Microsoft Sentinel Reviews

Our use case for Microsoft Sentinel is having a more holistic view by having all security events in one place.

We were likely the first partner in New Zealand. We've been able to manage the path forward early on and have helped small businesses adopt a really scalable solution.

It's one of the key areas we've focused on. We love the ability of having reliable threat intelligence.

Microsoft Sentinel's ability to integrate with other Microsoft products has been beneficial to our team's operations. We like the best of ecosystem versus the best of breed approach. We can have everyone have the same skillsets and not have individuals specialized. It's much more holistic. 

The threat detection has been useful. We like having everything managed by one solution. It simplifies everything. 

The automation feature helps with efficiency, specifically around security. 

It has good integration with other security features. It's a great product. The ease of use and ease of management are great. 

It's allowing us to have one Microsoft security pane of glass.

Microsoft Sentinel has improved cost efficiency, which is one of the key areas we're able to win business against the ability to have threat intelligence.

To improve Microsoft Sentinel specifically, giving us different functionality to handle tasks would be really amazing. I don't have any issues with what's currently available.

It would be nice to be able to leverage more AI to handle more data and recovery aspects in the future. 

I've used the solution for the last five years. 

Regarding the stability of Microsoft Sentinel, there haven't been any significant issues. There may have been one or two minor incidents over time, yet nothing substantial.

The scalability is very good. Our largest customer has 55,000 seats. Others have 100 to 200 seats. 

We've had a good experience with Microsoft support.

We decided early on we weren't going to partner with a lot of vendors. We liked what Microsoft was going to do with a best-of-ecosystem approach instead of best of breed. 

The initial setup is pretty easy. 

I have definitely seen a return on investment in the past five years. We attribute our growth to Sentinel. It became a product that everyone suddenly wanted. 

My experience with the pricing setup has been positive.

There were a couple of other products available, however, we were quite certain we were going to go with Microsoft Sentinel.

The reason why having a best-of-ecosystem is crucial for our customers is that it eliminates the need to set up multiple different products, so it was really attractive to have everything in one place.

I'd rate the solution ten out of ten. 

We use Sentinel for our SOC operations. We set up analytics rules and SOAR playbooks. Sentinel covers our entire security operation. It is deployed across multiple locations and covers around 4,000 users.

Sentinel gives us alerts, identifies vulnerabilities, and helps us remediate issues. Some of it is automated, but we also do manual remediation through the ticketing process. We have integrated Sentinel with ServiceNow, so the alerts are routed to the engineers.

Sentinel has reduced our mean time to resolution, one of our KPIs, by about 30 to 40 percent and enabled us to identify vulnerabilities faster. The co-pilot capability saves us a lot of time, too. We're also doing mapping with the MITRE framework, improving our MITRE coverage. We started to see results after the initial deployment and configuration. It took about two or three months. It's an ongoing process, but we realized the benefits within three months. 

The solution correlates signals from native and third-party sources into a single incident. Before implementing Sentinel, we used multiple tools to investigate and remedy vulnerabilities. Having that single pane of glass has significantly increased the efficiency.

Sentinel has improved our overall visibility. We get data about user behavior and correlate it. It also gives us alerts about network vulnerabilities. Having a single pane of glass and one consolidated security tool allows us to capture multiple layers, from the endpoints to the servers. One solution gives us visibility into all the layers. 

The SOAR playbooks are Sentinel's most valuable feature. It gives you a unified toolset for detecting, investigating, and responding to incidents. That's what clearly differentiates Sentinels from its competitors. It's cloud-native, offering end-to-end coverage with more than 120 connectors. All types of data logs can be poured into the system so analysis can happen. That end-to-end visibility gives it the advantage.

Sentinel's AI and automation capabilities make our SOC team's job easy. When logs come into Sentinel, the AI engine analyzes, contextualizes, and correlates them. The AI is correlating the data from multiple log sources and giving us alerts. We depend on that. We also perform automated remediation based on our SOAR playbooks. 

I would like Sentinel to have more out-of-the-box analytics rules. There are already more than 400 rules, but they could add more industry-specific ones. For example, you could have sets of out-of-the-box rules for banking, financial sector, insurance, automotive, etc., so it's easier for people to use it out of the box. Structuring the rules according to industry might help us. 

They could also add some more connectors. Sentinel has 120 connectors, including most of the essential data ones, but they could add some more legacy connectors.

I have used Microsoft Sentinel for three years.

Our SOC team relies on Sentinel from end to end, and it has been quite stable. It's always up, and we've never had any issues with the connectors.

Scalability isn't a problem because we have an Azure environment, and Sentinel is native.

I rate Microsoft support nine out of 10. They resolve our tickets within an acceptable time frame. That is pretty much okay for us.

Positive

Initially, we used Splunk, but I've mostly worked on Sentinel at this company. It was a company decision. Splunk works well in an on-premise or legacy environment, but our entire digital estate shifted to the cloud, so it makes more sense to move to Microsoft Sentinel because we moved to Azure.

Our deployment went smoothly. We spent about three or four months setting up the entire thing, and it all went according to plan without any undue complications. About three months of that was the configuration phase, and we had a transitional month before starting operations. 

The implementation steps included enabling Sentinel, setting up Log Analytics Workspace, and connecting the data connectors. After that, the logs started flowing in. Next, we created the analytic rules and remediation use cases. The deployment team included seven full-time staff. After deployment, Sentinel requires some ongoing maintenance when we add new analytics rules or log sources. We have one engineer responsible for that.

We see an ROI. Our efficiency increased once we created the initial set of analytics rules and SOAR automation, and we review our automation use cases every six months to find more ways to save money. It comes out to roughly a 10 percent return annually on a three-year contract.

I am not involved on the financial side, but from an enterprise-wide use perspective, I think the price is good enough. We have bundled pricing with Azure Monitor Log Analytics. We would be using Log Analytics Workspace even if we didn't have Sentinel, and we would need to pay a separate license for IBM QRadar or Splunk. It optimizes costs when we use both in our digital estate. 

We considered IBM QRadar. 

I rate Microsoft Sentinel eight out of 10. It's a plug-and-play solution, so you can start seeing benefits quickly using the out-of-the-box analytics rules and use cases. Of course, you need more time to create custom use cases and playbooks, but it's simple to get started. It might be challenging to migrate from a legacy system because you may have trouble connecting to the old data, but this is the best tool for a greenfield deployment. 

We use Microsoft Sentinel for centralized log aggregation and security management. Our environment uses a variety of security products to strengthen its security. This has made it difficult for the SOC team to analyze logs from different consoles and products. To ease the team's workload and help them prioritize events and attacks, we decided to acquire a centralized console. We chose Sentinel because it provides a centralized console where we can ingest and analyze logs. The logs that Sentinel analyzes add value.

Sentinel's threat visibility is good. It has analytics and threat detection capabilities that we can add to our own playbooks. We can use the predefined log analytics to create our own custom rules. Using these custom rules with predefined logs further improves our environment's security posture.

Sentinel helps us prioritize threats across our enterprise. When we have a lot of alerts and incidents, it is better to understand if they are false positives, because the SOC team sometimes wastes time on false positives, which are not very relevant. We must prioritize positive alerts, which should be given the highest priority. In order to solve this problem.

