Microsoft Sentinel Reviews

I'm an IT consultant, and I use Sentinel with two of my clients to monitor all their security signals and get alerts when things are happening that might be suspicious.

The fact that the solution helps automate routine tasks and the finding of high-value alerts has made it possible for me to provide security operations. If I didn't have automation, I wouldn't be able to do that. Nobody is going to pay me to sit and stare at a screen for eight hours a day. But with the automation built in to let me know about and fix things, it becomes viable. The automations have an email option, and all the alerts show up as emails in my inbox. I'm busy with other things, and I'm not looking at Sentinel all day. And the automation in those emails is available to deal with things automatically. Automation is incredibly important.

Sentinel gives me one XDR dashboard. In terms of security operations, it's improved them and makes it easy for me to do my job.

It saves my clients time, on the order of 30 percent.

It also saves costs for me and my clients. If we didn't have Sentinel in place, and they were to get compromised, it could cost them tens of thousands of dollars due to ransomware, a BEC scam, or another type of attack. Without Sentinel in place, that could be a very big cost.

And it decreases the time it takes to detect and respond by days, if not weeks.

My clients are small businesses, and mine is also a small business. Traditionally, even the concept of using a SIEM in most small businesses was unheard of. It was an on-premises product, and you needed to install servers, and most normal IT consultants wouldn't even look at it because it would be very complex for them. The standout feature of Sentinel is that, because it's cloud-based and because it's from Microsoft, it integrates really well with all the other Microsoft products. It's really simple to set up and get going. You don't have to set up a server or do a lot of configuring and setting up storage. It just lives in the cloud, you turn it on, and connecting most things to it is really easy.

It's fantastic when it comes to integration with other Microsoft products. It's so easy. I've been in IT for 30 years, and integrating products was, up until a few years ago, something we would never want to do. It was so hard, we wouldn't want to touch it. We would have to write custom code and configure things. It was just horrible. Now, it's literally a couple of sliders in the interface, and you're done.

And once these solutions are integrated, they work natively together to deliver coordinated detection and response across my clients' environments. I follow this space very closely, but I am not an expert in any other solution. Still, at least for my clients, with the threats they are facing and the alerts we get from the real world, Sentinel's detection and response are very comprehensive.

Sentinel enables you to ingest data from the entire ecosystem. I have integrated some non-Microsoft products with Sentinel, and, predictably, it's not as simple as one click because these are third-party products. But it is definitely quite easy. For cloud products and services, it's still very simple. It might be three or four clicks. But for on-premises products, it's a bit more work.

My clients also use Defender for Cloud, and its bi-directional sync capabilities are very important. It makes things much easier.

Sentinel provides a clear view into the threats that are coming in, and, compared to what I had before, it is night and day. I heard somebody say on a podcast, "The solution we had prior to Sentinel was like a dark room and you had a torch, and you could shine the torch in different directions and see some things. Having Sentinel, combined with Microsoft 365 Defender, the XDR solution, is like turning on the lights and seeing everything." I completely agree. That's exactly what it feels like.

Another incredibly important factor is the solution's ability to investigate threats and respond holistically from one place. Again, as a small business, I wouldn't have the time and energy to look in several different places. I need one place where it all shows up, and that's what Sentinel provides.

And with built-in SOAR, UEBA, and threat intelligence, the comprehensiveness of Sentinel's security protection is good.

Given that I am in the small business space, I wish they would make it easier to operate Sentinel without being a Sentinel expert. Examples of things that could be easier are creating alerts and automations from scratch and designing workbooks. All of those are available as templates and community-produced content, but doing all that from scratch and keeping it up-to-date, is not easy. Because I have lots of other things on my plate, it would really improve things for me if they would make it more accessible for small businesses and non-experts.

I have been using Microsoft Sentinel since it was in public preview, so that's at least three and a half years.

It's a very stable solution—rock-solid.

It's also very scalable.

I have only ever contacted them about Sentinel once, but I have certainly dealt with Microsoft support in various ways. Their response time is pretty good. But they have a difficult time providing good support, at the level that would cause me to give them a higher score than six out of 10, because things change so fast. And it's so much wider than it used to be 10 years ago. There's so much to cover, and that's difficult for them.

We used ESET for one client, but it wasn't a SIEM, it was just endpoint protection. We replaced that with Defender for Endpoint, Defender for Identity, Defender for Cloud Apps, and Sentinel. It's not an apples-to-apples comparison.

The initial deployment is very straightforward. It took me four or five hours to set it up.

The product itself, obviously, does not require maintenance, but the alerts and rules require work.

Sentinel is fairly priced and pretty cost-effective. Compared to on-premises solutions, Sentinel is very cost-effective.

It's certainly possible, if you're not careful about what you connect, to shoot yourself in the foot by ending up with large data sources being ingested that cost you a fair bit of money. You do need to think about what data sources you actually need, which ones will lead to the detection of actual attackers, and how much of that data you need. You also have to consider how you're going to store it, because Sentinel has different levels. You don't have to store it all in the expensive "this will give me alerts" tiers. But, as I said, my clients are small businesses. They certainly don't have a budget for anything expensive, and they're very happy with the costs.

Do a proof of concept. It's really easy to set up and get started. You don't have to turn everything on to start. Do a small proof of concept, get familiar with it, and you'll see how easy it is.

Does it help prioritize threats across the enterprise? The short answer is, "Yes, it does." The slightly longer answer is that it is not a set-and-forget solution. And no SIEM is. You do need to configure Sentinel and fine-tune it. I have a calendar reminder every two weeks to go back in and make sure the right analytics rules are in place and change the ones that need changing, et cetera. It does prioritize threats, but it's not an automatic process that you never have to worry about again.

Sentinel's threat intelligence doesn't really help with proactive steps. The threat intelligence has indicators of compromise, such as IP addresses, URLs, and file hashes. They get detected, but that's not really proactive. Perhaps it's "proactive" in the sense that somebody else has figured out that those things are bad and let the system know. But Microsoft 365 Defender does the proactive part because it has threat intelligence in it. It will tell you, "A new threat that we have a report on seems to be targeting your type of client." That's proactive, but Sentinel isn't proactive. Meaning, if you read about a threat and then protect yourself before that threat reaches you, Sentinel doesn't really do that.

