Benefits of using Microsoft Sentinel SIEM

I wanted to share why so many companies are looking at Microsoft Sentinel as a SIEM solution. From my experience, here are the key benefits of using Sentinel:

1. Deployment and Lower Maintenance: We can deploy Sentinel within weeks rather than months, compared to legacy/on-prem SIEMs. There’s no need for SIEM infrastructure, patching, capacity planning, or AMC’s for hardware.

2. Scalability and Flexibility: Sentinel’s cloud-based design allows it to easily scale with organization’s needs, handling large volumes of data from multiple sources, even during high-traffic events, without the need for heavy infrastructure investments

3. Integration with Microsoft Ecosystem: If company already uses Microsoft 365, Defender, and Azure, Sentinel connects easily with these tools. This makes managing data and spotting patterns across platforms much simpler.

4. Cost Efficiency & Pricing Commitment Tiers: Legacy SIEMs can have high upfront costs like licensing, storage, and infrastructure. Sentinel’s pricing is based on data ingestion, offering cost-saving commitment tiers, log retention management, and filtering rules to exclude unwanted logs.

4.1 Free Data Sources: The following data sources are free with Microsoft Sentinel:
Although alerts are free, the raw logs for some Microsoft Defender XDR, Defender for Endpoint/Identity/Office 365/Cloud Apps, Microsoft Entra ID, and Azure                      Information Protection (AIP) data types are paid.

• Azure Activity Logs
• Microsoft Sentinel Health
• Office 365 Audit Logs (including all SharePoint activity, Exchange admin activity, and Teams)
• Security alerts from sources like Microsoft Defender XDR, Microsoft Defender for Cloud, Microsoft Defender for Office 365, Microsoft Defender for Identity, Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps, and Microsoft Defender for Endpoint

4.2 Data Grants for Microsoft 365 Customers: If we’re using Microsoft 365 E5, A5, F5, or G5, we can get a data grant of up to 5MB per user per day to ingest Microsoft 365 data. This includes things like:

• Microsoft Entra ID (formerly Azure AD) sign-in and audit logs
• Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps Guard shadow IT discovery logs
• Microsoft Purview Information Protection logs
• Microsoft 365 advanced hunting data

4.3 Defender for Servers Plan 2: This gives us 500MB per node per day for Defender for Cloud security data.

5. Advanced Threat Detection: Leveraging artificial intelligence and machine learning, Sentinel offers proactive threat detection, reducing false positives and improving accuracy.

6. Automation and Orchestration: Sentinel includes built-in automation capabilities that help streamline security operations and incident response.

7. Ease of Use: Sentinel’s user-friendly interface and smart analytics make it easier for security team to track and handle threats. The simple dashboards and automatic workflows help us work more efficiently

8. Community and Support: Microsoft provides great docs, community support, and professional services to help us make the most of Sentinel. This support is super useful when we’re improving our security.

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