Microsoft Azure Sentinel is a security information event management (or SIEM) and security orchestration automated response (or SOAR) solution, built on existing Azure services, completely scalable, secure and cloud-native.
Attacks will only become more sophisticated with time and managing a single view of cyber security and data, gaining actionable insights and subsequently triggering mitigation processes in one place is an enormous, complex task that normally involves substantial resource and staff capacity, especially at scale.
Azure Sentinel offers an enriched, full view of security information and threats, actively hunting for issues with AI and speeding up the process of investigating events.
Machine learning and intelligent threat detection
It offers comprehensive intelligent security analytics and threat intelligence across the entire organisation, delivering a complete view of security and improving security as a whole with alert detection, proactive hunting, threat visibility and threat response.
This isn’t to say the volume of threat detections will become unmanageable, or the detections irrelevant or over-sensitive. Azure Sentinel collects data from a variety of data sources (Azure Active Directory and Security Centre, Office 365 and more). It gleans insights from that raw data and identifies potential incidents, and can be triggered to mitigate them.
How does it do this?
Azure Sentinel offers machine learning rules to track network behaviour and quickly spot irregularities. It also comes with built-in “out-of-the-box” templates for threat detection rules, based on common threats and attacks and suspicious activity escalation chains, and the expertise of Microsoft’s security analysts and experts.
These rules are further customisable based on your requirements. You can create rules to actively search for specific alerts or discount them to avoid common false positives. These alerts will generate investigable incidents.
Ultimately, Azure Sentinel gives you a comprehensive view of security across your organisation…
Collect: data can be collected at cloud scale across the enterprise – users, applications, devices and infrastructure, whether in the cloud or on-site. Azure Sentinel will notify you if any logs deserve attention. For instance, this could include suspicious log-in’s or suspicious log-in locations.
Detect: insofar undetected threats can be accurately identified with fewer false positives.
Investigate: AI in the hunting search-and-query tools proactively hunts for threats prior to alerts being triggered. Custom rules and bookmarks for certain events can then be created, gathering data to form the basis of an investigation.
Respond: incidents can be addresses quickly and accurately with common task automation and orchestration.
Image and pillars credit: Microsoft
Using Azure Sentinel at Amdaris
We use Azure Sentinel internally for the Amdaris infrastructure for a variety of benefits. It’s cloud-based and efficient, and we can control and customise our threat detection rules to maximise our security. It offers the latest in security innovation and AI, so our insights are almost real-time.
Moreover, Azure Sentinel is a native part of Azure, so it’s scalable and secure, and integrates effortlessly with our Office 365 systems.
But if you’re not an Office 365 user? Azure Sentinel can integrate with almost any data source, not just Microsoft services.
If you want to see how Azure Sentinel could work for you, or talk more about your cyber security, please get in touch via +44(0)117 935 3444 or use the form below.