In the debate about best-of-breed versus a single-vendor security solution, if you pick best-of-breed individual security solutions and you have to integrate them, now you're an integrator. And that is hard. It's not easy to integrate different security products. And that's why, at least for my clients, Sentinel and Microsoft 365 Defender have been a huge shift. They're so easy to integrate. My clients could license separate products and then try to integrate them to get the same level of integration, but that would never work.

Every day, I log into Microsoft Sentinel to check the logs. I start by checking the incidents and analyzing them. If I need to create an automatic rule, I do so. If the logic needs to be changed, I make the necessary adjustments. I am responsible for managing Microsoft Sentinel for our organization.

For our organization, Microsoft Sentinel helps us prioritize threats across most of our environment because we have not yet fully integrated the solution into all aspects of our operations. Currently, we are working on integrating mutual source AWS into Sentinel, which will provide us with more visibility. Apart from that, there is already a lot of visibility in case of any failures or anyone attempting large deployments across other companies or similar activities. Additionally, if someone attempts to use login information from a different location, it becomes apparent, as it is impossible to travel that quickly. Sentinel covers almost everything.

We are using Microsoft Office 365 for email security in our environment. Our infrastructure engineers have integrated Microsoft Office 365 with Sentinel. When we view the old connectors in the application, it mentions Microsoft Office 365. Currently, it also indicates this in terms of firmware.

Microsoft Sentinel can enable us to ingest data from our entire ecosystem. However, since we are currently receiving services from an external source, we are not integrating the tool right now. That's why we are looking for another tool that we can integrate with Microsoft Sentinel. Once we do that, I believe we will be able to see everything, including any malware-related issues, as well as other security and licensing concerns.

The ingestion of data into our security operations is of utmost importance. If we are not monitoring whether people are sending large documents to other companies, how will we realize it? We don't have any other tool for that. Of course, we have email security and EDR, which cover some aspects, but some of them are not effective or are too basic. Unlike them, Microsoft Sentinel is comprehensive. It records everything: every click, download, login, and search. Therefore, it is a necessary tool for our operations.

Microsoft Sentinel allows us to investigate threats and respond quickly from a unified dashboard. A couple of months ago, there was a concern with the AWS environment, and our director asked us to identify any relevant code-related alerts originating from the environment. Since we didn't have the rules at that time, I looked into the recommended analytics section, which turned out to be quite straightforward. When we write Python or work with any logs, cells, or Java-related elements, Microsoft Sentinel provides us with insights and a logical approach to integrating our environment. During my investigation, I discovered some configurations related to the Python code, and it appears to be functioning well now.

Microsoft Sentinel's built-in SOAR, UEBA, and threat intelligence capabilities work well and are further enhanced with the addition of a firewall for added protection.

Before our organization implemented Microsoft Sentinel, we only had an email security DLP solution and some other tools. While we could see the logs on our computer, they were often presented in a confusing manner, appearing like gibberish to us. However, with the introduction of Sentinel, we can now interpret and make sense of that information.

When I joined the organization, they were already in the process of implementing Microsoft Sentinel. However, I am familiar with other integrations with Sentinel, such as AWS, and the integration is not difficult. We simply create the necessary resources, and everything is well-documented, which is a huge plus. We can access all the information online, both in the AWS part and in Microsoft Sentinel. So, I believe it's not rocket science.

It helps automate routine tasks and aids in identifying high-value alerts. We have automated the tool to receive critical or high alerts and send us messages accordingly. This automation is currently active. Whenever a high alert is generated, it comes through direct messages. Even during non-working hours, I receive these alerts on my phone immediately. If it's an important alert, I can respond promptly. We had an incident where I had to work on weekends due to such an alert. However, if I'm not using the tool or haven't activated it, I generally don't turn on the computer after work hours. So, this feature has been beneficial for us. Some months ago, there was a Microsoft bug that created false positive alerts for every clean link, including company links. We made modifications to the alerts, and now we no longer receive those unnecessary alerts.

It helps eliminate the need to look at multiple dashboards by providing us with just one XDR dashboard. We no longer have to go to other places. However, there are instances when we receive alerts about failing servers, and we can't check them using Sentinel; instead, we have to use Azure Active Directory. It's not Sentinel's fault, and checking through Azure Active Directory is not difficult, but we still have to go somewhere else.

Sentinel's threat intelligence assists us in preparing for potential threats before they strike, allowing us to take necessary precautions. My weekly routine includes dedicating at least two hours to the accounting part. I am constantly searching for any threats in our environment that may have gone unnoticed. So far, I haven't found anything, but I'm always vigilant because we can never be entirely certain that there are no threats.

We have been enabled to save a significant amount of time. The log files consist of hundreds of pages, and to review them, we need to possess networking knowledge to identify the specific case. Without knowing what we are searching for, it's like trying to find a needle in a haystack. Sentinel migrates the logs and presents the visual information in a user-friendly manner, which has proven to be a time-saving solution for us.

Sentinel saves money by reducing the number of people required to monitor the alerts. For example, if there are normally 50 alerts per week, fine-tuning reduces them to just one.

Microsoft Sentinel helps decrease our time to detect and time to resolve. Sentinel provides a brief introduction to the events occurring in the environment when someone is causing instability in the AWS environment. Sentinel precisely identifies the issue and offers a link for accessing more information about the situation.

The dashboard that allows me to view all the incidents is the most valuable feature. Threat hunting is also valuable. Sentinel has a Microsoft framework, so we can experiment with numerous queries. There are almost 500 queries available that we can utilize based on our environment.

I believe one of the challenges I encountered was the absence of live training sessions, even with the option to pay for them. Microsoft insists that all information is available in the documentation, which I must admit is quite comprehensive and helpful. However, for someone without a coding background, learning solely from the documents can be challenging at times. It would be much easier to learn if there were practical exercises and instructional videos available. This aspect bothered me significantly. While I did come across a course, my preference was to access it through Sentinel since they are already providing us with their services. Having the team trained up would undoubtedly streamline my job and save a considerable amount of time.

I have been using Microsoft Sentinel for one year.

We have not had any scalability issues with Microsoft Sentinel.

Microsoft Sentinel is scalable. We can add as many services as we want, and Microsoft automatically increases the capacity by adding memory and storage.