The manufacturing environment I work in is not very critical, so a simple attack is unlikely to have a major impact on the business. However, data is important in any business, and a data breach can damage our reputation. Therefore, it is important to have a good security posture to avoid threats. Threats and attacks can happen even with the highest level of security. Therefore, we look for products that can give us visibility into our environment and help us to proactively solve problems. Microsoft proactively identifies threats and informs its peers and partners. This allows us to take action to assess the impact of these threats on our environment. By taking proactive measures, we can prevent threats from harming our environment.

We also use Microsoft Defender for Cloud and Microsoft Defender for Identity. We have integrated these solutions with Microsoft Sentinel, and their logs are ingested by Sentinel. We do not incur any costs for ingesting Office 365 logs because Microsoft provides a free login exchange for Microsoft Office 365 and, I believe, for Defender as well into our Sentinel for analysis.

Our Microsoft products work seamlessly together to provide coordinated detection and response in our environment. We use a lot of Microsoft products, and it is best to use them in the same environment. This makes integration and collaboration easier. We also have licensing agreements that give us discounts when we use multiple products together. For example, we use Microsoft 365, OneDrive, and security products. We are also migrating our workloads to Azure. We have already migrated many workloads to Azure, and we are in the process of migrating the remaining workloads. We are heavily dependent on Microsoft, so we believe it is best to use one cloud provider. This makes it easier to manage different services. Additionally, Microsoft provides us with a lot of help and benefits, which can save us money. Cost is one of the factors that businesses consider, and IT is a major investment for businesses. Even though our business is not in the IT industry, IT plays a vital role in driving the business forward. Therefore, our organization needs to ensure that their IT investments are having a positive impact.

The comprehensiveness of the threat protection provided by our Microsoft security products is good. They have a large number of predefined indicators of compromise and a comprehensive team that monitors threats around the world. We receive notifications and newsletters from Microsoft whenever a new threat emerges. When an organization does not have experts on its team, it is very difficult to identify zero-day vulnerabilities or attacks. This makes it difficult for them to identify and mitigate these threats. Microsoft, on the other hand, proactively identifies threats and informs its teams and partners so that they can mitigate or prevent them in their environments.

Sentinel allows us to ingest data from our entire IT ecosystem, including network devices, servers, endpoints, and firewalls. This is important because if we are not monitoring all of our devices, we cannot know what threats they are facing or what attacks they have already been subjected to. Sentinel scans every device in the environment because it is difficult to see how many devices are compromised by a threat when we have an inventory of thousands of devices. This is why we need a centralized console where we can ingest all of our important logs and correlate them to identify threats. We need to know when our environment has been attacked by zero-day vulnerabilities. If we see that two devices have been affected, we still do not know how many additional devices the attack has compromised. This can only be known if we have all of our logs in our console. Sentinel provides us with a valuable capability: we can simply identify the source, user, or affected machines, and Sentinel will tell us how many machines have already been compromised and how far the threat has spread. This information allows us to isolate or quarantine the affected machines so that they cannot access more of our environment or steal more data.

We can react and respond holistically from one place with Sentinel.

The best part of Sentinel is its built-in SOAR, user and entity behavior analytics, and threat intelligence capabilities, which collaborate with the SIEM. Other products typically sell these capabilities as separate products. When we automate tasks, we reduce the team's manual effort. Whenever we detect an attack or need to provide analytics, we generate a lot of events and alerts. If we don't correlate these events and automatically resolve them, repetitive tasks will have to be performed by team members. This is not an efficient use of resources. Repetitive tasks can be automated by writing scripts and putting them into the system. Sentinel correlates events and creates incidents for us. These incidents can be resolved by scripts, such as by informing users that their IDs have been compromised and they need to reset their passwords or their IDs will be blocked. This saves SOC time so that they can focus on more important tasks, such as detecting and responding to threats that are already impacting the environment. Sentinel's features help organizations reduce manual and repetitive effort.

Sentinel has helped our organization by providing seamless collection and correlation of all logs. It is important to correlate logs into alerts and then to incidents, as this prevents the team that receives the alerts from becoming overloaded. Sentinel's analytics capabilities are also beneficial, as they allow me to easily perform searches and analyses of incidents. I do not have to spend much effort to determine the source of an incident, its impact, or how far it has spread through our environment. Additionally, Sentinel's automation features, such as its playbooks, templates, and integrations, help us to reduce manual effort.

Automating routine tasks that help find high-value alerts reduces the cost and workload of our SOC team. We have created several automation use cases by discussing them with multiple stakeholders and analyzing how frequently we receive the same type of incident alerts. When we receive the same type of incident alerts, we can correlate them and create scripts or automate solutions to resolve them. This helps to reduce the team's workload and headaches. We have already incorporated this automation into our SOC processes. If an incident is created, it is automatically resolved without any user or machine interaction. If we receive an alert that the resolution failed, some team members investigate the cause, such as a missing or disabled user ID or a technical system issue.

Automation has reduced our manual tasks, saving us around 30 percent of our time so that we can focus on more important tasks.

Previously, when I joined the organization, they were using Splunk on-premises and other security tools, such as Trend Micro and Darktrace devices, to collect logs. The security operations center team had to log into each console to see the logs, investigate them, and determine how to mitigate the alerts. This process was slow and inefficient, especially in the event of a critical attack. Sentinel provides a centralized console for log collection and analysis which helps the SOC team respond to alerts more quickly and reduce the impact of threats.

Microsoft Sentinel helped us eliminate the need for multiple dashboards by providing a single XDR dashboard. They have data connectors that can integrate with different security tools because they partner with other security companies to provide us with the functionality we need to integrate into our environment. Microsoft is at its best when we can integrate with our peers and security companies that are bringing new features to improve our security posture. We can then integrate these features with Sentinel, benefit from them, and ingest our logs into Sentinel as well. We no longer need to log in to multiple security tools; we can simply go to Sentinel, view the incidents and alerts that are being generated, and take action.

The automation feature is valuable. There are many events that happen, and we require manual effort from our SOC team to mitigate each one. When we started automating tasks, it helped us to reduce the time it takes to react to attacks. Attacks may not be able to penetrate our environment as easily because of this. Therefore, I believe that Sentinel's automation is the best.

The integration is not that difficult. The configuration is simple, but the data connector documentation is lacking in useful information. If Microsoft improves the documentation, we will be able to see how to complete the integration from start to finish. In the past, we have encountered problems during the integration process because the documentation was incomplete. For example, we recently deployed Microsoft Defender for Identity with the help of our Active Directory team. Initially, they told us that only a few ports were required, but later they said that more ports were needed. Our environment did not allow these additional ports, and we were not aware of this requirement. This delayed the project and caused frustration for our team members. The customer also expected the project to be completed sooner, but unexpected firewall rules and undocumented configuration requirements prevented us from doing so. We had to open a case with Microsoft for assistance, and we were eventually able to resolve the issue.

The playbook is a bit difficult and could be improved. For those who do not have a deep understanding of playbooks or programming languages, it would be better to have extensive documentation and information available online. When I started working with Sentinel, there were times when we had to refer to the documentation to get information about the configuration or implementation steps. If we encountered errors in the implementation, we had to rely on the internet to figure out how to fix them. The information available online is not that comprehensive and does not cover specific maintenance tasks. If the documentation were improved a bit, and the playbook and automation were made easier to use, it would be a great benefit for technical users.

The AI and Machine Learning can be improved.

I have been using Microsoft Sentinel for over one year.

I have not seen any downtime with Sentinel. Sentinel is stable.

Sentinel is highly scalable. We can easily integrate more devices without any effort. Microsoft has a large data center, and they are always ready to add our devices.

