Security can be a never-ending adventure—a record of increasingly sophisticated attacks, volumes of alerts, and long resolution timeframes where today’s Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) products can’t keep pace.

What is SIEM? A SIEM is a tool that works by gathering the events and logs created by the host machines, applications, and devices (i.e., firewalls, monitors, antivirus), bringing in all the company’s infrastructure data onto a centralized platform.

SecOps computers are flooded with a very high volume of alerts and spend too much time on tasks such as configuring the infrastructure and maintenance. An expected shortage of 3.5 million security professionals by 2021 will further increase the challenges for security operations teams. You need a solution that enables your existing SecOps team to see threats more clearly and eliminate distractions. This is the exact reason for a SIEM tool to be re imagines as a new cloud-native solution called Microsoft Azure Sentinel.

Azure Sentinel makes life easier by collecting data across the entire hybrid organizations from devices to apps, to users and to any servers on any cloud. It is built with artificial intelligence to ensure quick identification of threats and removed the burden of setting up the traditional SIEM architecture from scratch, maintaining and scaling. Since it is built on Azure, it offers nearly limitless cloud scale and speed to address your security needs. Traditional SIEMs have expensive to run and operate, requires an upfront cost and most companies do not opt for SIEM for the same reason. Azure Sentinel is a ‘Pay as you go’ service that requires no upfront costs and you pay for what you use.

Many companies use Office 365 and are increasingly adopting Microsoft 365’s enhanced security and compliance offerings. There are many cases where you might want to combine endpoint application and user security data with information from your infrastructure environment and third-party data to understand a full attack.

It would be ideal if you could do all of this within the compliance limits of a single cloud provider. Now you can transfer your Office 365 activity data to Azure Sentinel for free. With just a few clicks, you can keep your data in the Microsoft cloud.

Azure Sentinel provides you a 360 view of the entire enterprise, reduces the stress of increasingly sophisticated attacks, increasing alerts, and long resolution times.

Now let’s take a look at how Azure Sentinel will help you deliver cloud-native security operations:

Collect data across your enterprise easily – Yes, With Azure Sentinel you can aggregate all data with connectors built-in, native integration of Microsoft signals, and support for industry standard log formats like common event format and syslog. With just a few clicks, you can import your Microsoft Office 365 data for free and combine it with other security data for analysis. Azure Sentinel uses Azure Monitor, which is based on a proven and scalable log analysis database that consumes more than 10 petabytes per day and offers a very fast query engine that can search millions of records in seconds.

Analyze and detect threats quickly with AI on your side – Use of AI in Azure Sentinel can help replace the traditional SIEM as they perform invasive search from correlated alerts from different devices and applications. It uses the scalable machine learning algorithms to correlate millions of low range anomalies to present a few high-rate security incidents to the analyst. It helps to connect the dots for you. For example, you can quickly see a compromised account that was used to deploy ransomware in a cloud application. This contributes to a drastic reduction in noise. In fact, we were able to determine an overall reduction in alert fatigue by up to 90 percent in evaluations.

Automate common tasks and threat response – Whilst AI sharpens your focus on finding issues, once you have solved the issues you don’t want to find the same issues again and again; you want to automate the way you respond to those issues. To avoid this, Azure Sentinel offers built-in automation and orchestration that have pre-defined or custom guides to solve repetitive tasks and can quickly respond to threats. Azure Sentinel will enhance existing business investigation and defense tools, including best-in-class security products, self-developed tools, and other systems such as human resource management applications and workflow management systems such as ServiceNow. Microsoft’s unmatched threat intelligence, based on daily analysis of more than 6.5 trillion signals and decades of cloud-scale security experience, will help you modernize your security operations.

At Cloud 9, we believe the best place to start evaluating a cybersecurity solution is by seeing what it’s capable of firsthand. Whether you’re just starting to build your cybersecurity stack or considering a change, contact us for a demo today.