I have used technical support many times. Sometimes, I have a really hard time understanding them. I am not sure if they are calling from India, but there was background noise at times. However, they are really helpful, even though they seem a bit indifferent. They frequently inquire whether we have addressed the issue and if it has been resolved—quite a lot, actually.

In a company, we are often very busy. They expect us to address the issues immediately, but sometimes it can take months. So, I inform them that I will follow up. They can be a little pushy, which is understandable from their perspective, but for us, it can be challenging because we have many other tasks to handle. Sentinel is just one of my priorities, and there are a lot of other things I need to take care of. That's why sometimes we need time, but to their credit, they are always responsive. Whenever we ask them a question, they promptly provide a response.

Positive

I had previously used Kibana, which is quite different from Microsoft Sentinel. When I used Microsoft Sentinel for the first time, I realized that this was the ideal solution. Microsoft Sentinel is user-friendly, unlike Kibana, which I found difficult to install and not very user-friendly. Microsoft Sentinel, on the other hand, is incredibly user-friendly, making it easy for everyone to understand and learn how to use it. It is a straightforward solution to comprehend.

I give Microsoft Sentinel a nine out of ten.

We are currently evaluating Microsoft Defender and CrowdStrike in our environment to determine which one is a better fit. As for Defender, I cannot claim to have a complete understanding of it since it's in a testing environment. I can monitor people's devices, but I have not yet received any alerts generated by the devices. It has only been around ten days.

I am responsible for creating documentation for all of our implementations, while other teams handle the infrastructure portion.

Maintenance is minimal for Microsoft Sentinel. There is a check button in the house. Sometimes I go there because we occasionally find that some things are not working properly. So we have to go there and address the issue, but it is not a common occurrence. Maybe it happens, like, three times a year which is not bad.

When Exchange email is outside the domain, we have found sometimes that there are phishing emails. With the help of Microsoft Defender only, without Sentinel, we would not be able to track them. A couple of times data was compromised. With Sentinel, what we have done is integrate Microsoft Endpoint for Defender, M365 Defender, and our Exchange Online for all the email communications in and out.

With the investigation and threat-hunting services in Sentinel, we have been able to track and map our complete traffic: Where it started from, where it was intercepted, and where the files were downloaded and exchanged. We have been able to see how a phishing email was entering our domain. Accordingly, we understood that we needed to develop or modify some rules in Exchange and now, we do not have any phishing emails.

Sentinel enables us to investigate threats and respond holistically from one place to all of the attack techniques, such as MITRE ATT&CK, manual, DDoS, and brute force attacks. They are quickly identified by Sentinel. That is of high importance because we don't use any other product with Microsoft. Our SOC team continuously analyzes and monitors Sentinel, the activities and events that are happening. That team needs to be equipped with all of the real-time data we are getting from our ecosystem.

We have also integrated our SIEM with multiple firewalls and proxies. The traffic in and out, coming from the firewalls and proxies, is intercepted by Sentinel. We are now getting granular visibility into our traffic. We can see the hits we are getting from various regions, such as the hits that recently came from Russia. We have multiple such attacks on our firewall front end and we have been able to develop more granular rules on our firewalls.

And for DLP we have the help of protection from Microsoft Information Protection labels that we have defined for our data. Whenever this labeled data is shared, the data is limited to the recipients who were specified in the email. Similarly, our OneDrive data has been secured with the MIP Labels. All of this tracking is happening on Sentinel, which is giving us a broader view of where our data is traveling within and outside our organization as well.

People tend to go with Microsoft because it provides you with 360-degree protection, protecting your files, network, infra, and cloud environment. Each of its products is linked and interacts with the others. Microsoft Defender for Cloud will interact with Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps, for example. And both of them can interact with Sentinel. Sentinel is the central SIEM in Microsoft and has the ability to take all the instructions from all of these Microsoft products and it gives you a central dashboard view in Azure. That helps manage infrastructure and identify threats. It's a single pane of glass. That's why Microsoft is gaining compared to other products.

Eliminating our multiple dashboards was a little tough in the beginning, but the Microsoft support team's expertise helped us create our own dashboard. Previously, when we started integrating all the products, it was very hard for us to give a broader review to management. It was only something the technical guys could do because they know what all those events mean. But when it came to a dashboard and presenting the data to the stakeholders, it was very tough. With the help of Microsoft's expert engineers, we were able to create dashboards into Sentinel, as well as with the help of Azure dashboards and Microsoft Power BI, and we were able to present the data.

We got Sentinel to send the data to Microsoft Power BI and that helped us create some very useful and easy dashboards so that our stakeholders and senior-level management, who are non-technical guys, could understand much better how we are utilizing this product. They can see how much we are making use of it to investigate, hunt, and track the incidents and events, and the unnecessary accessing of applications in the environment. As a result, we started to put granular controls in place and restrict unnecessary websites.

The watchlist is one of the features that we have found to be very helpful. We had some manual data in our Excels that we used to upload to Sentinel. It gives us more insightful information out of that Excel information, including user identities, IP addresses, hostnames, and more. We relate that data with the existing data in Sentinel and we understand more.

Another important feature is the user behavior analytics, UEBA. We can see how our users are behaving and if there is malicious behavior such as an atypical travel alert or a user is somewhere where he is not regularly found. Or, for example, if a user does not generally log in at night but we suddenly find him active at night, the user behavior analytics feature is very useful. It contains information from Azure Identity as well as Office 365.

With the E5 license, we have Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps, Microsoft Information Protection, Defender for Cloud, and Defender for Office 365. All of these products are integrated with Sentinel because it has those connectors. With both Microsoft and non-Microsoft products it can be integrated easily. We also have ASA on-premises firewalls and we have created a connector and have been sending those syslogs to Sentinel to analyze the traffic. That is the reason we are able to reverse-investigate and hunt threats going on in our network, end to end.

Sentinel enables us to ingest data from our entire ecosystem. In addition to integrating our Cisco ASA Firewall logs, we get our Palo Alto proxy logs and some on-premises data coming from our hardware devices. We also get our Azure Firewall logs, and the logs from the Microsoft 360 bunch of products, like MIP and Defender for Cloud, Defender for Cloud Apps, et cetera.

