In a recent survey, 74% of cybersecurity professionals said that the threat landscape is the worst they’ve seen in 5 years.1 Escalating cyber threats, an expanding attack surface, and staffing shortages are putting tremendous pressure on the security operations center (SOC).
It’s never been more important to have the right tools in place, especially when it comes to security information and event management (SIEM), which bring insights from various logs and security sources together for comprehensive threat detection and response. Unfortunately, it can be difficult to scale and adapt traditional on-premises SIEM offerings, leading to gaps in coverage, high costs, and inefficiencies.
With SOC teams managing an average of 3,832 alerts daily2, outdated SIEM technology increases the risk of critical threats slipping through undetected. Reflecting that: 71% of SOC practitioners worry about missing a real attack buried in a flood of alerts.3 The business stakes couldn’t be higher. Experts peg the average cost of a data breach at $4.88 million in 2024, which is 10% higher than last year.4
Increasingly, security leaders are turning to Microsoft Sentinel, an industry-leading, modern SIEM, to address the evolving challenges of the modern threat landscape.
Microsoft Sentinel is transforming the SOC with a comprehensive solution that delivers built-in security orchestration automation and response (SOAR), user entity and behavior analytics (UEBA), threat intelligence (TI), and Generative AI (GenAI) to make threat detection, investigation, and response seamless. Further, Microsoft Sentinel empowers analysts to get started quickly with native integrations of XDR, cloud security, and exposure management in Microsoft’s unified SecOps platform.
The Microsoft Sentinel advantage
What follows are some of the reasons security pros are turning to Microsoft Sentinel.
Cloud flexibility and cost management. As the first cloud-native SIEM, Microsoft Sentinel offers unparalleled scalability, flexibility, and efficiency. Organizations benefit from a 44% reduction in costs and a 35% lower risk of data breaches versus traditional on-premises SIEMs, resulting in up to a 234% return on investment (ROI) according to The Total Economic Impact™ Of Microsoft Sentinel. Microsoft Sentinel protects the entire digital environment, collecting and analyzing disparate security data from applications logs to vulnerability alerts—and everything in between—using over 350+ out-of-the-box connectors. The solution makes it easy to deploy custom connectors with its codeless connector platform, enabling customers to achieve a 93% reduction in configuration time.
“[Microsoft] provided us with a significant discount in terms of what we were facing as opposed to Splunk.” – Microsoft Sentinel customer, healthcare
Comprehensive coverage. Microsoft Sentinel is the only fully functional SIEM solution that is built into a security operations platform that combines the full capabilities of SIEM, extended detection and response (XDR), exposure management, GenAI, and global threat intelligence. Together, this streamlines the analyst experience with a single list of prioritized incidents, automated enrichment of alerts with all relevant data, built-in response actions, and a single hunting experience. This delivers unmatched efficiency, enhanced protection, and greater insights for investigations, reducing time spent training analysts on different tools and minimizing context switching during investigations. By bringing these capabilities all together, 70% of security practitioners said Microsoft Sentinel was more intuitive than competitive SIEMs, according to research from Microsoft.
“It integrates with everything super easily—it’s pretty seamless. Since we have all these different Microsoft tools already, we could probably integrate with any of them in under a week, depending on the tool.” – Microsoft Sentinel customer, manufacturing
AI-powered security. Microsoft is setting the pace for GenAI. Security Copilot, Microsoft’s GenAI assistant built for Security, is embedded into the analyst workflow to accelerate response, making tasks 22% faster and reducing labor by 85% during complex, multitouch investigations, according to Microsoft. Ultimately, GenAI adoption is associated with a 30% reduction in mean time to resolution for security incidents. Further, Microsoft Sentinel offers built-in SOAR capabilities to help automate common tasks, and includes several features, such as incident prioritization, that are enriched with machine learning.
“Microsoft Sentinel has exceeded my expectations with AI. Utilizing AI to stay on top of competitors and improve detection with SIEM shows they care about staying on top of new trends and features, and making sure customers get the best bang for their buck. ” –Microsoft Sentinel customer, manufacturing
The bottom line
Security teams have never been more overwhelmed, and they need a SIEM that can help them protect their organization in this critical moment. With Microsoft Sentinel, customers can confidently protect their organizations from today and tomorrow’s threats with unparalleled visibility, cloud flexibility, and comprehensive coverage.
Click here for more information or read the Microsoft security blog, “Why security leaders trust Microsoft Sentinel to modernize their SOC.”
[1] https://www.isc2.org/Insights/2024/09/Employers-Must-Act-Cybersecurity-Workforce-Growth-Stalls-as-Skills-Gaps-Widen
[2] https://www.vectra.ai/resources/2024-state-of-threat-detection
[3] https://www.vectra.ai/resources/2024-state-of-threat-detection
[4] https://www.ibm.com/reports/data-breach
