Azure Sentinel is a cloud-native security information and event management (SIEM) solution offered by Microsoft Azure. It provides intelligent security analytics and threat intelligence across the enterprise, helping organizations detect, investigate, and respond to security threats quickly and effectively. Here are some key features and benefits of Azure Sentinel:
- Cloud-native: Azure Sentinel is a cloud-native solution built on Azure, which means it can easily scale with your organization’s needs and integrate with other Azure services.
- Intelligent security analytics: Azure Sentinel uses machine learning and artificial intelligence to analyze security data from various sources, including logs, telemetry, and other security tools. This helps identify potential threats and detect anomalies in real-time.
- Threat intelligence: Azure Sentinel provides access to a vast collection of threat intelligence, including Microsoft’s global threat intelligence, to help identify and respond to known threats.
- Customization: Azure Sentinel allows you to customize the solution to fit your organization’s unique security requirements. You can create custom detection rules, build custom dashboards, and integrate with other security tools and services.
- Automation and orchestration: Azure Sentinel enables the automation and orchestration of security tasks, reducing the manual effort required for security operations. This helps improve efficiency and reduce response times to security incidents.
- Integration with other security tools: Azure Sentinel integrates with a wide range of security tools and services, including Microsoft and third-party solutions, to provide a comprehensive security solution for your organization.
Let’s take a look at how to use it. In the Azure portal, we can get to Azure Sentinel by searching for it in the search bar.
But before we can use it, we need to add it to an Azure Log Analytics Workspace. Currently, we don’t have one yet as shown below:
To create a workspace, we will first need to give the workspace a name and we’ll select an existing resource group. We’ll also change the location of the workspace.
This will create a workspace for us and now we need to Add Azure Sentinel.
The below image shows the Azure Sentinel dashboard. It can collect data from many sources and analyze that for security incidents and threats. It provides tools to investigate the data, create alerts, and mitigate security threats.
Let’s start by connecting a data source. There are many data sources to connect to out of the box. Microsoft data sources and for party ones like Amazon Web Services. Let’s connect our Active Directory.
Connecting it is really simple, we just need to click both the Connect buttons and it is done.
So now as Azure Sentinel has access to data from Azure Active Directory. After a while, you’ll see that there are more events here and maybe some incidents, although there aren’t any yet for our current subscription.
We can visualize the data in dashboards. Here, we can choose out of many pre-built dashboards, like this Azure Active Directory Audit Logs dashboard. Let’s install that and let’s take a look at it.
This shows all sorts of interesting graphs about ourAzure Active Directory activity.
You can use tools like dashboards to gain more insights into your security data. Azure Sentinel provides more tools to analyze data and identify security incidents. You can hunt for them with queries as shown below:
You can also use Azure notebooks to mangle the data and identify threats.
You can also set up alerts for certain events and incidents. This helps you to act quickly if something happens.
You can also automate your mitigation response with playbooks. Playbooks are Azure Logic Apps that contain a workflow to do something based on security information. Playbooks have options like sending an e-mail when there is a new recommendation in Azure Security Center.
Application and infrastructure security is extremely important to get right. Azure Sentinel provides a threat detection and mitigation service, it helps you to detect incidents and threats when they happen and helps you to solve them as effectively as possible.
Conclusion: By leveraging the features and benefits of Azure Sentinel, organizations can improve their security posture, reduce the time to detect and respond to security threats and gain deeper insights into security events across their environment.