When I think about the kinds of attack techniques that you are not able to understand at eye level, the AI/ML logic being used by Sentinel helps an administrator understand them in layman's language. It tells you that something has been identified as a malicious event or activity being performed by a user. All of those details are mentioned in an understandable manner. That is very important and is one way Sentinel is playing a wider role in our environment.

We use Microsoft Defender for Cloud and from that we get our regulatory compliance, recommendations, CSPM recommendations, cost recommendations, cost-optimizing strategies, and techniques for things like purchasing reserve instances. It helps us reduce the number of unused VMs or turn off VMs if they're not in production, as well as DevOp VMs in the early hours. We also use it for applying multi-factor authentications for users and reducing the number of owner or administrator roles that are assigned to subscriptions.

And the bi-directional sync capabilities of Defender for Cloud with other Microsoft products is near real-time, taking a couple of seconds. Within a minute, the information is updated, always, for all of the products that are integrated. Some products have a latency of around 4 to 12 hours of latency to update.

The following would be a challenge for any product in the market, but we have some in-house apps in our environment. We were thinking of getting the activities of those apps into Sentinel so that it could apply user behavior analytics to them. But our apps were built with different parameters and the APIs for them are not present in Sentinel. We are working with Microsoft to build those custom APIs that we require. That is currently in progress. 

We are happy with the product, but when it comes to integrating more things, it is a never-ending task. Wherever we have a new application, we wish that Sentinel could also monitor and investigate it. But that's not possible for everything.

I have used Microsoft Sentinel for around two years now.

It is scalable, with the help of the log retention facility in Sentinel in the Log Analytics workspace. We can limit the data that is being retained in it and that limits the cost.

We have it deployed across multiple sites.

In the beginning, it was not so good, but when we switched from standard support to premium support, the support improved.

I have been using QRadar and Splunk, but they both only gave me a centralized SIEM solution, a SOAR, and a VAPT solution. But I wanted to reduce the efforts required when jumping into different portals at different points in time. The way things stood, I had to hire different engineers to maintain those different portals and products. With the help of Sentinel, I could integrate all of my applications with Sentinel, as the APIs were ready and the support for them from Microsoft was good. That's why we thought of moving to Sentinel.

It was pretty hard to convince the stakeholders to invest so much in protecting the ecosystem through investigating and hunting, which is mainly what Sentinel is for. The integration part comes later. But convincing the stakeholders about the cost we would be incurring was a big challenge.

Slowly but surely, we started integrating many of our products into Sentinel and it started showing us things on the dashboard. And with the help of the Logic Apps, we were able to do multiple other things, like automatically creating tickets out of the incidents that are detected by Sentinel, and assigning them to the SOC team. It reduced the SOC team's workload because they used to manually investigate activities and events. Sentinel killed those manual tasks and started giving "ready-made" incidents to work on and mitigate. It has helped my SOC team because that team was facing a lot of issues with workload.

Then we also got visibility into different products, like Microsoft Defender, and Defender for Cloud Apps, whereas we used to have to jump into different portals to see and analyze the logs. Now, we don't have to go to any other product. All the integration is happening with Sentinel, and with the help of the AI/ML in Sentinel, investigating and threat-hunting have become easier.

It took around six months for us to realize these benefits because we were slowly integrating things, one by one, into it. We were a little late in identifying the awesome capabilities it has.

Most of our products are integrated but a few of our products are facing challenges getting connected. We are dealing with it with Microsoft and they are creating a few connectors for us.

We had to pay extra compared to what we would pay for other products in the market. But you have to lose something to gain something. Sentinel reduced the efforts we are putting into monitoring different products on different portals, and reduced the different kinds of expertise we needed for that process. Now, there are two to three people handling Sentinel.

The pricing was a big concern and it was very hard to explain to our stakeholders why they should bear the licensing cost and the Log Analytics cost. And the maintenance and use costs were on the higher side compared to other products. But the features and capabilities were going to ease things for my operations and SOC teams. Finally, the stakeholders had clarity.

Microsoft is costlier. Some organizations may not be able to afford the cost of Sentinel orchestration and the Log Analytics workspace. The transaction hosting cost is also a little bit on the high side, compared to AWS and GCP. But because it gives a 360-degree combination of security products that are linked with each other, Microsoft is getting more market share compared to Splunk, vScaler, or CrowdStrike.

But if I want to protect my files, to see where my files have been sent, or if the file I'm receiving is free of malware, or even if one of my users has tried to open it, Windows Defender would track it first. The ATP (Advanced Threat Protection) scans my emails and the attachments first. It determines if the attachment is safe and, if it is not safe, it will block it. I don't have to create any granular or manual settings. That connectivity across different products has a brighter future. That's the reason, even though we have a small budget, that we are shifting to Microsoft.

There are competitive applications in the market, like vScaler, Splunk, QRadar, and CrowdStrike. These are also good in terms of their features and capabilities. But these products only work as a SIEM or VAPT solution. They won't scan everything that we need to protect.

But if you are only considering SOAR, I prefer CrowdStrike because of cost and the features it provides. The AI/ML is also more developed compared to Sentinel.

But why Sentinel? Because it not only covers Microsoft products, but it also has API connectors to connect with any non-Microsoft products. It has inbound APIs for connectivity to QRadar, vScaler, or Splunk, so we can bring their data into Sentinel to be analyzed. Splunk is doing its job anyway, but Sentinel can filter the information and use it to investigate things. 

Those have great visibility and great potential over Sentinel. But for products that are out of the ecosystem, those competitive solutions might face issues in connecting or integrating with them.

We have created a logic app that creates tickets in our service desk. Whenever a ticket is raised, it is automatically assigned to one of the members of our SOC team. They investigate, or reverse-investigate, and track the incident.

Every solution requires continuous maintenance. We cannot rely on AI/ML for everything. Whenever there is a custom requirement or we want to do something differently, we do sit with the team to create the required analytic rules, et cetera. It doesn't involve more than three to four people.

In terms of the comprehensiveness of Sentinel when it comes to security, it plays a wide role in analysis, including geographical analysis, of our multiple sites. It is our centralized eye where we can have a complete analysis and view of our ecosystem.

