With the rise of cloud-based services, collaboration platforms, and other cloud-native technologies, the digital workplace is becoming increasingly digitised. This is great news for businesses — but it also means that cybercriminals have more opportunities to strike. According to the Australian Cyber Security Centre (ACSC), 164 cybercrime reports are made every day – about one every 10 minutes.
The alarming increase in cybercrimes has led to a surge in demand for security solutions which guard against malicious insider attacks, user threats, and third-party risks. A cloud-based security solution is a must for any business to protect itself against the growing sophistication of cyber threats.
As an SIEM solution, Microsoft Sentinel has the capacity to collect data from across your business and create a holistic view of the security situation so you can detect and respond to unknown threats rapidly.
What is Microsoft Sentinel?
Microsoft Sentinel is a cloud-based security monitoring solution that provides security information and event management (SIEM), and security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR) to deliver security analytics and threat intelligence across an enterprise. It allows users to identify threats as they happen, increase visibility into their security operations, and discover new attacks across their network.Â
Using threat visibility, proactive hunting, and threat response, Sentinel’s core capabilities are security data collection, threat detection, incident investigation, and incident response. All of these work together to provide a robust security solution that can be implemented across your entire organisation – whether on-premises or in the cloud.
Data collection
One of the biggest challenges in security today is the sheer amount of data that businesses need to monitor and protect. This includes everything from user and device behaviour, to network traffic and security events.Â
Microsoft Sentinel SIEM collects and correlates data across both on-premises and cloud environments, making it easier to detect and respond to attacks in real time. It collects data from a wide variety of sources, including devices, applications, security systems, user behavior, and more. This means that Sentinel can collect data from more sources than legacy SIEM solutions. This is thanks to its scalable, cloud-based architecture, which allows it to collect data from millions of devices and sensors, regardless of their size or configuration.
Cloud-based security events are also supported; by configuring Sentinel to collect events from security sensors, you will receive events from cloud services, such as Microsoft Azure Storage.Â
Detect threats
Threat intelligence is critical to any modern security strategy, as it enables businesses to get a complete view of their threats, prioritise their response to those threats, and meet compliance standards.
Using machine learning (ML) algorithms, Sentinel searches for potential threats by performing anomaly detection. It then categorises suspicious behaviour using a signature-based approach.Â
You can configure Sentinel to notify users about these issues or incidents. Its investigation features will detect malicious IP addresses, hostnames, and domains, as well as malicious network traffic, and other potential threats. These characteristics can be used to detect potential dangers on the network. You can use Sentinel to detect potential vulnerabilities in your network’s applications, as well as to scan applications for vulnerabilities to warn you of potential risks.
Investigate threats
Using its ML abilities, Sentinel can track and report on malicious activity occurring across your network, and discover both existing and new threats by analysing network data. When a threat is detected, it notifies users. This will be used by security analysts to seek out information on current threats.
Sentinel identifies emerging threats or anomalies by gaining a deeper understanding of the threat environment using AI. With this knowledge, Sentinel can detect new threats or identify normal patterns that become anomalous at a later date. Combining cloud security with ML is particularly effective at detecting new threats.
Respond to incidents
Sentinel’s incident response feature helps businesses to create and distribute incident response reports. This has been reported to reduce management efforts by 56% while enabling the Security Operations Centre (SOC) team to respond more efficiently.
Users can create incident reports that display all incident alerts, and those reports can then be used to investigate incidents and determine who or what was affected.
With Sentinel’s incident management functionality, you can centrally manage security across your organisation’s network. Incident management, user management, and policy management are all accessible via the same console, which provides a variety of incident management tools, including incident monitoring, troubleshooting, incident management, and user management.
Protect your business with Microsoft Sentinel SIEM
Microsoft Sentinel is a comprehensive solution for securing your business from the latest threats with visibility, analysis, and response across your entire network. It collects and correlates data across both on-premises and cloud environments, making it easier to detect and respond to attacks in real time.
The Microsoft Sentinel specialists at Steadfast Solutions can implement the SIEM solution into your existing digital environment, train your users on its best practises, and manage it remotely for maximum effectiveness and efficiency.
