The downsides of managing your IT infrastructure without a security information and event management (SIEM) platform include the following:
- Redundant assets
- Ignored cybersecurity alerts
- Poor safety against threats to your IT estate
Security information and event management (SIEM) can help you secure your business and IT infrastructure, but any SaaS SIEM solution may not meet your business’s needs.
88% of security analysts face challenges like complex processes and cloud threat visibility gaps with their current SIEM solution.
Azure Sentinel is a reliable solution that helps businesses enjoy the benefits of using a modern SIEM without the fallbacks of a traditional one that only ingests data.
What Is Azure Sentinel?
Azure Sentinel is a scalable Microsoft cloud-native security information and event management (SIEM) and security orchestration, automation and response (SOAR) solution that operates on the Azure platform. Microsoft Azure Sentinel can collect data and detect, investigate and respond to threats.
Azure Sentinel, also known as Microsoft Sentinel, helps businesses secure their IT operations and streamline workflows for better efficiency regardless of scale.
Microsoft Sentinel’s four primary capabilities are security data collection, threat detection, investigation and automated response, which you can perform from one central panel.
Microsoft Azure Sentinel secures your business against threats by working according to these four security operations areas:
- Collect – Gathers security data across your business’s network infrastructure, including devices, users, and applications located on-premises and on several clouds.
- Detect – Identifies threats with analytics and threat intelligence, which can pinpoint previously uncovered threats and lessen false positives.
- Investigate – Uses machine learning and artificial intelligence technology to scrutinize suspicious activities and hunt threats.
- Respond – Provides proactive and customizable automation for everyday security actions to respond quickly to incidents.
The Benefits of Microsoft Azure Sentinel for Your Organization
From identifying sophisticated threats to responding to issues quickly, Azure Sentinel offers several benefits to meet and satisfy your business’s security needs.
1. Easy To Set Up
Azure Sentinel eliminates the cost of setting up infrastructure as you don’t need to install servers, regardless of your network environment. Traditional SIEMs require considerable time and money to set up, maintain, and scale infrastructure. However, you can easily set up Azure Sentinel with little to no overhead and tackle your business’s security needs.
Microsoft Azure Sentinel is effortless to scale as a cloud-native solution with zero upfront costs. Azure Sentinel is 48% less expensive and 67% faster to deploy than legacy on-premises SIEMs.
2. Reduced Downtime
Azure Sentinel operates on the Azure cloud platform, which has built-in load balancing and automated fail-over, making it a secure and robust system. These features help reduce downtime so you can handle crucial cloud apps better.
Migrating your SIEM functionalities to cloud services helps you minimize downtime, and you can continue collecting and analyzing data without disrupting or missing any alerts.
3. Automated Threat Detection and Response
Microsoft Azure Sentinel helps you detect and respond to threats automatically with its playbook feature and integration with Azure Logic Apps. The cloud-native SIEM solution makes an incident whenever an alert is triggered.
You can link automation to security incidents and investigate them using these Azure Sentinel capabilities:
- Assignment and incident status – Helps you set or change the status of an incident and assign it to your team member to investigate.
- Investigation functionality – This enables you to investigate multilayered attacks visually by mapping elements across incidents.
4. Manage Hybrid Environments
For better scalability, you can manage data on-premises and in multiple clouds, including Amazon Web Services (AWS). Azure Sentinel can ingest and analyze data from several cloud environments in a centralized platform. Regardless of how your business scales or the number of network environments you employ, you can easily handle data collection, threat detection, investigation, and responses with Azure Sentinel.
5. Seamless Collection With Data Connectors
Microsoft Azure Sentinel helps collect data from several Microsoft products, including Office 365. With a few clicks and built-in connectors, you can collect data across different sources in a secure, streamlined, and cost-effective manner.
With Azure Sentinel’s built-in connectors, you can utilize more comprehensive cloud security solutions and ecosystems, including non-Microsoft solutions. In addition, other options like Syslog and REST-API connect Microsoft Sentinel with data sources.
