What is MICROSOFT SENTINEL and How Does it Empower Security Operations Centers,
While these enterprise security measures can get away with prevention and detection mechanisms that are based on knowledge of attack methods, today, separating the wheat from the chaff is extremely difficult. We observe that admins are dealing with a large volume of events. And, data quality is an issue, with false positives often leading to triage fatigue. In the digital age, we certainly live in an identity-driven security perimeter.
What is Microsoft Sentinel?
Microsoft Sentinel is a cloud-native Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) and Security Orchestration, Automation and Response (SOAR) solution built to provide security analysts with powerful tools to detect and respond to cyberattacks. Sentinel’s SOAR capabilities are fully customizable and allow security teams to write playbooks that can also (if desired) automate the entire response to security events.
Challenges of the traditional Security Operations Center (SOC)
For the past decade, SOC leaders have been trying to leverage SIEM technology to build this “single pane of glass” for their security operations. “Single pane of glass” means leveraging SIEM to identify and investigate security issues, which also means that large amounts of data need to be ingested, processed, correlated, and stored.
Unfortunately, the challenges inherent in SIEM technology will initially make this single pane of glass view much more difficult due to the ongoing need to purchase and install more hardware to handle increasing data volumes. SOC leaders will certainly face a number of challenges, including the following :
- Often, security teams are required to not connect data sources due to the costs associated with scaling their SIEM.
- Early search and correlation engines could not handle large volumes of data, and analyst queries would time out before they could complete their tasks.
- Static correlation rules often miss anomalies that (when combined with other contextual data) indicate that an attacker has successfully compromised the system.
- Typically, early SIEMs were not built with machine learning models to help identify such anomalies.
How does Microsoft Sentinel help address traditional SOC challenges?
Microsoft Sentinel is Microsoft’s cloud-native SIEM and SOAR solution. It is the first SIEM solution built into the cloud platform to help empower security operations teams by leveraging cloud-native and addressing these SIEM SecOps challenges by :
- Automatically scales to meet data collection and storage requirements for companies of any size.
- Integrate directly with the Microsoft Intelligent Security Graph to help increase the likelihood of detecting advanced threats by leveraging Microsoft and partner threat intelligence.
- Includes advanced anomaly detection using Microsoft machine learning algorithms, eliminating the need for companies to hire their own data scientists.
- Reduce the need for human intervention by leveraging open and flexible automation capabilities to investigate and respond to alerts.
- Provides an intuitive dashboard and user interface for analysts and is designed to simplify common operations within a SOC.
What Are the Features of Microsoft Sentinel?
- Dashboard: The built-in dashboard provides data visualizations for connected data sources, allowing security analysts to dive deeper into the events generated by those services.
- Incident: An incident is a collection of all evidence relevant to a particular investigation. It can contain one or more alerts, which are based on analytics you define.
- Hunt: This is a powerful tool for investigators and security analysts who need to proactively search for security threats. The search capabilities are powered by Kusto Query Language (KQL).
- Data connectors: Built-in connectors are available to facilitate data ingestion from Microsoft and partner solutions.