Go with a single vendor security suite if you have the choice between that and a best-of-breed strategy. It is better to have a single vendor for security in such a complex environment of multiple vendors, a vendor who would understand all the requirements and give you a central contact. And the SLA for response should be on the low side in that situation, as Microsoft, with its premium support, gives an SLA of an immediate callback, within two to three minutes of creating a ticket.

My customers mainly want to correlate logs so that they have a single point for their log information. In addition to correlating logs, they want to automate tasks.

Microsoft Sentinel is just a "watch tower" to get all the logs and manage threats. After that, you have the Microsoft Defender products that help to reduce threats. For example, Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is an anti-virus and EDR that helps to eliminate threats on devices such as laptops and smartphones. Microsoft Defender for Office 365 enables protection for Teams, Mail, or SharePoint, and Microsoft Defender for Identity helps to reduce risk on Active Directory or Azure AD. So Microsoft Defender products are the tools for reducing threats, and Microsoft Sentinel is the tool for analyzing incidents and threats.

Each time I deploy Sentinel, it helps the client get information about the overall security of their IT system. It brings together all the logs in a single place, so it's easy to track attacks and get information about breaches.

It also eliminates having to look at multiple dashboards. If you centralize the logs, you don't need to go to the firewall to get alerts or to the antivirus console or to a network device. You get everything in a single place, which means you have incidents in a single place, and then you can have a dashboard. You can check the built-in dashboard, or you can create one on your own, and these dashboards can be refreshed automatically or you can refresh them whenever you want.

The solution is well integrated with the Microsoft environment, so if a customer has a lot of Microsoft services, such as M365 or Azure, the solution fits well in their environment. Because I deploy solutions in general, I also use Microsoft Defender for Endpoint, Microsoft Defender for Identity, Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps, and Microsoft Defender for Office 365. It's really straightforward to integrate these products. You have just to check a box and all the logs from these products go to Sentinel. And if the customer has a Microsoft 365 E5 license, the Defender logs are free.

It also helps to prioritize threats across an enterprise. When you receive an alert of an incident, you can categorize it as a low, medium, or high priority. That's really important because sometimes low-priority incidents are just false positives. We need to categorize incidents to get to the high-risk incidents.

Sentinel also enables you to ingest data from your entire ecosystem and not just from the Microsoft ecosystem. It can receive data from third-party vendors' products such as firewalls, network devices, and antivirus solutions. It's not only a Microsoft solution, it's for everything. There are native connectors to get information from third-party vendors, but if you don't have a connector for something, you can get information from protocols such as syslog.

It's really important that Sentinel allows you to investigate threats and respond holistically from one place. It's important to know where an attacker went. For example, an attacker could go through a firewall and then to a specific application, and you need to know where the attacker started first.

When you enable this feature, Sentinel automatically gets information about the users and devices, and you can then search for specific entities. For example, if you know that a specific user is at risk, you can enter the username and get all the information about the user: on which device he's connected, to which servers he's connected, and what he did on these devices, among other things. This ability is important to a breach.

With Sentinel, you have some built-in rules to automate tasks. You can also create your own automation based on Logic Apps in Azure. You can do what you want with scripting with PowerShell or Python. The first time you have a given incident, you do some troubleshooting and when you write up this incident you can create a knowledge base. Once this knowledge base is done, you can try to automate the troubleshooting. If you do it via automation, you can close this incident because the incident will be managed automatically with Sentinel. And that helps you to save time.

Sentinel should be improved with more connectors. At the moment, it only covers a few vendors. If I remember correctly, only 100 products are supported natively in Sentinel, although you can connect them with syslog. But Microsoft should increase the number of native connectors to get logs into Sentinel. Each time we have a connector, it eases the configuration of Sentinel, and we don't need custom deployments to get the information from a specific vendor. 

The second thing they should do is create more built-in rules for the dashboard, automation, and hunting. The first time you use Sentinel, it's not easy to use the product because, beyond the dashboards, you need to know the Kusto Query Language (KQL) to create the right requests.

I have been using Microsoft Sentinel for two years. I implemented the solution for a customer a couple of months ago.

There is no problem with the stability of Sentinel. It's really stable. I have never experienced an issue with accessing the product.

It's a SaaS solution, so you don't need to scale it. It scales by itself. 

If you need a multi-tenant implementation, for example, if you have a SOC and you have several customers, you can get your own Sentinel, and you can ask the customers to deploy Sentinel in their environments. You can then gather logs from several Sentinels in a single point.

I haven't contacted Microsoft for support of Sentinel, but each time I contacted them for other products, it was a bad experience. The technical support of Microsoft is a negative point because, most of the time, they don't have the answer.

I used QRadar and a Symantec solution, but that was 10 years ago.

The first deployment was not complex. The first step, when you want to connect a solution to Sentinel, is pretty straightforward. When you want to use the built-in dashboard, it's also straightforward. But once you want to do some customization, like a custom dashboard, custom automation, or custom hunting rule, it can be complex because you have to know several languages, how Log Analytics works, and how Logic Apps works for automation.

Most of the time, I deploy a single Sentinel in a single location because it is a worldwide SaaS solution. And most of the time I deploy Sentinel to be used on-premises and in Azure, and I deploy Azure Sentinel for a SOC team. I have never deployed a multi-tenant Azure Sentinel setup, although it's possible to do.

In the beginning, when a customer uses Sentinel, they cannot use it on their own. They require some assistance. That is why, after deployment, a consultant is usually onsite two days per month to add some connectors and custom rules, and to end some incidents.

Sentinel is a pay-as-you-go solution. To use it, you need a Log Analytics workspace. This is where the logs are stored and the cost of Log Analytics is based on gigabytes. You can get a discount of 10 percent if you get to 100 terabytes of data. On top of that, there is the cost of Sentinel, which is about €2 per gigabyte.

If a customer has an M365 E5 license, the logs that come from Microsoft Defender are free.

The solution is really easy to deploy compared to other solutions such as Splunk.

Taking proactive steps to prevent breaches is a default. It's not like competitors on the market. Sentinel doesn't give you advice about how to set some settings on your device to protect them from a specific breach. But you can use Microsoft Defender for Endpoint for devices and it helps you to know if a device is breachable from a specific attack and how to be protected against it.

