8 reasons you should ditch your SIEM for Microsoft Sentinel

The landscape of Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) solutions has changed. SIEM solutions historically were complicated, expensive and difficult to manage. However, today’s cloud based SIEMs are far more accessible to businesses.   

By adopting a cloud native SIEM, like Microsoft Sentinel, you don’t have to build or maintain any infrastructure and there are no upfront costs. You only pay for what you use.  

So, should you ditch your current SIEM for Microsoft Sentinel? We’ll let you decide. Here are 8 reasons why we think it’s worth considering.  

Rapid Deployment time 

Unlike traditional on-premises SIEM systems that have long deployment times and require a lot of configurations, a Microsoft Sentinel deployment can be completed in substantially less time with a fraction of the resources.  

This, coupled with Sentinel’s hundreds of out-the-box integrations, means that you can begin generating actionable insights from your event logs faster than ever before. 

Microsoft Sentinel has seamless security integrations 

By leveraging the power of the Microsoft Cloud, Sentinel takes traditional SIEM technologies to the next level to monitor your entire IT estate – irrespective of whether your workloads exist in Azure, on-premises or non-Microsoft cloud platforms. 

Azure Sentinel comes with a rich portfolio of native and third-party integrations that strengthen your organisation’s security capabilities. This is achieved through connectors that connect to data sources across your entire IT estate.  

By leveraging AI and machine learning, Sentinel is continuously learning and becoming ‘smarter’ as it’s being fed data from your environment. Thus, the more data sources you have connected, the more value Sentinel can provide.  

Makes threat protection smarter and faster with machine learning and artificial intelligence 

With traditional SIEM solutions, legitimate behaviors and actions are frequently misclassified as correlated attacks. These alerts are called False Positives, and they drain the time, resources and willpower of the IT teams investigating them. This is commonly referred to as alert fatigue and can cause legitimate threats to dwell in your environment for longer. 

Sentinel uses artificial intelligence and machine learning that’s been built up over the past decade to ensure that it only notifies you of the security incidents that require your immediate attention. Thus, eliminating false positives and keeping your IT security teams checked in.  

Scalability 

Sentinel allows businesses to swiftly deploy and customise their SIEM. There’s no need to fuss about installing hardware or performing manual maintenance and upgrades. And since it’s built on Azure, it offers virtually limitless cloud scale while addressing all your security needs.  

Better yet, Microsoft Sentinel takes care of updates and patches for you, without requiring any additional cost or effort. 

Reduced downtime 

The cloud now plays a crucial role in mitigating downtime for business-critical applications. Built-in load-balancing and automated fail-over make Azure a secure, robust platform for operations. By moving your SIEM into Azure, you can take advantage of the same availability benefits. Logs continue to be collected and analysed, ensuring that no alerts are missed, and that disruption is minimised.  

From an operational standpoint, reducing downtime will help you maintain a resilient security posture and address issues swiftly. Improving your SIEMs availability will also help to reduce downtime across the rest of your IT estate. 

Better Value for Money 

As is the case with all of Microsoft’s cloud solutions, Microsoft Sentinel is billed on a per-usage basis. Thus, shifting your SIEM to the cloud allows your business to take advantage of the operational expenditure (OpEx) payment model and avoid hefty capital investment into on-premises infrastructure. 

Sentinel also avoids the problem of estimating future storage requirements or purchasing additional capacity that gathers dust until it is required. Instead, cloud storage can be activated whenever required – and you never pay for it until it is used. Once factors like licensing, storage and infrastructure are considered, Azure Sentinel is typically 48% less expensive to run than other on-premises SIEM solutions. 

Compliance

In today’s hybrid cloud world, managing the network security perimeter and detecting unauthorised access has become increasingly challenging. However, regulatory bodies make no allowances for complexity. 

Microsoft Sentinel is designed to address the specific challenges of hybrid operating environments – even in the most heavily regulated industries: 

• The cloud-based platform offers massive scalability potential so you can collect and retain vast amounts of security log data. 
• Support for all common log formats means that Sentinel can track security issues across all of your systems, regardless of where they are located. 
• Security logs are centralised and collated into a single platform. This makes it easier to assess the IT estate as a whole or to drill down into its constituent parts. 
• Using bookmarks and notebooks, your SOC team can document complex security issues for review by auditors or law enforcement. 
• Converting notebooks into playbooks will formalise your response to future security events, ensuring that the SOC team are properly prepared to act quickly. 

Microsoft’s proven security pedigree

Given the importance of the cloud in corporate IT plans, Microsoft has been actively investing in protecting the Azure platform, paying upwards of $1 billion every year. This rate of spend beats other SIEM suppliers, making it very appealing to companies trying to strengthen their own defenses. Because of this consumer trust, Microsoft generated $10 billion in sales in 2021, a 40% increase over the previous year.

Better yet, Microsoft Security is a Leader in four of the Gartner Magic Quadrant™ reports.

Looking to test-drive Microsoft Sentinel in your organisation?

Find out how Microsoft Sentinel could benefit your organisation with our Microsoft Sentinel Cloud Accelerator Workshop. During this workshop, you’ll get an overview of Azure Sentinel along with insights on active threats to your Microsoft 365 cloud and on-premises environments.