Microsoft technical support has declined in quality over the years. I have only been using Sentinel for a year, but I have experience with Microsoft technical support through Azure and other Microsoft products. In the past, we were able to resolve tickets quickly with minimal back-and-forth. However, recently, the quality of support has degraded. We had a few critical cases that directly impacted production, but Microsoft did not assign their senior engineers to these cases. This wasted a lot of our time, as we had to explain the problems to multiple support representatives.

Neutral

We previously used Splunk SOAR in conjunction with Trend Micro and Darktrace to ingest logs, but we switched to Sentinel because it is more seamless.

The initial setup was successful. The configuration is not difficult. There were some challenging areas. However, we had access to free tools and a Microsoft contact who was always available to help us if we encountered any knowledge gaps. When setting up Sentinel for the first time in our environment, we always have an expert with us to assist with the setup, as not everyone has extensive knowledge of implementing the product. The expert is there to help us with the implementation if we get stuck on a step.

We decided which devices and types of alerts or information we wanted to ingest. At that time, we were not using automation. Our environment was in poor condition, and we were not utilizing the automated features of Sentinel. We only required the basic features of Sentinel, which were to ingest logs from the devices we were interested in, correlate them, analyze them, and integrate them with our service tools and alerting. For alerting, we used ServiceNow as our ticketing system. We would receive a ticket from ServiceNow for the SOC team, and then the SOC team would investigate and mitigate the issue. However, as time went on, the number of events increased, and the time it took to investigate them also increased. If we did not automate our environment, we would have to keep increasing the size of our SOC team or the number of SOC members to handle the workload. We could not meet the priority requirements. That is when we proposed using some of the automation features to help with low-priority alerts.

The deployment required three to four people. I joined the team for the implementation phase. So, by the time I joined, a lot of decisions had already been made, and a low-level plan had been decided upon. This was a low-level design and plan that we had to follow.

We had help from our Microsoft representative for the implementation. This contact was provided to us by Microsoft from the initial trial period all the way through the implementation.

Currently, given our use case, the cost of Sentinel is justified, but it is expensive. It is not so cheap that any organization can afford it. However, if an organization has a requirement for good security posture and can invest in security tools, they should have at least a decent budget to afford Sentinel. Sentinel does offer good features, such as SIEM, SOAR, and automation. However, we need to monitor our budget because ingestion can increase at any time and exceed our budget. We can set alerts to notify us if our budget is increasing significantly on a monthly or yearly basis. We can then control our budget by adjusting what we ingest. We can ingest any amount of data because there is a lot of data flowing in. However, some data is not necessary to ingest because it is not valuable to our analytics. Therefore, being careful about what data we ingest through Sentinel will help us stay within our budget.

We evaluated IBM QRadar and Splunk. Splunk has been in the market for a long time and is trusted by many organizations. While it was once a leader in its field, it does not seem to be keeping up with new features and automation. However, I am not aware of their current state of development.

We saw good features in both Splunk and QRadar, but QRadar had more features that were relevant to us. However, we are moving more towards the cloud. Previously, we had on-premises infrastructure, but we migrated to Azure when a new management team came in.

When we evaluated Microsoft Sentinel, we found that it had good functionality and met our requirements. We also liked that it is a cloud-based solution, so we do not have to worry about underlying hardware, features, operating systems, or management. We simply need to configure the application, which is relatively straightforward. We also do not need to make any upfront capital expenditures.

However, we need to consider the cost of ingesting logs into our environment. Microsoft charges for the amount of data ingested per day, so we need to keep our costs within budget.

QRadar is more complex and difficult to configure than Sentinel. Sentinel is easy to expand. If we add new devices to our environment, we can simply connect them directly to Sentinel. We do not need to worry about additional hardware or configuration.

Overall, Sentinel is a good choice for us because it is cloud-based, easy to configure, and scalable.

I would rate Microsoft Sentinel an eight out of ten.

Whether to use separate SIEM and SOAR solutions or Microsoft Sentinel depends on each organization's specific needs. All SIEM and SOAR tools are expensive because they provide essential security features. Organizations with the resources to pay for these features may choose to purchase Sentinel or another SIEM or SOAR solution. However, small and medium-sized businesses may not be able to afford these tools. Instead, they may choose to use a third-party service provider that already has a license for an SIEM solution such as QRadar or Sentinel.

Sentinel ingests data from over 1,500 endpoints, including technical devices, Windows devices, and Linux devices in our environment.

There is no maintenance required on our end. Microsoft is doing everything for us. We only have to have our configurations in place.

Before using Sentinel, organizations should clearly understand their use cases and requirements. They can take a trial of Sentinel and collaborate with Microsoft to create use cases that demonstrate the value of the investment. Because there are thousands of SIEM and SOAR tools on the market, organizations should evaluate multiple solutions to see what benefits they offer. They can then create use cases for each solution in their environment and take trials to implement them. Organizations should compare the solutions based on visibility, budget, and additional features. Anyone who is considering using a SIEM or SOAR solution should evaluate multiple solutions. Budgeting is very important.

My role thus far has been to integrate security log sources into the platform. This includes developing or troubleshooting some of the data connectors for different sources, such as web application firewall interfaces.

Sentinel is a SOAR platform. It represents the next generation beyond traditional SIM and SIEM platforms. Its powerful SOAR functionality orchestrates and automates responses to security events, eliminating the need for manual intervention. Instead of relying on human analysts to monitor events and react, Microsoft Sentinel leverages pre-defined automation rules. These rules correlate relevant events, generating a holistic understanding of the situation. Based on this analysis, automated responses are triggered, expediting the resolution process and eliminating any delays associated with manual identification and decision-making.

Sentinel provides us with a unified set of tools for detecting, investigating, and responding to incidents. This centralized approach offers both advantages and challenges. On the one hand, it grants us the flexibility to tailor Sentinel's capabilities to various situations. However, this flexibility demands a deep understanding of the environments and activities we're dealing with to effectively utilize Sentinel's features. While this presents a challenge, it also highlights the potential benefits of this unified approach. The unified view is important to me because I get all the information together in a single pane of glass instead of having to switch between multiple applications. The ability to consolidate all of that information into a single application or dashboard and to centrally evaluate its intelligence is a significant advantage.

Sentinel's ability to secure our cloud environment is of the utmost importance.

Sentinel Cloud Protection offers a collection of customizable content that caters to our specific requirements, demonstrating the solution's flexibility. The versatility of this content allows us to address a wide range of needs. However, in most instances, we need to adapt the material to suit our unique circumstances. While Sentinel Cloud Protection provides a comprehensive set of resources, including pre-written responses, it often requires tailoring to fit specific situations. This customization process is not a drawback but rather an essential aspect of effectively utilizing the tool. It's crucial to understand the nuances of each situation to apply the content appropriately. While I wouldn't consider this a negative aspect, I've encountered individuals who believe they can purchase a solution, implement it without modification, and achieve optimal results. However, such unrealistic expectations often lead to disappointment.

The Sentinel Content Hub is essentially the central repository where we acquire the content to build upon. Therefore, it serves as the starting point for our efforts. Some of the hunt rules have been quite beneficial in terms of what they provide from the Content Hub, allowing for a plug-and-play approach. This means we can immediately benefit from what's available without having to do any additional work. We can then build upon this foundation and extend the capabilities beyond what's provided by the Content Hub. The Content Hub itself is a valuable asset that gives us a head start in achieving our objectives.

