Security is one of the key components of an IT system – whether on-premise or in the cloud. Also, with the growth of organizations, there is a higher risk of cyber theft and malware attacks, especially for data that offers valuable insights. And if your company is on the cloud, it is all the more essential for you to know all about Azure Sentinel, its offerings and configurations.
Synergetics, a leading cloud service consulting agency and providers shares valuable insights on this security information and event management service. Synergetics Consulting has been associated with Microsoft Azure for nearly three decades and are Microsoft Certified Partners.
Let us know more about Azure Sentinel, its offerings and operations
Microsoft has developed and offers the Microsoft Azure Sentinel as a scalable, cloud-native security information event management (SIEM) and security orchestration automated response (SOAR) solution. The Azure Sentinel can deliver smart security analysis and insights on threats to the organization.
The working pattern of Azure Sentinel
• Data collection across all devices, users, applications, cloud well as on-premise infrastructure
• Use and apply Microsoft’s cybersecurity expertise and investigate threats using AI and malicious activities across the existing platforms
• Rapid response and act upon cyber incidents and automate common tasks and ensure no downtime.
• Employ Microsoft’s analytics to detect undetected threats and reduce false positives
Convenience in data connectivity for enhanced security
For Azure Sentinel to deliver the required security insights, all data sources should be connected and integrated at all times, which is possible through various Microsoft solutions such as Microsoft Defender for Identity, Microsoft 365 Defender Solutions, Office 365, Microsoft Cloud App Security, and others.
Creation of Azure Monitor Workbooks
Post connecting data sources with Azure Sentinel, it is possible to monitor the data through Azure Monitor Workbooks by creating custom workbooks or make use of built-in workbook templates. Hence, Azure Sentinel is a definitely versatile security option.
Analytical Insights
The functioning of Azure Sentinel includes recording alerts and grouping them into relatable alerts to create an action plan that will help investigate and resolve the threats. It is possible to refer to the in-built rules and regulations that help to correlate to the threats or rely on them for better understanding.
Automating security and its orchestration through Azure Sentinel
Azure Sentinel is equipped with automation and orchestration solutions on the foundation of Azure Logic Apps. This solution offers scalable automation on par with new technologies and recent threats through highly extensible architecture.
Azure Logic Apps empowers you to build playbooks by choosing from a varied range of built-in playbooks. Alongside, there are various connectors that allow to apply any custom logic in code, such as Cloud App Security, Windows Defender ATP, Slack, Microsoft Teams, Jira, Service Now, Zendesk, HTTP requests, and so on.
Inspection and Investigation
The Azure Sentinel is equipped with inspection and investigation tools to ascertain the root cause and scope of the likely security threat. As an investigator, you can raise queries regarding a particular entity and probe further across its connections to reach the actual reason for the threat or even ask for an interactive graph to get a clearer picture.
Searching and Hunting
The Azure Sentinel is empowered with all-pervasive hunting search-and-query tools through which you can embark upon a definite and result-oriented hunt for security threats based on the MITRE framework. You can also create bookmarks for events that you wish to revisit or share with others, collate them with similar events and for a detailed investigation and reporting.
Azure Sentinel community – A Proactive Resource
As mentioned above, the Azure Sentinel community helps in threat detection and automation. The security analysts are always updating their playbooks, workbooks and hunting queries for the community to use.
An Overview of Azure Sentinel Solutions
Azure Sentinel solutions provide the convenience of discovering products and step-by-step deployment, enabling end-to-end product, vertical/or domain scenarios. The users can choose various solutions available across the Azure Marketplace and Microsoft Partner Center for solutions’ authoring and publishing for discovery, deployment and enablement.
Reasons why users prefer Microsoft Azure Sentinel Solutions
• They offer packaged content and integrations that are valuable for a domain or a vertical or a product.
• The content can be easily deployed in a single step or permit the content to begin without delay. The users and partners can employ Azure Sentinel solutions as a combined product, vertical value or domain. It is also possible to productize investments.
Types of Azure Sentinel Solutions
Users can choose from packaged content solutions that are a combination of workbooks, analytical rules, playbooks, watchlists, parsers, data connectors (one or multiple), hunting queries, components for use by Azure Sentinel and so on.
Also, at the generic Azure marketplace, users can opt for two other solutions, viz.
- Integrations comprise tools and services built using Azure Log Analytics or Azure Sentinel APIs. They can integrate existing applications with Sentinel or migrate data, responses, and queries from them to Azure Sentinel.
- Service offerings: These services listed are suitable for managed services for Azure Sentinel
Normalization and the Azure Sentinel Information Model (ASIM)
Azure Sentinel receives and ingests data from varied sources. With ASIM in tow, you can conveniently work simultaneously with multiple data types and tables. You can also understand the data, develop analytic rule sets, workbooks and hunting queries for each data type or schema.
The strong points of ASIM are –
- Seamless operational experience in normal, uniform viewing and handling of multiple sources through
- Source-agnostic content and solutions
- Within the Sentinel workspace, analytic use of data in a simplified approach
- Minimize the performance impact and the convenient use of query-time parsing.
Key Components of the Azure Sentinel Information Model (ASIM)
Normalized schemas: They are a standardized collection of events that can be placed under unified capabilities. Each schema has in place fields that represent an event, a consistent column naming convention and follow a standardized format for field values.
Parsers: Azure Sentinel is equipped with parsers, which are Microsoft-developed normalization parsers. These parsers are stored in the GitHub Parsers folders. The normalized parsers are stored in subfolders whose names begin with “ASIM.”
Content for each normalized schema: Each scheme comprises various elements such as workbooks, hunting queries, analytics rules, etc. The content is intuitively designed so that it is compatible with any normalized data without the need to create source-specific content.
Wish to get an overview of how to begin working with Azure Sentinel, then refer to our blog on or if you are interested in knowing more about Azure Sentinel, do email at info@synergetics-india.com
Microsoft Azure Sentinel Tutorial
Moving ahead, you will learn to configure Azure Sentinel step by step:
- Open Azure Sentinel
- Search for Azure Sentinel in the portal’s search bar
- Create a new sentinel
- Click on the Create tab
- Create a workspace
- Create a new workspace
- Fill in the details
- Add the resource group that you want to connect; if it is not available, create a new one
- Put in the instance name
- Put in the region
- Click on Create + Review
- Review + Create
- Check the filled-in details and click on Create
- Wait for the instance to be created. It will take a minute or two
- Once the process is complete, you can see our instance name below
- Click on the instance that you have created
- You will be taken to the Overviewtab
- Here (1): The name of the instance that you created
- You can see how your created instance is working
- Here (2): News & Guides
- Click on News & Guides
- Here, you can add data collectors to your instance
- Click on Connect
- This is where you can look at the list of available data connectors
- Click on any data connector and you can see its details toward the right side
- Here, the first one is selected, Agari Phishing Defense and Brand Protection
- You can proceed further by buying the API of the data connector that suits your requirements.
- This is the Workbooks tab
- Here, you can save the templates of the workbook
- There is a list of various notebooks from which you can select
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Conclusion
Azure Sentinel is a powerful cloud-native SIEM tool that has the features of both SIEM and SOAR solutions. Azure Sentinel can detect and respond to threats due to its in-built artificial intelligence. It helps to monitor an ecosystem from cloud to on-premises, workstation, and personal devices.
Synergetics India 