Azure Microsoft Sentinel: What You Need to Know About this SIEM

What is Microsoft Sentinel?

Microsoft Sentinel is a cloud-native tool that assists in Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) and Security Orchestration Automated Response (SOAR).

Device, application, or user data is collected in the cloud, and threat response can be automated through pre-defined tasks and workflows.

Azure Sentinel and SIEM

Sentinel can be used to obtain security analysis and alerts on corporate threats (which can be prioritized and displayed in lists), as well as to respond to them. This is the purpose of SIEM systems, which detect, analyze and respond to threats. This automates a task that can be scaled according to security needs.

According to Forrester’s The Total Economic Impact™ of Microsoft Azure study, Sentinel is 48% cheaper and 67% faster to deploy than other on-premises SIEM systems.

How Does Sentinel Work?

Sentinel’s functions include:

• Detect new threats.
• Reducing the number of false positives.
• Using artificial intelligence to analyze possibly dangerous activities. We will talk about it later.
• Collect data from users, devices, applications… in the cloud.
• Automate certain tasks to respond to incidents. This automation helps reduce the average response time to potential threats.

Sentinel draws on company data in real-time through connectors to data sources such as Office 365, Microsoft 365 Defender or Azure Kubernetes Service. Since it supports open standard formats such as CEF and Syslog, it can collect data from more places.

Also, it integrates with in-house applications or other security products. If needed, other security information and machine learning models can be added to it.

Threat Search with Integrated Queries

Security threats can be examined with internal search and query tools. To find threats missed by scheduled scans, there are built-in Microsoft Sentinel search queries. By performing these queries on data sources, you do not have to wait for the system to automatically detect a threat.

Moreover, the conclusions drawn from these queries can be used to design customized detection rules to help deal with threats.

Azure Services on Microsoft Sentinel

Microsoft Sentinel already includes:

• Log Analytics, to edit and run log queries from the data already obtained. In addition, logs are analyzed to obtain trends that serve the business.
  Logic Apps, to design and launch low-code automated workflows. Since only little programming knowledge is required for this, many employees can design their own workflows. At the same time, automation saves time on certain tasks.

In addition, Azure Firewall integrates with Azure Sentinel to support detection and prevention. This tool detects network traffic with suspiciously malicious activity, so that potential threats are quickly eliminated.

Artificial Intelligence

To improve threat detection and analysis, Microsoft Sentinel has built-in machine learning. Artificial intelligence is ‘trained’ by analyzing billions of signals every day.

Creation of Customized Books

With Microsoft Sentinel, customized data workbooks are created. These workbooks are used to visualize the data, and do not require extensive programming skills to design, which helps workers with less technical knowledge.

Benefits of Azure Sentinel for Your Business

The main benefit of Azure Sentinel is that it strengthens the security of the cloud and simplifies the collection of data from various places (servers, users, applications…) in a single panel. This makes the tool ideal for companies that are in or transitioning to the cloud. In addition, it is suitable for corporations of any size.

Moreover, the use of artificial intelligence speeds up the identification of potential threats. Also, its customization capabilities allow customizing the ways of threat detection and how to visualize them in a control panel.

In addition, being scalable, it can be adapted to the security needs of each moment, with the necessary infrastructure expansion and maintenance facilities.

At Plain Concepts, we are experts in cybersecurity. We build customized strategies to secure your data, strengthen external access or migrate information easily. We are specialists in Azure or Microsoft Office 365, as well as partners of the National Cryptologic Center (CCN) of Spain, which certifies us to implement the guidelines of the National Security Scheme on Microsoft Office 365 and Azure. And speaking of certifications, our team is continuously trained to obtain new knowledge about IT security.

You can take our Zero Trust and Identity Maturity Status, Secure Identities and Access, or Secure Multi-Cloud Environments workshops in order to check the status of your cybersecurity. We even have a SIEM Plus XDR Workshop to get an in-depth understanding of Microsoft Sentinel. And then, how else can we help you?