Content Hub helps us centralize out-of-the-box SIM content. This has made our workload more manageable.

The ability to correlate and centralize all of that information together, rather than having to manage it across multiple platforms and potentially miss things between different platforms, makes it more likely that we will not miss anything. The workload and the missed threats that we need to respond to have been reduced because of that unified approach. The mean time to detect has been reduced, and the mean time to respond has been reduced.

Sentinel correlates signals from first- and third-party sources into a single, high-confidence incident. The third-party integrations provided through Microsoft offer all the tools we need to integrate those sources. In other cases, we have to build the integrations from the ground up. Currently, we are struggling to integrate some of the sources that don't have existing connectors. However, the platform is flexible enough to allow us to build these integrations. It is just a matter of finding the time to address this issue.

Our security team's overall efficiency has improved. The build phase is still ongoing. We have not yet fully transitioned to an operational model. We are still in the build implementation stage because we need to integrate some third-party sources into the existing platform and ensure that they are included in the scope of the analytics rules. However, this has significantly reduced the amount of time spent working between different platforms.

The automation capabilities are perhaps the platform's most significant advantage. The force multiplier capability is exceptional. Traditional SIM or SIEM-like platforms were effective in gathering and presenting security information to security personnel. However, security personnel were still responsible for evaluating the information and determining whether a response was necessary. One of the benefits of Sentinel's automation capabilities is the ability to automatically trigger an action or response activity, which is a significant advantage.

The automation capabilities have helped reduce our mean time to respond. Automated events can prevent a problem from escalating beyond a single incident to multiple occurrences before we have to respond to it. In this way, automation effectively catches problems right away.

Sentinel has helped to improve our visibility into user and network behavior. This is extremely important because it allows us to have a better understanding of how users and networks are behaving.

Sentinel has helped reduce our team's time.

Sentinel has streamlined our event investigation process by eliminating the need to manually track down specific event activities. The rules are now automatically identifying and processing these activities, significantly reducing the time required for investigation. Tasks that previously took half an hour can now be completed in under five minutes.

The analytic rule is the most valuable feature. It allows us to assess the various use cases we've developed and then automate those processes accordingly. I consider it a force multiplier. It empowers a small team to achieve a significant impact, whereas previously, I would have relied on multiple individuals. By utilizing it, we can accomplish more with fewer resources.

While I appreciate the UI itself and the vast amount of information available on the platform, I'm finding the overall user experience to be frustrating due to frequent disconnections and the requirement to repeatedly re-authenticate. Microsoft needs to address these usability issues to enhance the user experience.

I have been using Microsoft Sentinel for seven months.

The stability is exceptionally reliable. I tend to be quite vocal when things don't function as expected. The web interface requires using a browser for interaction, and I often find myself multitasking between Sentinel-related tasks and other activities, such as responding to emails. When I return to the Sentinel interface, I'm prompted to re-enter my credentials, which causes me to lose my previous work. If I'm using KQL to query data, I frequently have to restart my work from scratch. This can be frustrating, but I've learned to copy my work periodically to avoid losing it. I haven't encountered this issue with previous platforms, even those that use web interfaces.

Sentinel boasts exceptional scalability. While it's crucial to monitor data ingestion costs, Microsoft has effectively crafted a platform capable of expanding to accommodate far greater volumes than initially anticipated.

The technical support has room for improvement.

Neutral

The initial deployment was straightforward. Our strategy was to consolidate onto a common platform. We have a significant portion of our security information being handled through SysLog events. As a result, it was almost as straightforward as simply rerouting data from the old platform to the new one. This served as a preliminary test of the new platform to ensure it was functioning as intended and could effectively redirect and handle the increased volume.

The deployment likely involved six people, but not all at the same time. There were six people involved in the deployment overall, but we probably had four people working on it at any given time. From a headcount perspective, I believe four people is the appropriate number.

We employed a third-party company for the implementation because we sought expertise in Sentinel and the Azure platform, and we aimed to augment our existing staff.

We have achieved a positive return on our investment. In my previous jobs of comparable size, I would have needed approximately three people to manage the event activity and to handle and respond to it. Here, we can accomplish this with two people. As a result, we have saved at least one headcount with our current staffing levels. Additionally, as we expand the platform, we will not need to increase the headcount to manage the growth.

Microsoft Sentinel can be costly, particularly for data management. While Microsoft provides various free offerings to attract users, these benefits can quickly become overwhelmed by escalating data management expenses if proper precautions are not taken.

I don't think it's Microsoft engaging in underhanded tactics. I believe the issue lies with customers not paying close enough attention to what they're enabling. Initially, they're excited and eager to incorporate everything, but before they realize it, they've incurred unexpected costs.

Azure Monitor Log Analytics and Sentinel have different subscription plans and pricing tiers. This segmentation was implemented to accommodate the distinct business relationships within our organization. Sentinel costs are managed separately from Azure costs.

The decision to adopt Microsoft Sentinel was made before I joined the organization. I understand that they evaluated all the major solutions available, including Splunk and QRadar. However, due to the selection of a cloud-based solution, they opted for Microsoft Sentinel as it aligned with their overall strategy.

I would rate Microsoft Sentinel eight out of ten.

We've got a user base globally of about 5,000 people.

Microsoft Sentinel does require maintenance, which includes monitoring the incoming data and ensuring that everything is functioning as expected. While automation simplifies many tasks, it doesn't eliminate the need for oversight. We still need to verify that everything is working correctly. Part of the maintenance cycle involves ensuring that the automation agents are operational and performing their intended tasks and that events are being collected and evaluated properly.

Users need to have a clear understanding of their goals before selecting a solution. I have encountered too many people who believe that simply choosing a solution will resolve all of their problems. It is crucial to understand the desired outcome and the specific requirements of the use case to determine whether or not Sentinel is the appropriate fit.

We're a cybersecurity company using Sentinel to provide SIEM services to our customers. 

Sentinel improved how we investigate incidents. We can create watchlists and update them to align with the latest threat intelligence. The information Microsoft provides enables us to understand thoroughly and improve as we go along. It allows us to provide monthly reports to our clients on their security posture. 

It helps us automate some tasks but not others. There are some things we missed because there aren't any rules. We're still working on integrating it. We know it can detect high-severity incidents if we utilize it correctly. We've been able to automate incident responses to some high-level threats we've encountered.

Microsoft's threat intelligence helped us prepare for attacks by developing rules before they hit. We know what behavior to expect because we have visibility into the threat and the actors. 

Sentinel's reporting features save us time. In the past, we created reports in Microsoft Word by dropping in screenshots. With Sentinel, we can create readymade reports from the dashboard. Our monthly report previously took about 16 to 24 hours to complete. We cut that in half. 

We have our own ticketing system for our soft team, and Sentinel's playbooks helped us automate many processes. 

Sentinel provides excellent visibility. Microsoft updates a lot of its security solutions via Sentinel. The content hub and connectors are available to integrate everything. Microsoft also created separate analytics groups, so we log behaviors and use a template. We often need to modify the template based on a customer's log behavior and our correlation and analysis. 

We can learn some new techniques for using KQL correctly by studying the latest templates that Microsoft releases and creating some KBs for our analysts. The MITRE ATT&CK framework is now integrated into Sentinel, so we can statistically identify which part of our microservices are vulnerable. We can assess the severity of threats and prioritize them accordingly. We also need to prioritize based on our SLAs. 

My company also provides managed service for Defender for Endpoint, previously called ATP. We also work with Defender for Cloud and Defender for Identity.

