Cybersecurity is a top priority for every organization in the digital age. As cyberattacks become more sophisticated and frequent, organizations need to adopt a proactive and comprehensive approach to defend against them. However, traditional security solutions often operate in silos, creating gaps and inefficiencies in the security posture. Moreover, security teams often struggle with the complexity and volume of security data, alerts, and incidents, resulting in longer detection and response times.
That’s why Microsoft offers Microsoft 365 Defender and Sentinel, two cloud-native solutions that provide integrated and intelligent security across your entire digital estate. Microsoft 365 Defender is a unified pre- and post-breach enterprise defense suite that natively coordinates detection, prevention, investigation, and response across endpoints, identities, email, and applications. Microsoft Sentinel is a scalable, open, and extensible security information and event management (SIEM) and security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR) solution that collects and analyzes data from a wide range of sources, including Microsoft 365 Defender.
In this blog post, I will explain why you need Microsoft 365 Defender and Sentinel to protect your organization, and how they work together to provide a holistic and effective security solution.
The benefits of Microsoft 365 Defender and Sentinel
Microsoft 365 Defender and Sentinel offer several benefits for your organization, such as:
- Reducing the complexity and cost of security operations by consolidating multiple security products and services into one platform, and leveraging the power and scale of the cloud.
- Improving the efficiency and effectiveness of security teams by providing a unified portal, automated workflows, and actionable insights, and reducing the noise and false positives of security alerts and incidents.
- Enhancing the security posture and resilience of your organization by applying advanced protection, detection, and response capabilities across your environment, and leveraging the threat intelligence and expertise of Microsoft and its partners.
- Enabling faster and more confident decision making by providing a holistic and correlated view of the threat landscape and the impact of attacks, and empowering security teams to take swift and appropriate actions.
How Microsoft 365 Defender and Sentinel work together
Microsoft 365 Defender and Sentinel work together to provide a seamless and integrated security experience for your organization. Here are some of the key features and capabilities that enable this integration:
- Microsoft 365 Defender connector: This connector allows you to stream all Microsoft 365 Defender incidents and alerts into Microsoft Sentinel, and keeps them synchronized between both portals. Microsoft 365 Defender incidents include all their alerts, entities, and other relevant information, and they group together, and are enriched by, alerts from Microsoft 365 Defender’s component services Microsoft Defender for Endpoint, Microsoft Defender for Identity, Microsoft Defender for Office 365, and Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps, as well as alerts from other services such as Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention (DLP) and Microsoft Entra ID Protection (AADIP). The connector also lets you stream advanced hunting events from all of the above Defender components into Microsoft Sentinel, allowing you to copy those Defender components’ advanced hunting queries into Microsoft Sentinel, enrich Sentinel alerts with the Defender components’ raw event data to provide additional insights, and store the logs with increased retention in Log Analytics.
- Microsoft 365 Defender solution: This solution provides a comprehensive dashboard that shows the status and trends of Microsoft 365 Defender incidents and alerts in Microsoft Sentinel, as well as the most common attack techniques and affected entities. The solution also provides several workbooks and analytics rules that help you monitor and investigate Microsoft 365 Defender incidents and alerts in Microsoft Sentinel, as well as take actions to remediate them.
- In-context deep link: This feature allows you to easily switch between Microsoft Sentinel and Microsoft 365 Defender portals, and access the relevant incident or alert details in both platforms. For example, you can click on the View in Microsoft 365 Defender link in a Microsoft Sentinel incident or alert to open the corresponding Microsoft 365 Defender incident or alert, and vice versa. This feature helps you leverage the unique strengths and capabilities of both platforms in your incident investigation and response.
Conclusion
Microsoft 365 Defender and Sentinel are two powerful and convenient solutions that can help you protect your organization from cyberattacks. They integrate multiple security products and services into one platform, and provide a unified and correlated view of the threat landscape and the impact of attacks. To use Microsoft 365 Defender and Sentinel, you need to have the appropriate licenses and roles, and follow the steps to enable and configure the connector and the solution.