The cost and ease of use of Sentinel compared with other standalone SIEM and SOAR solutions depends on whether the customer has the whole stack, meaning an M365 E5 license. If so, they get a really good discount because all the logs from Microsoft Defender are free. But if they don't have an M365 E5 license, those logs are not free and the solution can be expensive.

We haven't evaluated other options recently because our customer wanted Sentinel. But one of the differences I see between Sentinel and competitors' solutions is in the normalization of logs. With Sentinel, normalization is done automatically, whereas with other solutions, you need time to do the normalization manually. By "normalization" I mean lining up the fields. For example, in some logs, the time is in the first field, while in other logs, the description is in the first field. You need to sort the fields, but this task is done automatically by Sentinel.

Before using Sentinel, I recommend reading the documentation and watching the YouTube Ninja Training channel. They go through all options for Sentinel. 

In addition, I recommend knowing KQL—it's a requirement—and how to automate tasks in Azure. Other than these points, Sentinel is easy to enter because if you have a native connector, it's just "next, next, next." But when you want to do customization, it can sometimes be hard to do what you want.

When you look at going with a best-of-breed strategy versus a single vendor's security stack, it depends on the strategy of the customer. Sometimes, the customer prefers to get all its security products from a single vendor because they get discounts when they do that. Other customers prefer to have several vendors for security reasons. From my point of view, there is no correct answer. If I were responsible for the security of a company, I think I would prefer to use an all-Microsoft security stack because it's easier to interconnect the solutions and you get more information as a result.

I'm currently using this solution for monitoring our SOC. I also implement Sentinel for clients.

We use Defender for Cloud, Defender for Endpoint, Defender for Office 365, and Defender for Identity. They were easy to integrate. It's necessary to understand the background of the data source to integrate the devices into Sentinel. If it is cloud-based, we can utilize the GeoLogic app or Azure function to integrate the log sources or use the slot method.

These solutions work natively together to deliver coordinated detection and response across our enterprise. We have different EDR solutions in our environment, and we have integrated them with Sentinel. We directly monitor all of the other security devices from Sentinel.

I haven't seen many issues with integrating different products. We can set a robust error detection mechanism. If there are some issues while integrating the logs, we can do automated alerting and easily troubleshoot any issues.

There are no issues with integrating multiple-location firewalls. We have Sentinel deployed in the US and other geolocations.

There are between 15 to 20 people using this solution in my team.

The solution is deployed on the cloud.

We mainly use this solution for monitoring purposes. We previously used on-premises data sources, but we wanted to integrate lots of log sources that weren't directly supported by other solutions. Sentinel provides the capability to integrate unsupported log sources. We have integrated lots of unsupported security devices with Sentinel as well.

Sentinel helps automate routine tasks and helps automate the finding of high-value alerts. Microsoft provides some very useful out-of-box automation playbooks that we can utilize in our day-to-day operations. This increases the efficiency of security analysts and our response time. We are using those solutions in our environment to do automation, increase productivity, and enhance the efficiency of our security analysts. Sentinel reduces our overall investigation time compared to other solutions.

Sentinel has helped eliminate the need to look at multiple dashboards. We can use the workbook for that. Correlating everything into a single workbook isn't available right now, but it's achievable in the future.

The solution's threat intelligence helps prepare us for potential threats before they hit and helps us take proactive steps. We have integrated one open-source solution for IOC monitoring, and Microsoft even provides the IOC data. To be proactive, we also rely on other solutions like Defender for Endpoint for detecting those threats before they actually happen.

We added IOCs into Sentinel from a monitoring perspective. If we can detect ransomware, we can prioritize that and work on mitigation.

Microsoft Sentinel saves us time. It has provided us with a very rich automation solution. We can see most of the details directly on the Sentinel site. We don't need to log in and check for different things, so it saves a lot of time for associates. It saves us about 30 to 40 minutes on average per incident.

The solution decreases our time to detect and respond. We can increase detection using dashboards. The automation and playbooks help us respond to threats if the user is compromised. We can directly reset the user's password or disable the user from the Sentinel portal by using the playbooks. We're saving about 15 to 20 minutes on our response times.

Sentinel is a Microsoft product, so they provide very robust use cases and analytic groups, which are very beneficial for the security team. I also like the ability to integrate data sources into the software for on-premise and cloud-based solutions. We can very easily integrate the devices with Sentinel. There are multiple ways that we can utilize the product. I also like how the solution processes data.

The solution helps prioritize threats across our enterprise. We can set the severity for the low and medium-priority severity incidents. Sentinel has machine learning and fusion rules, which help us effectively prioritize. Prioritization is very important for us in this security landscape because attacks are getting stronger.

Sentinel provides a lot of out-of-box analytic rules with Sentinel. It's very good at detecting threats compared to the different SIEM solutions in the market now.

Sentinel enables us to easily ingest data from our entire ecosystem. Attacks can happen from any of the devices. Even the IoT is vulnerable now. We can integrate different solutions for it. For instance, there is Microsoft Defender for IoT, which we can integrate into Sentinel. That provides a single pane of glass for security. In any SOC, we need to have multiple solutions. Sentinel is a great solution for managing and monitoring those products.

Sentinel enables us to investigate threats and respond holistically from one place. We can integrate other solutions like ServiceNow with Sentinel, and we can set the bidirectional sync.

Sentinel's security protection is comprehensive. In the area of UEBA, I use the entity behavior settings of Sentinel. It provides some enhancement in security monitoring, but it still needs some improvement regarding user and entity behavior.

There is room for improvement in entity behavior and the integration site. It's a new solution, so it can include different security products in the data connector section. I've also experienced some performance issues with the runbook. It takes a lot of time to load.

In the automation section, there are some limitations.

I have used this solution for two and a half years.

It is pretty stable. I haven't had any issues in the two and a half years that I've worked with Sentinel.

The price goes up whenever we integrate more log sources, but there aren't any issues with scalability. We can increase it very easily.

Technical support is good. They're very quick to respond when we raise a case.

I would rate technical support a nine out of ten.

Positive

Splunk is also the leader in this market. I prefer Sentinel because it's a Microsoft product that provides a lot of free and built-in use cases.

We switched to Sentinel because it's a cloud-native solution. On-premises solutions involve managing IT databases and doing some upgrade activities, but we don't need to manage any of that in Sentinel. We can focus directly on security monitoring and detection and response.