All the Microsoft solutions are integrated with Sentinel, including 365 apps, Azure AD, and various cloud-based security solutions. It includes all the connectors you need to ingest logs from multiple Microsoft products, giving us near-total visibility. Some customers use on-prem security appliances, so we have to correlate logs. 

Sentinel comes with Azure Lighthouse. We can link the subscription to our customer's tenant and ask them to create a global admin account. We can report on the activities using each account and how secure the credentials are. The integration is seamless when we have that level of access. 

We offer ingestion for all Microsoft products and always recommend our clients get everything so we can get full threat visibility and effectiveness. Having all the products integrated into Sentinel helps us see the big picture. In addition to the analytics rules and everything, we're utilizing dashboards and workbooks. Some workbooks are templates that Microsoft provides, but we also develop our own. 

We can compile all this data, put it in a workbook, and create rules. The other part is communicating with the customer because the user is still reviewing logs. Is it an admin? Is it doing daily counts of logins, etc? 

Three of our customers use Defender for Cloud. If a company needs it, we can support it. We have Microsoft-certified engineers who can provide expert frontline support.

Initially, we were only ingesting incidents from Defender for Endpoint, but now we can ingest more data throughout the system. Previously, we could not see some things. We could do it, but we had to search through the portal to find what we needed. Using a connector, we can see everything our employees do on the endpoint, such as device info, location, logins, etc. It's especially useful when employees work remotely or outside their normal area. 

Sentinel lets us investigate threats and comprehensively respond from one console. We can have multiple tabs on one application. The capabilities are robust and marketable. All of these solutions are combined. 

We've seen delays in getting the logs from third-party solutions and sometimes Microsoft products as well. It would be helpful if Microsoft created a list of the delays. That would make things more transparent for customers. 

In some instances, the customer reports that they suspect malware on a computer, and one of their IT guys noticed it. There is a five to ten minute delay before we can see it and respond. As a security company, we don't want the customer to be the first one to identify the threat. However, we must deal with delays from the various products we're integrating. For example, Apex One has a 15-minute delay.

Sometimes it's an issue with the third-party product, but sometimes it isn't. If it isn't, we need to open a ticket with Microsoft. We would benefit from transparency around delays and communication about what Microsoft is doing to resolve the issue. 

Another issue is transparency around usage and associated costs. There are charges if you use playbooks and queries. If you query 100,000 times a day, your costs will go up. The usage only displays in gigabytes per day. A breakdown would help us make reports for our management. 

We have used Sentinel since 2020, so it has been about three years.

We also have experienced some performance problems in the UK. I'm not sure how that works, but something might be going on in the back-end. We transferred to a different region a while ago and lost some of our workspaces. We were shocked.

If Microsoft needs to failover to another region, the customer should be informed because it affects many things. Some of the products we ingest just suddenly stopped, and we have to redo the integration with Cisco Umbrella, AWS S3, and SendGrid. Azure was pulling those logs, and the connections were suddenly cut when this happened. 

I rate Microsoft's support a five out of ten. We had problems using Azure and getting the logs from event services for one of our customers. The date and time the log generated on our customer's device were wrong. It showed the event's location but not the time that the event was generated. 

We contacted Microsoft, who told us to expect a reply the following day, but they didn't respond until four days later. Then, they sent us to another department to speak with someone more knowledgeable about our issue. 

We described the problem, and they asked us for evidence. They wanted our support team to recreate it. Microsoft's support team can create a lab environment and recreate the scenario for themselves. We had to stop the call because we were too busy.

Neutral

We previously used an in-house SIEM solution. 

Deploying Sentinel was complex initially, but it has gotten easier. We documented how we did everything, so it's easy for someone to replicate the steps. If we have accepted the CSP invite, we can deploy it in two days, including configuring ingestion, creating rules, and Azure onboarding. We also must build dashboards and templates. Sometimes there are delays, and it might take three to five weeks.

Sentinel is costly compared to other solutions, but it's fair. SIEM solutions like CrowdStrike charge based on daily log volume. They generally process a set number of logs for free before they start charging. Microsoft's pricing is clearer. It's free under five gigabytes. Some of these logs we ingest have a cost, so they don't hide it. I believe the tenant pays the price, and Microsoft helps create awareness of the cost.

With other solutions, you don't know what you're being charged until you get the bill. You might find that you're using playbooks or queries too much. Microsoft gives you visibility into your expenses. 

We evaluated a few other solutions, including CrowdStrike, Splunk, and LogRhythm. We decided to go with Sentinel because we have Microsoft-certified staff, and many companies in the UK are adopting Defender and other Microsoft security solutions. Sentinel offers seamless integration with Microsoft security products, and we've also seen how flexible it can be.

We can leverage KQL queries. If you're trying to send logs to another SIEM, you'll probably need an API and a lot of other components to make it work. Sentinel makes our jobs easier by providing all of the connectors and out-of-the-box integration. 

I rate Microsoft Sentinel a nine out of ten. I think the industry is shifting toward a single-vendor strategy instead of best-of-breed. If you have a lot of tools from various vendors, it makes things more complicated. You need to hire employees who specialize in each device. It's better if your team understands a solution's features and capabilities. 

If you're considering a SIEM solution, you should compare each product's mean detection and response time. I'm unsure if that information will be publicly available for every solution, so you may need to test them. You should also think about other components besides cost. Sentinel might be more expensive than other solutions, but it's more comprehensive because it incorporates all the different security elements and keeps evolving.

Microsoft is constantly updating all of its solutions. We mainly utilize Microsoft infrastructure, but some solutions are based on Unix or Linux. At the same time, threats on that side aren't as critical as those from Microsoft. They own the operating system, so they're positioned to understand the vulnerabilities and how to fix them. 

We utilize Microsoft Sentinel primarily to monitor our data storage software. Through the implementation of distinct connectors, we can accommodate multiple use cases for Sentinel. This solution also enables us to thwart failover attempts and prevent brute-force attacks. Moreover, we leverage the EDR tools to establish groups. For instance, if an unauthorized individual attempts to access a critical server from outside the designated group, we can promptly identify them by analyzing the event ID.

Using the Microsoft Sentinel Investigation tab, we can observe all activities related to access and unauthorized attempts taking place in our environment.

Sentinel assists us in prioritizing threats across our entire enterprise. When we receive high-priority alerts, we engage with the client to investigate whether they are conducting any testing first. If not, we identify the unknown activity and collaborate with them to resolve the issue as quickly as possible.

We also utilize Office 365. We have seamlessly integrated Office 365 with Sentinel, which is made easy through the provided connectors, especially when our API keys are associated with a cloud machine. All that is needed are the workspace ID, subscription ID, and API key.

The effectiveness of the protection offered by the integrated solutions is substantial. We are capable of preventing spam, tracking the complete trajectory of data transmitted by the end user, including its source, especially when originating from unauthorized URLs. Additionally, we can identify instances of unauthorized mail redirection. Furthermore, we can utilize SPF authentication to safeguard our domain against spoofing.

Microsoft Sentinel allows us to gather data from our entire ecosystem. We also have the capability to exclude non-suspicious or non-malicious data, such as daily reminders, from the daily logs in order to prevent system slowdown.

Sentinel allows us to investigate threats and respond promptly from a central location. We can gather all the necessary information for an investigation with a single click, which will provide us with a comprehensive overview of the actions taken by the suspicious user by reviewing the Event ID.

