Digital workplaces are becoming increasingly digitised as cloud-based services, collaboration platforms, and other cloud-native technologies become more popular. This is great news for businesses, but it also means that cybercriminals have more opportunities to commit crimes.
The rise in cybercrimes has led to a demand for security solutions to protect against malicious insider attacks, user threats, and third-party risks. This is where a cloud-based security solution such as Microsoft Sentinel is the answer to safeguard your company from the increasing sophistication of cyber threats.
What is Microsoft Sentinel?
Microsoft Sentinel is a cloud-based security solution that provides security information and event management (SIEM) and security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR). Sentinel focuses on delivering security analytics and cyber threat intelligence for organisations, identifying threats in real-time, increasing visibility into security operations and discovering fresh attacks across the network.
Sentinel’s core abilities are security data collection, threat detection, incident investigation, and incident response, providing a robust security solution by collecting security data, detecting threats, investigating incidents, and responding to them. Whether you deploy it on-site or in the cloud, your business can benefit from these capabilities.
Data collection
Today, businesses must monitor and protect an overwhelming amount of data which is essential to operations and productivity. This can make security monitoring challenging, particularly as cybercriminals utilise sophisticated technology to gain unauthorised access to data and networks.
With Microsoft Sentinel, you can monitor and detect attacks across both on-premises and cloud infrastructures in real-time. Because it aggregates data from a wide array of sources, including devices, applications, security systems, user behaviour, and more, Sentinel can monitor more sources than legacy SIEM solutions. Because of its cloud-based, scalable architecture, Sentinel can collect data from millions of devices and sensors of all sizes and configurations. Sentinel can also collect security events from cloud services, such as Microsoft Azure Storage, by configuring it to collect events from security sensors.
Threat detection
Any modern security strategy requires threat intelligence, as it allows organisations to get a comprehensive picture of the dangers they face, prioritise their responses, and fulfil compliance requirements.
Sentinel looks for potential threats by performing anomaly detection using machine learning (ML) algorithms. Using a signature-based approach, it then categorises suspicious behaviour.
Sentinel’s investigation capabilities can identify malicious IP addresses, hostnames, and domains, as well as malicious network traffic, and other possible dangers. Sentinel can detect potential weaknesses in network applications, and scan applications for vulnerabilities to keep you informed of potential threats.
Threat investigation
Sentinel can monitor and report on malicious activity occurring across your network, as well as identify new threats by analysing network data. When a threat is detected, it notifies the security team to seek further information about the current threats.
Sentinel monitors the threat environment for emerging risks or anomalies by gaining a deeper understanding of it with AI. With this information, Sentinel can either identify new dangers or discern regular patterns that deviate from norms at some future point. Combining cloud security with ML is particularly effective at detecting new threats.
Incident response
You can centrally manage your organisation’s network security using Sentinel’s incident management features. Incident management, user management, and policy management are all accessible via the same console, which offers incident management tools such as incident monitoring, troubleshooting, incident management, and user management.
An incident report can be created that lists all incident alerts and shows who or what was affected. The use of Sentinel’s incident response feature has reportedly resulted in a 56% reduction in management efforts while enabling the SOC team to respond more effectively.
Protect your business with Microsoft Sentinel
With visibility, analysis, and response capabilities across the entire enterprise, Microsoft Sentinel protects your business from the latest dangers. It collects and combines data from both on-premises and cloud environments, making it easier to detect and counter attacks in real-time.
The security specialists at INTELLIWORX can integrate Microsoft Sentinel into your existing IT infrastructure and manage it remotely to optimise efficiency and effectiveness, so you can have peace of mind that your business is always protected.