The setup was straightforward. I worked on multiple projects before the deployment of Sentinel.

The amount of time it takes to deploy the solution depends on the client's network area, the firewall, and log sources. We have deployed the solution for user bases of 4,000 to 5,000. Deployment was completed within one month by integrating all the required processes.

We had a team of three people for deployment. I took care of the integration of the log sources, and the other two people took care of the customization.

Sentinel doesn't require much maintenance.

We evaluated Splunk and a few other solutions.

I would rate this solution as nine out of ten. 

My advice is that colleagues who have worked on different solutions, whether on-premises or cloud, should use the Ninja training. Microsoft provides this training directly. It is publicly available and provides a better understanding of how to utilize the solution more effectively.

I think it's ideal to go with different vendors across our environment rather than a single vendor for security purposes.

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.

We are developing our security signals for Microsoft Sentinel, so we are making a connector for Microsoft Sentinel. We try to use several features.

When using mobile devices, if there is an attacker or malware, the signal goes to the Microsoft Sentinel console from there. Our IT admin looks at those incidents.

The importance of that for our organization is because we are using our mobile devices for work. Mobile devices are not safe enough.

I focus on mobile devices while using Microsoft Sentinel. Mainly we want to expand our Identity performers. 

The signal correlation and dashboards features of Microsoft Sentinel are fantastic because it correlates the signal logs with other products. The customizable dashboards are also valuable.

Microsoft Sentinel's ability to correlate data from multiple sources and its detection capabilities are essential.

Microsoft Sentinel can be improved in terms of automation or connecting with security products so that it is easier to use for general IT admins.

I started using Microsoft Sentinel last June, so it has been about a year.

I was not using any other solutions for this specific task before Microsoft Sentinel. We ultimately chose Microsoft Sentinel because we have partnerships.

We have not yet seen a return on investment with Microsoft Sentinel. We expect to see a return on investment this year. 

We try to use the security incidents feature in Microsoft Sentinel, but I have not seen the actual incident yet. I could not find good use cases. My experience with the collaboration capabilities of Microsoft Sentinel is limited, as I am still getting used to it.

I would rate Microsoft Sentinel a seven out of ten. 

We require a comprehensive, scalable solution for cyber threat protection. 

The interface is simple. It was easy to click through and to refer back and assess things. 

We can do frequent training sessions so that people or end users are able to get used to the system.

Microsoft Defender is proven to be able to incorporate with this product. We also utilize the Power BI dashboard. We wanted to monitor the logins. It's helpful for threat investigations. We're able to use the session queue report to identify the frameworks having issues.

The workflow is quite smart. Incidents alerts can be generated automatically. It has good automation capabilities and that helps us respond to incidents quickly.

Sentinel provide our customers with a unified set of tools to detect, investigate, and respond to incidents. It's actually a part of Defender. It's unified within the operating platform. This allows for the mobility of the end user.

Our customers use Sentinel to help secure hybrid cloud and multi-cloud environments. We do have a limited amount of space. Out of ten or so clients, five or six have adopted a cloud protection system.

We can use it with Microsoft Athena and we can manage compliance and see logs for analytics. Sentinel can correlate signals from first and third party sources into a single high-confidence incident. Since the process is automated, it makes our response times faster. This saves the team's time.

We do make use of the solution's AI capabilities. The machine learning is very mature. Its machine learning has been very good overall. It's also something that enhances response times and threat analysis. 

It's provided us with improved visibility into user and network behavior.

Sentinel has reduced the work involved in the event investigation by quite a lot.

From a client perspective, they'd like to see more cost savings. I'm not sure if Sentinel gives a POC for free.

I've been using the solution for two years.

The solution is very stable. We haven't received any complaints and haven't had outages.

The solution is easily scalable. Of course, we do have to do due diligence with our Oracle system architecture.

We have an SLA that says there will be a receiving engineer that will respond if the system is down. Technical support is great. They might have different tiers of service.

Positive

I did not personally deploy the product. I just work with it.

There is some maintenance. We do have a resident engineer that's certified on troubleshooting.

We have a technical partner that helps with deployment. 

The solution is less expensive than an APM option. If the client wants to have a complete solution that covers the whole big organization, a good option will be going with Microsoft Sentinel. For the features it has, the price is justified.

We are an SSI system integrator.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.

For those interested in adopting the solution, I'd suggest looking at the costing and billing and ensuring you have the budget and maybe doing a POC for 45 days or two months so that they can really experience the product.

I use the solution to ensure proper security analytics and threat intelligence across the enterprise. The tool helps me to know the type of attack detection that happens and the kind of visibility, proactive hunting, and threat response we have.

We use the tool because we want a solution that can quickly analyze large volumes of data across the enterprise. Microsoft Sentinel is a one-stop solution for all our security needs. It gives threat visibility, enables proactive hunting, and provides investigation reports.

The product can integrate with any device. It has connectors. So, we do not have big issues in building connectors. Microsoft Sentinel gives us a unified set of tools to detect, investigate, and respond to incidents. It also helps us recover things. It is very important to our organization. It centralizes our total threat collection and detection and generates investigation reports.

The AI capabilities must be improved. The product must efficiently leverage the AI capabilities for threat detection and response. The product does not provide auto-configuration features. So, we need to do configuration, policy changes, and group policies ourselves. If AI can do these functions, it will be easier for the customers.

I have been using the solution for three years.

The product is stable.

We have around 1500 users. We have only one administrator. The product is easily scalable. As long as the enterprise grows, we will continue using Microsoft Sentinel.

The technical support team is very good.

Positive

We were using Splunk before. We decided to switch to Microsoft Sentinel because we were unable to work on large data using Splunk. Splunk did not have AI capabilities and was not user-friendly.

The product is deployed on the cloud. It is a SaaS solution. The initial deployment was easy. We ensured that all the devices and the APIs were configured well. We needed two engineers from our team for the deployment. We have deployed the tool in a single location. The solution does not need any maintenance.

We took help from an integrator to deploy the tool. It was a user-friendly experience.

The solution is efficient. We could see the returns on investment immediately. It doesn’t take much time.

The product is costly compared to Splunk. When we pay for the product, we also have Azure Monitor Log Analytics as part of the package. It is economical for us.