The built-in SOAR, UEBA, and threat intelligence capabilities of Sentinel are commendable. The UEBA can furnish a summary of all entities and discern unfamiliar ones that are not commonly associated with our system, subsequently tagging them for our review.

It aids in the automation of routine tasks and the identification of high-value alerts. For instance, if we need to compile a list of our administrative or high-profile users, we can establish rules based on high and medium security criteria, or any other specifications we might have. The entries will then correspond to the information aligned with our requirements. Furthermore, we have generated a watchlist of blacklisted users, which assists us in conveniently tracking activities originating from them. 

It provides the ability to create personalized dashboards that offer all the necessary information in a single location. It is important to mention that this feature comes with an extra cost, as is the case with all aspects of Sentinel.

Sentinel's threat intelligence helps prepare us for potential threats before they hit. By utilizing the event summary, we can proactively prepare for unauthorized entries and directly block IPs at the firewall level.

As a partner of Microsoft, they pay us for any POCs we create.

Sentinel has contributed to a reduction in our time for detecting and responding to incidents. As Sentinel operates in the cloud, it offers user-friendly accessibility, enabling us to swiftly access crucial information for responding to potential threats.

The automation rules that enable us to create playbooks for each individual are valuable.

The Identity Behavior tab furnishes us with the entire history linked to each IP or domain that has either accessed or attempted to access our system. By utilizing the data supplied by Sentinel, we can ascertain whether there are any attempts to breach our system. Numerous pre-defined queries are at our disposal, and we also have the option to craft custom queries as needed.

We are invoiced according to the amount of data generated within each log. For example, if I neglect to specify the time period in a search, Sentinel will retrieve all the logs, leading to charges for both pertinent and irrelevant data. This could potentially cause a substantial increase in costs. We incur lower charges for data under 100 GB, but anything surpassing that threshold becomes more expensive.

When setting up EDR for multiple endpoints, we need to create distinct rules for each one to monitor the devices effectively. 

I am currently using Microsoft Sentinel.

Microsoft Sentinel is stable. It is extremely rare that the solution is down.

Microsoft Sentinel is highly scalable. We can create any random custom playbooks. We can create any custom rules over there As per our requirements. We can enable and disable policies also as per our requirements. We can combine both policies accordingly.

The technical support is good.

Positive

Compared to IBM Security QRadar and Securonix, Microsoft Sentinel is more user-friendly. QRadar is quicker to respond but it has stability issues.

We are charged based on the amount of data used, which can become expensive.

I rate Microsoft Sentinel nine out of ten.

Maintenance is overseen by Microsoft. They announce periods of system downtime for maintenance. If we have anything critical that we require while the system is down, we can request it from Microsoft, and they promptly provide it to us.

Microsoft Sentinel offers us query update suggestions every three months. If we find a suggestion we like, we can simply click on it to automatically update our policy.

I believe it is better to choose a single-vendor security suite over a best-of-breed strategy.

It's mostly used for cloud-based analytics for proactive incident response. As an enterprise product, it falls under next-gen SIEM.

An advantage of Sentinel is that Microsoft has acquired RiskIQ as a threat intel platform and they've amalgamated it into the platform. When any analytical (or correlation) rule triggers, the enrichment is bundled within the solution. We don't need to input anything, it is there by default. Every rule is enriched right at the triggering or detection stage, which eases the job of the SOC analyst. The platform has become so intelligent compared to other solutions. When an alert is triggered, the enrichment happens so that we know exactly at that moment the true or false posture. This is a mature feature compared to the rest of the providers.

Most of our customers use M365 with E3 or E5 licenses, and some use Business Premium, which provides the entire bundle of M365 Security including EDR, DLP, Zero Trust, and email security. There are two native advantages for customers that use M365 Security and Sentinel. The first advantage is that the log or security-event ingestion into Sentinel is free. Cost-wise, they're saving a lot and that is a major advantage.

The other advantage is that when you use M365 Security with Sentinel, you get multi-domain visibility. That means when attacks happen with different kill-chains, in different stages through the email channel or a web channel, there is intelligence-sharing and that is a missing piece when customers integrate non-Microsoft solutions with Sentinel. With Microsoft, it is all included and the intelligence is seamlessly shared. The moment an email security issue is detected, it is sent to the Sentinel platform as well as to the M365 Defender platform. The moment it is flagged, it can trigger.

That way, if the email security missed something, the EDR will pick up a signal triggered by a payload or by a script being shared and will trigger back to the email security to put that particular email onto a blacklist. This cross-intelligence is happening without even a SIEM coming into play.

And a type of SOAR functionality is found within M365 Defender. It can run a complete, automated investigation response at the email security level, meaning the XDR platform level. When M365 Security is combined with Sentinel it gives the customer more power to remediate attacks faster. Detection and response are more powerful when M365 Defender and Sentinel are combined, compared to a customer going with a third-party solution and Sentinel.

Sentinel has an investigation pane to investigate threats and respond holistically from one place, where SOC analysts can drill down. It will gather all the artifacts so that the analysts can drill down without even leaving the page. They can see the start of the attack and the sequence of events from Sentinel. And on the investigation page, SOC analysts can create a note with their comments. They can also call for a response action from that particular page.

Also, most of the next-gen cloud analytics vendors don't provide a common MSSP platform for the service provider to operate. That means we have to build our own analytics in front of those solutions. Sentinel has something called Lighthouse where we can query and hunt and pull all the metadata into an MSSP platform. That means multi-customer threat prioritization can be done because we have complete visibility of all our customers. We can see how an attack pattern is evolving in different verticals. Our analysts can see exactly what the top-10-priority events are from all of our customers. Even if we have a targeted vertical, such as BFSI, we can create a use case around that and apply it to a customer that has not been targeted. We can leverage multiple verticals and multiple customers and see if a new pattern is emerging around it. Those processes are very easy with Sentinel as an MSSP platform.

Because we use 75 percent of the automation possible through the platform we are able to reduce MTTA. It is also helpful that we get all the security incidents including the threat, vulnerability, and security score in one place of control. We don't have to go to one place for XDR, another for email, another for EDR, and a fourth for CASB. Another time saver is the automated investigation response playbooks that are bundled with the solution. They are available for email, EDR, and CASB. As soon as a threat is detected, they will contain it and it will give you a status of partially or fully remediated. Most of our customers have gone for 100 percent automation and remediation. These features save at least 50 percent of the time it would otherwise take.

In terms of cost savings, in addition to the savings on log-ingestion, Microsoft Sentinel uses hyperscaler features with low-tier, medium-tier, and hot storage. For customers that need long-term data storage, this is the ideal platform. If you go with Securonix or Palo Alto, you won't see cost savings. But here, they can choose how long they want to keep data in a hot tier or a low or medium tier. That also helps save a lot on costs.

It's a Big Data security analytics platform. Among the unique features is the fact that it has built-in UEBA and analytical capabilities. It allows you to use the out-of-the-box machine learning and AI capabilities, but it also allows you to bring your own AI/ML, by bringing in your own IPs and allowing the platform to accept them and run that on top of it.

In addition, the SOAR component is a pay-per-use model. Compared to any other product, where customization is not available, you can fine-tune the SOAR and you'll be charged only when your playbooks are triggered. That is the beauty of the solution because the SOAR is the costliest component in the market today. Other vendors charge heavily for the SOAR, but with Sentinel it is upside-down: the SOAR is the lowest-hanging fruit. It's the least costly and it delivers more value to the customer.

