In terms of visibility, Microsoft Sentinel captures a lot of useful data. Microsoft Sentinel helps us prioritize threats across our enterprise. It shows us the most vulnerable assets, and because we have agents on every machine, we know exactly where to go to investigate. This is important for staying secure as a company. It allows us to cover our own bases by seeing what is happening in real-time and taking proactive steps to address threats, rather than reacting to them after they have already occurred. We can stay up-to-date with security measures and ensure that we follow through and execute our security plan. We integrated Microsoft Sentinel with Defender for Cloud, Endpoint, and Defender Vulnerability Management. Microsoft is not the most vendor-friendly company in terms of integrations and connections, but we were able to get it working in the end, so we cannot really complain. Microsoft's security tools work natively together to deliver coordinated detection responses across our environment. The comprehensive threat protection that Microsoft Sentinel provides is good. They provide really good information. We are able to create documents, perform root cause analysis, and analyze anything we need to. Log integration is also key. We are able to find potentially malicious files, correlate events to alerts, and then take action on alerts. So, the comprehensiveness is pretty straightforward. We use Cloud and Endpoint security. We have our Defender cloud, and then Defender agents on each endpoint. The bidirectional sync capability is important, and it is a work in progress. We are in the process of off-boarding our contract with CrowdStrike. We are moving all of our cybersecurity needs to Microsoft Defender, which is included in our existing Microsoft licenses. This makes financial sense, and CrowdStrike was not providing us with much value. The system allows us to ingest data from our entire ecosystem, which is very important. This is our main source of correlation of logs to alerts. Therefore, we definitely need to get every single log source, and possibly a few more. The system allows us to investigate and respond holistically from one place. It is a very comprehensive tool to use. However, the supporting documentation is limited to initial troubleshooting. This is where I find the most difficulty in explaining how good the tool is. Other than that, the tool is pretty straightforward. There is enough documentation to get us started. However, beyond that, we will need to rely on online forums and other open-source resources to learn more about the tool. When comparing Microsoft Sentinel to other SIEMs in terms of cost, we are saving money because it is included with our Microsoft 365 E5 licenses. This also helps us to reduce the number of different types of software that we need to use. We do like redundancy in terms of coverage, but the cost of multiple solutions adds up. We want to be able to use one central location for all of our security software. This is one of the reasons why we choose Microsoft Sentinel over third-party solutions. As we move into larger projects, we need to have a centralized place for all of our security policies and procedures. Microsoft Sentinel helps us automate routine tasks and find high-value alerts. We also use Sentinel as a store for our alerts. This allows us to automate most of our responses if not all of them. We also tailored our alerts to specific events that occur in our environment. Microsoft Sentinel helps eliminate the need to use multiple dashboards by providing a single XDR dashboard. We currently use Sentinel's workbooks, which provide a dashboard that we can use for metrics, reporting, and other purposes. This makes it easier to relay information upwards, as it is presented in a more visually appealing and easy-to-understand manner. For example, we can use pie charts, bar charts, and line charts to represent data in a way that is easy to understand. This makes it easier to convey information to upper management, such as where we are most vulnerable and what steps we need to take to improve our security. Microsoft Sentinel helps us prepare for potential threats before they hit by taking proactive steps. We can also detect ongoing incidents. For example, if we receive a ticket or alert that is ongoing and will not go away, we can automate a response to it and add it to our playbook. This way, if a similar incident occurs in the future, we will know what to do to respond immediately. In terms of automation, I believe we save about 20 to 22 hours per week by closing tickets. We receive about 50 to 100 tickets per day, and we automated about 80 percent of those. This means that we can now close tickets without having to manually review them. This saved us a significant amount of time, which we can now use on other tasks. We are on the smaller side in terms of the number of logs that come in. So, I don't think it's necessary to compare at this level of data ingestion. However, I can definitely see that if we scale and grow in the future, it will save us a lot of money, especially in terms of manpower and hours that we have to dedicate to automation or non-automated tasks. For example, in the six months that we've had Sentinel up and running, we've saved 755 hours in automation alone. We currently meet all of our service level agreements in terms of incident response. This definitely saved us time, and we also receive email alerts directly so that we know as soon as something happens.