We use the tool to help secure our cloud-native security solutions. By enabling us to secure our cloud environments, it acts as a single solution for attack detection and threat visibility for proactive hunting. The solution gives us a library of customizable content that helps us address our unique needs. It also gives regular patch updates. It helps us to be updated with the latest threats happening across the world.

We use the Microsoft Sentinel Content hub. Integration with Active Directory is also helpful for us. The content hub enables us to see the latest features. We have Extended Detection and Response in SentinelOne. It provides effective protection for the platform. It provides more cybersecurity by providing more visibility and protects our enterprise.

The content hub helps us centralize out-of-the-box security information and event management content. It discovers and manages the built-in content. It provides an end-to-end security for us.

Microsoft Sentinel correlates signals from first and third-party sources into a single high-confidence incident. It can extract the information through the respective APIs of the third parties. It has increased our threat intelligence, monitoring, and incident analysis efficiency.

We use Microsoft Sentinel's AI in automation. The generative AI features enable real-time threat hunting and detection. The solution has helped improve our visibility into user and network behavior. The generative AI provides better detection and response capabilities and faster response times with actionable intelligence.

The product has saved us time. It helps us get various log files. When there’s an incident, it enables us to do investigations faster. The tool saves us three days in a week. It reduces the work involved in our event investigation by streamlining the processes and making automation effective. Event investigation is much faster.

If someone is looking for a comprehensive solution, Microsoft Sentinel is a good choice. It will fulfill all our needs, including attack detection, threat visibility, and response.

Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

We utilize Microsoft Sentinel to monitor files for suspicious activities, such as unauthorized user login information, remote logins from outside the secure region, and primarily attachments.

Microsoft Sentinel offers good visibility into threats because we can integrate it with both Defender for Cloud and Defender for Endpoint. We conducted a test to determine the extent of visibility achievable through Sentinel integration, aiming to identify the primary sources of attacks.

We also use Microsoft Office 365, Defender for Cloud, and Defender for Endpoint.

When it concerns cybersecurity, particularly regarding zero-day attacks, Microsoft tends to promptly release TVEs. These updates enable us to patch systems that are susceptible to specific zero-day attacks.

Sentinel allows us to gather data from our entire ecosystem. We can install connectors or an agent on the user's system, or we can do it manually.

Sentinel enables us to investigate threats and respond promptly from a unified platform. Upon receiving alerts, we can navigate to the corresponding tab for analytics, where we can initiate an investigation to view comprehensive details about the threat's origin and its interactions.

It has assisted our organization in enhancing our preparedness and thwarting phishing emails and attacks. We encounter attacks on a daily basis from individuals attempting to execute scripts via websites. Every month, we can conduct simulations to train our personnel in recognizing and evading threats. Sentinel is particularly effective in mitigating risks posed by employees who click on dubious email attachments.

Sentinel assists in automating routine tasks and identifying high-value alerts. Although I haven't extensively used it, playbooks can be employed to create automated responses for alerts and to resolve them.

It assists in eliminating the need to utilize multiple dashboards. We configured one of our servers as a honeypot, enabling us to observe all access and related details from a unified dashboard.

The threat intelligence assists us in preparing for potential threats before they occur and taking any necessary proactive measures. When a potential threat is identified, we are also given recommendations on how to proceed.

Sentinel has helped decrease our time to detect and respond. The automation has reduced the time I spend on low-level threats, allowing me to focus on the priority threats.

Microsoft Sentinel comes preloaded with templates for teaching and analytics rules. we can also create our own.

We need to continually test and define analytics rules due to the possibility of triggering false positives if we simply use the preloaded templates and neglect them.

We attempted to integrate our Microsoft solutions, but we occasionally faced problems when connecting with other systems. While it functioned effectively with Linux and Unix systems, a Windows 11 update led to complications. Sentinel was unable to capture essential logs on certain computers. As a result, we were compelled to create two SIEMs using Splunk and QualysGuard. This was necessary because certain operating systems experienced issues, particularly after receiving updates.

Although Sentinel is a comprehensive security solution, it could be more user-friendly. When I started using it, it was a bit confusing. I think that certain features should be placed in separate tabs instead of being clustered together in one place.

The KQL query does not function effectively with Windows 11 machines, and in the majority of machine-based investigations, KQL queries are essential for organizing the data during investigations.

I have been using Microsoft Sentinel for two years.

I have not experienced any stability issues with Microsoft Sentinel.

Scaling is straightforward. For instance, if an organization opts to establish a new department and intends to add ten machines to that department, all that is required is to create a new load analysis workspace, incorporate the machines into that workspace, and subsequently link it to Sentinel.

Microsoft Sentinel requires an E5 license. When considering this from the perspective of a large enterprise organization, the cost might be justified. However, for smaller organizations, it is comparatively expensive when compared to other SIEM and SOAR solutions. Open-source SIEMs like OSSEC are also available. These can be integrated with other open-source tools to address similar issues as Microsoft Sentinel, often at minimal or no cost.

I would rate Microsoft Sentinel an eight out of ten.

Our Microsoft security solutions both cooperate and have limitations in working seamlessly together to provide coordinated detection and response across our environment. The individual who initially implemented these solutions did so in a manner that prevents us from accessing all the necessary information to effectively utilize Sentinel with a single administrative account, as intended.

Most of our servers are on-premises but we have two that are connected to Defender for Cloud. Those are mostly pickup servers.

Microsoft takes care of the maintenance for Sentinel.

Using a best-of-breed strategy is superior to relying on a single-vendor security suite. I have observed while working with Splunk and QualysGuard, that they are capable of detecting certain low-level threats more promptly than Sentinel. Occasionally, these threats manage to slip through when using Sentinel.

Microsoft Sentinel is a commendable solution, and its value justifies the cost. However, it should be noted that it comes with a significant price tag. Therefore, any organization considering implementing this solution should ensure they are financially prepared for it. I strongly advise obtaining certification and acquiring proficiency in using Sentinel. It is an excellent tool equipped with numerous features. Unfortunately, many users remain unaware of these features or lack the understanding of how to utilize them effectively. It's worth mentioning that Microsoft Defender and Intune serve to further enhance Sentinel's capabilities, elevating it into an even more powerful tool.