The SOAR engine also uniquely helps us to automate most of the incidents with automated enrichment and that cuts out the L1 analyst work.

And combining M365 with Sentinel, if you want to call it integration, takes just a few clicks: "next, next finish." If it is all M365-native, it is a maximum of three or four steps and you'll be able to ingest all the logs into Sentinel.

That is true even with AWS or GCP because most of the connectors are already available out-of-the-box. You just click, put in your subscription details, include your IAM, and you are finished. Within five to six steps, you can integrate AWS workloads and the logs can be ingested into Sentinel. When it comes to a third party specifically, such as log sources in a data center or on-premises, we need a log collector so that the logs can be forwarded to the Sentinel platform. And when it comes to servers or something where there is an agent for Windows or Linux, the agent can collect the logs and ship them to the Sentinel platform. I don't see any difficulties in integrating any of the log sources, even to the extent of collecting IoT log sources.

Microsoft Defender for Cloud has multiple components such as Defender for Servers, Defender for PaaS, and Defender for databases. For customers in Azure, there are a lot of use cases specific to protecting workloads and PaaS and SaaS in Azure and beyond Azure, if a customer also has on-premises locations. There is EDR for Windows and Linux servers, and it even protects different kinds of containers. With Defender for Cloud, all these sources can be seamlessly integrated and you can then track the security incidents in Microsoft's XDR platform. That means you have one more workspace, under Azure, not Defender for Cloud, where you can see the security incidents. In addition, it can be integrated with Sentinel for EDR deep-dive analytics. It can also protect workloads in AWS. We have customers for whom we are protecting their AWS workloads. Even EKS, Elastic Kubernetes Service, on AWS can be integrated, as can the GKE (Google Kubernetes Engine). And with Defender for Cloud, security alert ingestion is free

Only one thing is missing: NDR is not available out of the box. The competitive cloud-native SIEM providers have the NDR component. Currently, Sentinel needs NDR to be powered from either Corelight or some other NDR provider. It needs a third-party OEM. Other than that, it supports the entire gamut of solutions.

Also, we are helping customers build custom data-source integration. Microsoft needs to look at some strategic development on the partner front for out-of-the-box integration.

We are an MSSP and we have offered Microsoft Sentinel as a service to our customers for close to one and half years. Before I joined this organization, I worked with another organization that provided Microsoft Sentinel as a service for close to one year.

The platform is pretty stable. I generally do not have any problems with it unless an issue arises while deploying a playbook. The platform is 98 percent stable. That other 2 percent only happens when you start working deep on customization. Out-of-the-box, everything has been tested and there aren't any problems. But when you try to create something on your own, that's where you may need Microsoft support.

You can scale it as much as you want. There are no limitations on scaling it.

It supports multi-region environments. Even if it is a large organization with multiple regions and multiple subscriptions, it can collect the data within the regions. With GDPR, logs should stay within the country. The solution can comply with the law of the land and still serve multiple locations.

Sentinel Lighthouse is not only meant for MSSPs. A large organization with diverse geography can meet the local data-residency laws, and Lighthouse will still act as a platform to connect all the regions and provide a centralized dashboard and visibility as an organization. So it can work if the customer has only one region and if there are multiple regions. It is a unique platform.

Also, every six months they develop a lot of playbooks as well as from the marketplace, the Microsoft Sentinel Content hub. MSSPs like us can use it to create content and put it into the marketplace so that other customers or service providers can use them. Similarly, when those parties develop things, they are available to us.

Microsoft is almost too active. We receive something new to offer to our customers every month or two. We also operate Splunk and QRadar but we see a lot of activity from Microsoft compared to the other vendors. That means we have a lot of value-adds to offer to our customers. These updates do not go to the customer by default. As a service provider, that helps us. We are the enablers, and a lot of these updates are free of cost for Sentinel users.

I would rate Microsoft technical support at five out of 10 because we have to go through a lot of steps before we get to the right technical stakeholder. They have to improve a lot.

Neutral

As an MSSP we also use Splunk, Qradar, and Micro Focus ArcSight. We added Microsoft as well because of customer demand. 

Existing customers that are doing a tech refresh are going for cloud-native. Digital transformation has been the driving factor. A lot of our customers have embraced microservices and they're looking for a new-age, cloud-native SIEM to support cloud-native solutions. For most of our customers that are looking at migrating to Sentinel, the major factor is the cloud. They have moved their data center servers to AWS or GCP or Azure.

The initial deployment is straightforward. There are only two or three methods, depending on whether it is on-premises log collection or M365 all-cloud, in which case it is API-based with out-of-the-box APIs. Within a few clicks, we can integrate it. It is simple and fast.

If we're dealing with all-M365 components and Azure components, we can complete deployment within a day. If we're dealing with the customer-log collection, it depends on the customer. There are some prerequisites required, but if the prerequisites are ready, then it takes, again, a day or so.

The number of people involved depends on the situation, but if there is not much more than out-of-the-box deployment, a maximum of two L1 engineers can complete all the activity.

From my perspective, the ROI is good because Microsoft keeps getting new things done without any additional cost. Every quarter there is at least a 10 to 15 percent increase with add-on components and content that are free. That is a type of enrichment that customers receive that they do not get from any other platform.

Microsoft gives a discount of 50 percent but only for customers that are clocking 100 GB and above. They should also look at medium and SMB customers in that regard.

There are a lot of advantages for customers with a Microsoft ecosystem. They need to know the tricks for optimizing the cost of Microsoft Sentinel. They need to work with the right service provider that can help them to go through the journey and optimize the cost.

For Microsoft security products there is a preview mode of up to six months, during which time they are non-billable. The customer is free to take that subscription and test it. If they like it, they will be billed but they have six months where they can evaluate the product and see the value. That is the best option and no other vendor gives a free preview for six months.

Other solutions will have two updates a year, maximum. And most of them are not updates to the features but are security or platform-stability updates. Microsoft is completely different. Because the platform is managed by them, they don't give platform updates. They give updates on the content that are free. They keep adding this data, which is helping customers to stay relevant and updated.

Our customers see a lot of value from that process. Some 60 to 70 percent move from preview mode to production.

The challenge with competitive products, or any SIEM, is that they are use-case specific: You define some correlation and they will detect it. Some of the next-gen solutions today work with analytics but the analytics are limited to the logs that have been registered. Other platforms are also not able to pinpoint the inception point of the attack. Once the attack is being reviewed, they will use log sources of that particular attack and will drill down into that particular attack scenario, but they're not able to group the attack life cycle: the initiation of that attack, and the different stages of the attack. The visibility is limited when it comes to other SIEMs.

But Sentinel has something called Fusion, which can give you multi-stage attack visibility. That is not something available from other SIEM vendors. Fusion is a very special kind of detection. It will only trigger when it sees the linkage between multiple attacks detected by multiple data sources. It will try to relate all the attacks and see if there is a link between them. It gives you a complete footprint of how that attack started, how it evolved, how it is going, and which phase it is in now. It will give a complete view of the attack, and that is a missing link compared with other SIEM vendors. This is a unique feature of Microsoft Sentinel.

Sentinel's UEBA is around 90 percent effective, and the threat intel is a 10 out of 10, but it is an add-on. If a customer takes that add-on package, it will give complete threat intel and visibility into the deep and dark web. In addition, it helps a customer to track the external attack surface. It is a comprehensive threat intel platform. 

