Cybersecurity issues are becoming a day-to-day struggle for businesses as cybercrime causes far more damage than anyone could know, and it is becoming one of humanity’s biggest challenges. By 2021, it could cost $6 trillion to combat it.

Generally, enterprise organizations allocate bigger budgets to cybersecurity than SMBs. Some SMBs do not even have dedicated cybersecurity staff in the first place, even though hackers target nearly 67% of SMBs.

SecOps teams are inundated with a very high volume of alerts and spend far too much time in tasks like infrastructure set up and maintenance. To be able to handle the increase the challenges for security operations teams. You need a solution that empowers your existing SecOps team to see the threats clearer and eliminate the distractions. That is why in today’s post we will describe the benefits of Azure Sentinel for your Organization.

What is Azure Sentinel?

Azure Sentinel is a cloud-native security information and event manager (SIEM) and Security Orchestration, Automation and Response (SOAR) with Machine Learning (ML) detection, a powerful querying language and virtually limitless storage. The platform uses built-in AI to help analyze large volumes of data across an enterprise. Sentinel is your birds-eye view across the enterprise.

Azure Sentinel makes it easy to collect security data across your entire organization (fully cloud or hybrid) from devices, to users, to apps, to servers on any cloud. Combined with a tight integration with highly specialized security controls such as Defender ATP, MCAS, Azure Security Center and Azure ATP, Sentinel is emerging as a natural choice for the organizations that want to take advantage of the synergy between these products. Click here to learn more about Azure Sentinel.

Sentinel Global prerequisites

• Active Azure Subscription.
• Log Analytics workspace.
• To enable Azure Sentinel, you need contributor permissions to the subscription in which the Azure Sentinel workspace resides.
• To use Azure Sentinel, you need either contributor or reader permissions on the resource group that the workspace belongs to.
• Additional permissions may be needed to connect specific data sources.

Azure Sentinel Components

• Dashboards: Built-in dashboards provide data visualization for your connected data Sources.
• Cases: A case is an aggregation of all the relevant evidence for a specific investigation. It can contain one or multiple alerts, which are based on the analytics that you define.
• Hunting: This is a powerful tool for investigators and security analysts who need to proactively.
• Notebooks: The notebooks feature combines full programmability with a collection of libraries for machine learning, visualization, and data analysis.
• Data Connectors: Built-in connectors are available to facilitate data ingestion from
  Microsoft and partner solutions.
• Playbooks: A Playbook is a collection of procedures that can be automatically executed
  upon an alert triggered by Azure Sentinel. Playbooks leverage Azure Logic Apps, which
  help you automate and orchestrate tasks/workflows.
• Analytics: Analytics enable you to create custom alerts using Kusto Query Language
  (KQL).
• Community: The Azure Sentinel Community page is located on GitHub, and it contains
  Detections based on different types of data sources that you can leverage in order to
  create alerts and respond to threats in your environment.
• Workspace: Essentially, a Log Analytics workspace is a container that includes data and
  configuration information.

Data Sources

Azure Sentinel can ingest data from a wide range of sources including Microsoft products and services, on-premises systems, leading SaaS applications, and non-Microsoft cloud environments including Amazon Web Services (AWS). Data sources can be connected to Azure Sentinel using one of these methods:

• Leverage the out-of-the-box data connectors included in Azure Sentinel to establish a connection in only a few clicks
• If a connector is not available, logs and alerts may be ingested using syslog, Common Event Format, or REST-API sources
• Some non-Microsoft solutions are connected via APIs provided by the connected data source

Why use Azure Sentinel for your Business?

• Azure Sentinel is purely cloud-native software-as-a-service, it is flexible and requires effortless infrastructure setup.
• The main feature of Azure Sentinel is the use of AI and machine learning models to analyses and Investigate serious threats quickly and solve them intelligently.
• Azure Activity Logs, Office 365 Audit Logs (all SharePoint activity and Exchange admin activity) and alerts from Microsoft Threat Protection products (Azure Security Center, Office 365 ATP, Azure ATP, Microsoft Defender ATP, Microsoft Cloud App Security, Azure Information Protection) can be ingested at no additional cost into both Azure Sentinel, and Azure Monitor Log Analytics. Note: Azure Active Directory (AAD) is not free and is billed for ingestion into both Azure Sentinel, and Azure Monitor Log Analytics.

In conclusion, Azure Sentinel is a powerful tool that can help you collect security data across your entire hybrid organization. By using the data sources you can build a more complete picture of the threats that your organization faces, conduct deep threat hunts across your environment, and use the power of automation and orchestration in the cloud to help free up your security analysts to focus on their highest-value tasks.