution or connector you need.
   
   Its codeless connectors allow content discovery of unique or proprietary data sources, which can be configured within several hours, and no programming is required.
   
   
4. Analytics Logs provide SecOps with the most robust detection and unlimited querying capabilities. The primary log type contains critical security values for real-time monitoring, alerts, and analytics, such as EDR or antivirus logs, authentication logs, and threat intelligence.
   
   
5. Auxiliary Logs enable SecOps to retain, ingest, investigate, and hunt over high-volume verbose data using synchronous and asynchronous queries, depending on the scale of the data you are reasoning over. It is explicitly designed for verbose logs (such as NetFlow logs, SSL certificate logs, firewall logs, and proxy logs) that don’t require immediate analysis but still need to be retained for future reference. This new plan offers an inexpensive solution for managing and consuming these logs without compromising capabilities.
   
   Both Analytics and Auxiliary Log tiers can be stored in long-term retention, which Microsoft recently enhanced to support up to 12 years of retention. This enables organisations to store data for longer periods of time for compliance or regulatory reasons and even inexpensively hunt over years of security data.
   
   
6. Proactively detect threats. Summary Rules allow SecOps to proactively detect threats over the data by automatically sifting through the high-volume verbose logs, aggregating only the relevant information, and moving it to the Analytics Log tier, where you can benefit from Sentinel's detection capabilities. This enables SecOps to expand your organisation's security coverage without inflating costs.

7. SOC optimisation automatically offers tailored guidance based on the data you ingest, the current product configuration, and your organisation’s risk profile, surfacing recommendations containing a full view of the impact and guidance on what to do next. SecOps benefits from SOC optimisation by:

8. 1. Automatically generating recommendations when there is an opportunity to stay more secure by tracking the MITRE attack techniques to which your environment may be vulnerable.
   2. Driving more value by identifying logs you already ingest, which can be leveraged better and more comprehensively for threat detection or hunting.
   3. Helping you manage costs by highlighting logs that can be stored in a cheaper tier if, for example, they're not being utilised often.
      
      
9. Microsoft research. Sentinel leverages the world’s largest threat intelligence store to enable you to get ahead of adversaries. Microsoft’s vast portfolio of cloud infrastructure, productivity applications, and operating systems all the way down to gaming, in addition to its security portfolio, generates an unprecedented 78 trillion signals daily that are reasoned over by AI and experts in Microsoft Threat Research to curate and maintain the most comprehensive and accurate threat actor profiles.
   
   
10. Seamlessly integrate with Microsoft tools. Microsoft’s unified SecOps platform brings all the threat protection products into a single experience—SIEM, XDR, multi-cloud security, and exposure management—all grounded in vast threat intelligence and cutting-edge AI to provide unparalleled security and efficiency. The unified SecOps platform eliminates the need to connect the different Microsoft security products because they are part of a single platform that offers native zero-click integration between Microsoft tools.

Who benefits from Microsoft Sentinel?

Microsoft Sentinel benefits many organisations, particularly:

1. Large enterprises with vast amounts of data and complex IT environments.
2. Organisations with stringent regulatory requirements like financial institutions, hospitals, healthcare, education, or government agencies.
3. Organisations requiring 24x7 monitoring and action on cyber threats.
4. SecOps that want to drive efficiency by using a single solution for protecting their organisation’s entire digital estate.

Elevate your security defences with Microsoft Sentinel

Microsoft Sentinel is a proven SIEM solution for streamlining threat detection, bolstering incident response, and complying with regulatory standards. New threats are constantly emerging, but with Microsoft Sentinel, you can rest easy and be one step ahead of the dangers.

Professional Advantage has years of experience securing businesses, large or small. Whether you need an assessment or are ready to deploy Microsoft Sentinel, our cyber security consultants are here to help. Contact us today to discover how we can help you transform your organisation’s SOC.

[1] Innovating security operations with Microsoft Sentinel, Microsoft Events 2024