The Sentinel SOAR is a 10 out of 10 and, if I could, I would rate it higher. Other SOAR platforms do not help reduce the price. A customer may not be able to use them after some time because they charge per SOC analyst. With Microsoft, there is no limitation on SOC analysts. It is purely billed based on consumption, which is a great advantage. Every customer can use it. It is free for up to 4,000 actions. Even if a customer goes to 50,000 actions per day, which is normally what a large-volume customer will do, he'll be charged $50, and no competitive SOAR vendor is in that league.

Understand the product capabilities first and, before finalizing your product, see how we can optimize your solutions. Also, try to see a roadmap. Then plan your TCO. Other SIEMs do not give you the advantage of free log ingestion, but if you want to understand the TCO, you need to know what your organization is open to adopting. If you integrate Microsoft solutions in different places, like cloud or CASB, it is going to give you more free ingestion and your TCO is going to be reduced drastically.

Organizations that have a Microsoft E5 license have an advantage because all the Microsoft components we have talked about are free. Unfortunately, we have also witnessed that most of our customers with an E5 license are not using the product features effectively. They need to see how they can leverage these services at the next level and then start integrating with Sentinel. That will give them a better return on investment and a proper TCO.

The platform gives you the ability to do 100 percent automation, but it is up to the service provider or the customer to decide what the percentage should be. The percentage varies from organization to organization. In our organization, we are using 75 percent of the automation before it reaches a SOC analyst. At a certain point, we want to see our SOC Analyst intervene. We want to do that remaining 25 percent manually, where the analyst can call for further responses.

Threat intelligence, in my opinion, is not generally going to work in a predictive mode. It is more a case of enrichment and indicators of compromise. It can only help in direction and correlation, but may not take you to a predictive mode, except if we talk about external attack surface management. The threat intel feed is going to give you an indicator of compromise and that will help you to be proactive but not predictive.

Whereas the external attack surface management and deep and dark web monitoring will monitor all your public assets. If a hacker is doing something in your public-facing assets, it will give a proactive alert that suspicious activities are happening in those assets. That will help my SOC analysts to be predictive, even before an attack happens. If somebody is trying brute force, that's where the predictive comes into play. The deep and dark web monitoring will help to monitor my brand and my domain. If hackers discuss my critical assets or my domain within a dark web chat, this intel can pick that up. In that case, they can say something predictively and that they are planning for an attack on your assets.

In terms of going with a best-of-breed strategy rather than a single vendor's security suite, customers need to be smart. Every smart solution keeps its intelligence within the solution. If the landscape includes email, web, EDR, et cetera, at a bare minimum there are eight different attack surfaces and everyone can have different controls. A SOC analyst will have to manage eight different consoles and have eight unique skill sets with deep knowledge of each product. So although individual solutions bring a lot of things to the table, the customer is not able to use those features 100 percent. We are failing when we go with individual products. An individual product may be more capable, but an organization will not be able to use the product effectively. The silos of intelligence, the number of different consoles, and the right skill sets to apply to each product are problems.

In addition, attacks are evolving and the software is evolving along with them. A product vendor may release some new features but the customer won't have the right skill set internally to understand them and apply them.

But with a single-vendor situation like Microsoft, the SOC analyst has nowhere else to go. It is one XDR platform. All the policies, all the investigation, and everything they need to apply is right in one place. There are also more Microsoft-Certified resources in the market, people who are certified in all the Microsoft products. All of a sudden, my skill set problem is solved and there is no need to look at multiple consoles, and the silos of intelligence are also solved. All three pain points are resolved.

My recent experience with Microsoft Sentinel involves my current work at another Government of Canada client where we are rolling out Microsoft Sentinel as their SIEM product of choice. In doing so, we are looking at connectors and data sources that we are going to be ingesting into Microsoft Sentinel. We are also examining the determination of whether it makes sense to look at a LAW or a Log Analytics Workspace on a per-subscription basis versus an aggregated approach where it is one subscription, but we are ingesting data from many different sources. It comes down to how much data has to be parsed by Microsoft Sentinel and what the volume is because you are paying essentially for Microsoft Sentinel to ingest the data. These are the analytical discussions taking place right now.

Some of the best features of Microsoft Sentinel are that it is cloud-based, which from a CapEx perspective saves clients money in procuring on-premises infrastructure. It proves to be a dynamic tool because we use it for not just IaaS related resources, but also for SaaS related resources. Additionally, we have some on-premises infrastructure that will be feeding Microsoft Sentinel log data as well. Looking at it as a SaaS tool makes it easier to leverage, procure, and configure without the need to be concerned about buying hundreds of thousands of dollars in gear from a CapEx perspective.

The automated response capability in Microsoft Sentinel enhances our security posture quite beneficially from a SOAR perspective. One of the things that we are looking to do is alleviate some of the day-to-day actions and functionalities from our SOC personnel. Anything that can be automated from an investigative or event-related perspective is helpful. Microsoft Sentinel is a great example of a SOAR tool, and that is the intent for the current client; they want to be able to automate as many of these functionalities as possible.

To improve Microsoft Sentinel currently, focusing on the quality of the telemetry is essential. The data sources are critical, so understanding where they are located, how much there is, and what kind of telemetry is coming in from these data sources is vital. We are looking to reduce the amount of non-critical data; it is important to ensure that the quality of the log data ingested by Microsoft Sentinel is high.

The government deals with international entities, so it is necessary to ensure from a threat hunting and workbook perspective that if suspicious event information is generated by Microsoft Sentinel, there is good quality telemetry and understanding of where this is coming from and what kind of alerts are being generated. It is about being able to use as many features of the tool as possible and making sure that with these connectors in place, the quality of the data sources is high.

We are currently implementing Microsoft Sentinel.

We have dealt with Microsoft support, and I would rate their support highly. We have good relations with the Microsoft resources in Ottawa, and the account manager we have dealt with is leading our efforts. We have to speak to what is referred to as one of the support ninjas, who is our point of contact. He has been very helpful, and where needed, we have been directed to other support resources, so overall it works well.

Positive

The initial setup of Microsoft Sentinel is a gradual iterative process for this case. There is the initial deployment of Microsoft Sentinel itself, setting up the Log Analytics Workspace, and then going through the configuration again, looking at what we want the tool to ingest.

We have a Power Platform tenant, so we are pulling in SaaS data from the Power Platform tenant. We do have an IaaS environment as well, so there will be some endpoints and other services that we will be pulling data in from that. Additionally, the majority of our applications are located on-premises, so we will be ingesting on-premises log data as well. This is done through an Event Hub, where you set up an Event Hub to ingest that on-premises data, which gets repackaged through an API call and sent to Microsoft Sentinel.

With those three environments actively generating log data, the full deployment of Microsoft Sentinel is realized over time. We have SOC personnel that are not highly knowledgeable about the tool, which is why it is taking more time to ensure that the configurations are correct and appropriate while tracking costs. At the end of the day, we want to use as many features of the tool as possible, and I estimate that over a year, maybe a year and a half timeframe, we will go from the initial setup to a fully blown deployment with all of the connectors in place and all of the threat hunting configuration done; it is a gradual process.

The AI is helping us improve threat detection from a generative perspective, although not yet from an agentic perspective. When looking to leverage LLMs for various tasks and for seeking information, it is great. However, given where we are in the deployment lifetime for the tool, we are not really leveraging AI as it is incorporated into the tool yet, such as looking for various analytics and data sources and suspicion around those data sources. That functionality will come, but it certainly is helpful when looking for information right now. I rate Microsoft Sentinel 8 out of 10.