4 Benefits of Securing your Cloud with Azure Sentinel
Azure Sentinel, a Microsoft SEIM solution, is an incredible tool to safeguard businesses of all sizes against security threats. Powered by AI, it provides intelligent cloud security to your entire organization against possible breaches. It is the best choice for the enterprise that is already on the cloud or transitioning to the cloud.
Unlike the traditional SEIM tools, Azure Sentinel detects and investigates security threats in real-time, unleashing organizations from the burden of maintaining and scaling infrastructure. It also responds to the breaches and reduces the time taken to discern them. This article discusses the top four business benefits of securing your cloud using Azure Sentinel.
What is Azure Sentinel?
Microsoft Azure Sentinel is a new cloud-native SIEM platform that provides integrated security management. It monitors the Azure cloud and automatically scales to meet your organizational needs. It uses built-in AI to write the custom rules and automated playbooks to collect data across the enterprise. Sentinel can collect data from any source such as other clouds and on-premises systems, covering the hybrid and multi-cloud infrastructure.
Why use Azure sentinel to secure your cloud?
As per IBM’s data breach study, 61% of organizations say data theft and cybercrime are the greatest threat to their reputation. And the average cost of these data breaches can be $6.5M in the US.
This clarifies that the standard Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) setup cannot stand the mastermind of cybercriminals. They can easily outsmart it with their sophisticated methods of attack. These volumes of threats can be overwhelming for the SecOps team. They end up spending far too much time on setting up infrastructure and maintaining it. As a result, a significant number of threats go undiscovered.
To add to the above challenges, the cybersecurity industry is currently under a shortage of qualified workers. As per the reports they need about 3 million skilled cybersecurity professionals. 64% of the employees in the industry agree that their organization is impacted by this shortage.
Hence most organizations are leveraging Microsoft Azure Sentinel as a go-to solution in the network security field. It not only empowers security operations (SecOps) but also enhances the security posture to address the modern challenges of security analytics.
How Does Azure Sentinel Work?
It starts by connecting your security resources to Azure Sentinel via Data Connectors. These data collected from different sources like users, devices, applications, and infrastructure (both on-premises and in multiple clouds) flows into Azure Log Analytics. A log analytics workspace has unlimited storage to hold data from a variety of sources.
This collected data is then visualized for potential threats and issues using Workbooks. With build-in workbooks, you can immediately evaluate the data while custom workbooks allow you to view the data as you want. These workbooks help to create specific queries to design rules called Analytics that scrutinize all the ingested data for suspicious activities. Microsoft Defender ATP and Cloud App Security are two of the pre-built rules and connections to Microsoft sources.
Once you are done creating analytics rules, you can see incidents and respond to them rapidly with built-in orchestration and automatic actions using Playbooks. Finally, you can step into hunting for possible security threats.
4 Benefits of Using Azure Sentinel
Here are the top business benefits of using Azure Sentinel
- Offers Seamless Data Integration
Azure Sentinel easily integrates with the data sources such as users, apps, devices, and servers on any cloud to collect the security data throughout your organization. With the help of Artificial intelligence, it identifies genuine threats to take action immediately. It releases the burden of spending time setting up, maintaining, and scaling the infrastructure, the way traditional SIEMs follow. Built on Azure, it provides limitless cloud capacity and speed to suit your security demands.
- Makes Threat Protection Smarter and Faster
Azure sentinel uses scalable machines with learning algorithms to detect anomalies and present them to analysts. Once it identifies a correlated security event, it prompts the IT team to investigate by sending them an alert. The team can then focus their efforts on a specific problem and determine whether it’s a potential breach for the company. Then they can run the incident response plan and mitigate the threat as quickly as possible, minimizing the damage.
Azure Sentinel also integrates with Microsoft Graph security API to import threat feeds and customize threat detection as well as the alert rules. This gives you an optimized view as per your specific use cases.
- Meets the Needs of both IT and Management Teams.
Sentinel offers a centralized control plane that brings the security team and management together in one place. It offers a versatile range of tools to the internal and external security teams to significantly enhance security operations. With the use of automation powered by ML and AI, the team can easily identify threats and remediate them in real-time.
On the other hand, the management team can access crucial data across the enterprise with the help of Azure’s Sentinel dashboard. This saves their time, rather than collecting reports from different departments, and enables more direct opportunities for useful insights.
- Offers Better Value for Time and Money
Since managers can access the status of events, alerts, and cases through a single dashboard, it saves their time to suspect any potential malicious events and data source anomalies. It provides quick and in-depth analysis with the threat management features such as cases, hunting, and notebooks, along with configuration features such as FAQs, data connections, analytics, and workspace settings.
Additionally, Azure Sentinel service can be automatically scaled to suit your organizational security demands at any given time. This means you only have to pay for the resources that you need and lower the usage when not needed. As the solution is handled by Microsoft as a platform-based service, your IT security staff can focus more on the threat landscape, rather than the managing technology.
How to make the most out of Azure Sentinel?
At iLink, we believe that having a good security strategy is essential in today’s digital world. Our services have helped businesses like yours to stand strong against cyber attacks. Our experts have qualified experience in strategizing and implementing Azure Sentinel to ensure your business performs optimally.
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