6. Monitor Key Metrics From a Central Point
Azure Sentinel gives you a bird’s-eye view of your IT estate by centralizing your log data in one plane. From here, you can perform analysis and reports on alerts across your entire IT infrastructure. This feature helps you minimize the risk of missing critical threat alerts and the consoles you need to access information.
Your SOC team can monitor your network’s health, track the resolution progress and manage threat response. With such at-a-glance access, you can run real-time queries on event logs without affecting performance.
7. Enhance Data-Driven Decisions With Workbooks
Microsoft Azure Sentinel enables you to create custom interactive workbooks that make monitoring, controlling and measuring your data more manageable. You have access to various templates that you can integrate with Azure Sentinel initially. Templates help you gain insights the instant you connect with a data source.
You can build custom workbooks to support your investigation workflows to monitor specific threats. With Azure Sentinel’s SOAR functionalities, you can easily integrate logs into custom automated incident responses. Integrate with Azure Monitor workbooks for better monitoring and visualization of your data once you set up Azure Sentinel.
8. Better Threat Hunting
You can enhance your threat protection scope past Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) by forwarding your Microsoft 365 logs to Azure Sentinel. With threat hunting, you can detect other threats that have bypassed other detection measures in your environment.
With Microsoft Azure Sentinel, you can identify queries that give valuable insights into possible attacks. These insights can help you create customized detection rules and alerts. You can also create bookmarks for events that stand out during threat hunting. Visit these events later to group them into one incident or share them with other team members for investigation.
9. Organize Alerts
Considerable alert volume can create problems for your IT security team, usually resulting in the inability to address all alerts within 24 hours. This situation makes it easier to miss critical alerts that may damage your business severely.
Azure Sentinel helps you minimize the alerts you need to review and investigate by using analytics to organize them into incidents. These incidents are groups of connected alerts that point out a possible threat for investigation. With a prioritized list of incidents, you can get better insights into possible threats, tackle a high volume of security alerts, and minimize alert fatigue.
10. Investigate Security Threats’ Root Causes
Microsoft Azure Sentinel provides in-depth investigation resources that enable you to better understand the entire scope of attacks and quickly identify potential security threats’ root causes. You can begin with a specific element in a threat and continue digging deeper to find its root cause. Identifying and addressing the root cause can help you eliminate connected threats.
Azure Sentinel Pricing
Azure Sentinel’s pricing is based on how much data it analyzes and stores in Azure Monitor Log Analytics workspace. You can choose your billing type as the SIEM ingests data into two different types of logs: Analytics and Basic.
Analytics logs support all data types with comprehensive analytics, alerts, and limitless queries. Scheduled alerts and reports enable you to monitor your Analytics logs and detect security threats better proactively. You can pay for Analytics logs via:
- Pay-as-you-go – Bills per ingested amount of data — measured in GB — for security analytics in Azure Sentinel and stored in the Logs Analytics service. This model helps you reduce infrastructure costs by automatically scaling resources according to your business’s needs and paying for only what you use.
- Commitment tiers – This enables you to commit a specific amount of GB that Logs Analytics can store daily. Microsoft requires you to pay a flat daily price according to the size of GB you choose. You can save up to 65% using this model, compared to pay-as-you-go.
Typically, Basic logs contain a blend of high-volume and low-security value data. Microsoft Azure Sentinel also offers a free plan for the first 31 days.
Amplify Your Business’s Security with Azure Sentinel
Azure Sentinel provides all-around security, enabling you to keep track of threats, respond to alerts proactively, and maximize your assets’ performance. We are here to help you integrate this security powerhouse into your network infrastructure.
ne Digital provides specialized IT and Cybersecurity consulting and Managed Services to help with the proper implementation and monitoring of Microsoft Azure Sentinel with a complete team of Microsoft Security Certified engineers and a 24x7 SOC Team to monitor your environments continuously.
From designing your Azure Sentinel implementation to monitoring and remediating your events and alerts, browse our Azure Managed Services Portfolio to learn more about how you can employ our services to drive your business’s growth, securely.
