Today, organizations are faced with the incredibly difficult task of trying to protect their expanded digital estate from increasing cyber threats. The move to the cloud, combined with an increasing mobile workforce, has pushed the border of an organization’s estate beyond the boundary of their physical network. Both their data and its users and systems are everywhere. Meanwhile the frequency and sophistication of attacks are consistently growing. Regardless of the size of the organization or the industry, everyone is a target.
IT security is a challenge that most businesses struggle with. We believe that Microsoft Sentinel can be the answer.
Security Data Explosion
Regardless of the size of your organization or the industry, you are a target. As your digital estate grows, so does the volume of security data. In fact 76% of organizations report an increase and much of it is coming from in the cloud. So pumping it into legacy, on-premises systems (with all the deployment and maintenance overhead that comes with that) just doesn’t make a ton of sense. And that volume is just going to keep growing. Data is the fuel for ML models that have become so critical to threat detection. The models need both more signals and more diverse signals.
To shore up their defenses, enterprises have deployed dozens of security products, each producing a large volume of alerts. In isolation, these products may have high false positive rates and poor response prioritization, resulting in deafening alert noise. As a result, organizations report that nearly half of alerts (44%) are never investigated.
Part of the reason these alerts fall through the cracks is a massive shortage in security professionals.
Thankfully, the cloud can help manage the complexity of the expanding digital estate. It simplifies and makes security easy to manage. Harnessing the power of cloud will set your SecOps teams free of IT work and help them focus on security work with no limits.
Microsoft Sentinel offers a new, modern approach to Security Incident and Event Management (SIEM). Sentinel is entirely cloud-native and powered by AI and automation to help optimize security operations. Microsoft Sentinel’s cloud-native nature empowers users with the scale, flexibility, and speed of the cloud, while eliminating the time and money spent on managing complex infrastructure.
Microsoft Sentinel detects complex, evolving threats across massive volumes of low-fidelity signals using built-in machine learning developed by Microsoft security experts. It gives you everything you need to expedite incident response, streamlining investigations with robust incidents and equipping you with built-in automation. With these efficiency gains, Microsoft Sentinel gives you the ability to finally be proactive about finding and stopping threats with robust threat hunting tools to help security teams get, and stay, ahead of attackers.
HARNESS THE SCALE OF THE CLOUD
With Microsoft Sentinel users can eliminate infrastructure setup and maintenance, enabling them to focus on what really matters – protecting the organization. Users have no limits to compute or storage resources, and can scale up or down at will. Microsoft Sentinel gives users everything they need to take advantage of this unmatched scale – users can collect and analyze data from all clouds, users, devices, and solutions, all powered by the speed and scale of a leading cloud platform. All of this results in much greater cost efficiency than traditional SIEMs. In fact, according to the 2020 Total Economic Impact™ of Microsoft Sentinel study by Forrester Consulting, Microsoft Sentinel is 48% less expensive in licensing and infrastructure costs than traditional SIEMs.
DETECT EVOLVING THREATS
What do you do with all of that data? Microsoft Sentinel uses machine learning created by Microsoft’s security experts to filter out all low-fidelity signals into actionable threat detection. Microsoft’s machine learning is based off of Microsoft’s extensive experience and insights as a major $10B/year security vendor. Microsoft Sentinel also includes built-in user and entity behavioral analytics fully integrated into the platform for deep understanding of behavioral anomalies. Users will receive the added benefit of Sentinel’s native integration with Microsoft 365 Defender and Microsoft Defender for Cloud (Microsoft’s XDR solutions) for integrated threat protection.
EXPEDITE INCIDENT RESPONSE
Microsoft Sentinel allows SecOps Teams to conduct investigations and responses more efficiently than ever. The built-in AI reduces false positives by 79%, already ensuring that you only spend time on incidents that actually need your attention. With incidents, Microsoft Sentinel automatically maps related entities, allowing you to easily see and understand the full scope of an attack. With Sentinel’s automation tools, users can streamline day-to-day operations and accelerate appropriate responses.
GET AHEAD OF ATTACKERS
All of the previously mentioned factors lead to massive efficiency gains, and with that saved time, users finally are enabled to shift from reactive to proactive responses. Many Microsoft Sentinel customers are finding that they are finally able to strategically and proactively hunt for threats after years of being stuck in an endless loop of reactive response. Microsoft Sentinel includes robust tooling for threat hunting, allowing users to rapidly search over massive amounts of data with the speed enabled by the cloud-native SIEM.
Empowered SecOps Teams
Below are just a handful of examples of the efficiency gains Microsoft Sentinel brings to security operations
For more information on Microsoft Sentinel and how to implement within your organization, please take a moment to contact the Microsoft security experts at Oakwood below.
