In this digitally evolved world, technologies are showing new trends on a daily basis. This has taken the cloud and IT sector to reach new heights of possibilities with scalable, cost-efficient, and low resources methods. As a result, top organizations and companies are using these methods to increase benefits levels and provide more advanced services. However, providing these services also requires a safe and safe secure environment. That is to say, there are many threats or hackers out there who try to create issues in these services. So, in order to handle all these and providing users a secure pathway, Microsoft offers Azure Sentinel and Security Center services.
Both of these are different services but with the same aim to provide a secure environment. But, which one to go with? This question can come into our minds. So, to understand these services, in this blog we will be covering the concepts of both these services by comparing their features and more. So, let’s begin with a quick overview of these two services.
What is Azure Sentinel?
Microsoft Azure Sentinel refers to a scalable, cloud-native, SIEM (security information event management) and SOAR (security orchestration automated response) solution. This is responsible for providing advanced security analytics and threat intelligence over the organization by offering a single solution for alert detection, threat visibility, and proactive hunting. However, we can consider also Azure Sentinel as a birds-eye for providing a great view over the complete organization. This as a result lowers the stress of increasingly sophisticated attacks, expands volumes of alerts, and long resolution time frames. Further, Azure Sentinel is responsible for:
- Firstly, collecting data at cloud scale for all users, devices, applications, and infrastructure, both on-premises and in multiple clouds.
- Secondly, discovering previously undetected threats, and lowering false positives using Microsoft’s analytics and unparalleled threat intelligence.
- Thirdly, investigating threats with artificial intelligence, and searching for suspicious activities at scale.
- Lastly, responding to incidents rapidly with built-in orchestration and automation of common tasks.
Azure Sentinel Components:
Azure Sentinel is a combination of SIEM and SOAR capabilities in one product. Where,
- Security information and event management (SIEM) are for analyzing activities in the environment for distinguishing between normal and anomalous incidents. However, this can be trained and tuned to improve its capabilities.
- And, Security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR) are for integrating all tools, systems, and applications inside the security toolset, spanning the whole organization and enabling security teams for automating incident response workflows.
What is Azure Security Center?
Azure Security Center can be considered as a unified infrastructure security management system that creates the security posture of data centers by offering advanced threat protection over hybrid workloads in the cloud. Moreover, it provides the tools required for hardening the network, securing your services, and ensuring that you’re on top of your security posture. Azure Security Center marks the three most urgent security challenges:
- Firstly, rapid change of workloads. This means that end-users are empowered to do more and making sure that the ever-changing services people are using and creating are up to your security standards.
- Secondly, an increase in sophisticated attacks. This can be defined as the attacks keep getting more sophisticated so you have to secure the public cloud workloads by following security best practices.
- Lastly, security skills are in short supply. That is to say, the number of security alerts and alerting systems far outnumbers the number of administrators with the required background and experience for making sure that environments are protected.
In addition to security, Azure Security provides Azure Defender. Let’s understand about it!
Azure Defender: Overvew
Azure Defender is combined with Azure Security Center, for Azure and hybrid cloud workload protection and security. With advanced detection and response (XDR) abilities, this can handle threats like remote desktop protocol (RDP) brute-force attacks and SQL injections. Streamline security with AI and automation. Moreover, to provide better security for the cloud, Azure Security Center’s features cover the two broad pillars:
1. Cloud security posture management (CSPM)
CSPM offers features such as secure score, detection of security misconfigurations in your Azure machines, asset inventory, etc. These features can help in building up the hybrid cloud posture and tracking compliance with the built-in policies.
2. Cloud workload protection (CWP)
Security Center’s integrated cloud workload protection platform (CWPP), Azure Defender, initiating advanced, intelligent, protection of your Azure and hybrid resources and workloads. However, allowing Azure Defender provides a range of additional security features. In addition to the built-in policies, after enabling the Azure Defender plan, you can add custom policies and initiatives and regulatory standards like NIST and Azure CIS.
Above we have talked about the basic overview of Azure Sentinel and Azure Security Center. In the next section, we will understand the difference by discussing their top-most features.
Features of Azure Sentinel
The top features of Azure Sentinel are:
1. Limitless cloud speed and scale
Azure Sentinel is the first cloud-native SIEM that automatically scales to meet your organizational needs, and pay for only the resources you need. However, as a cloud-native SIEM, Azure Sentinel is less expensive and faster in deploying than other on-premises SIEMs.
2. AI on your side
- Using Azure Sentinel, you can focus on finding real threats quickly. Because this lowers the noise from legitimate events with built-in machine learning and knowledge-based on analyzing trillions of signals daily
- Secondly, it accelerates proactive threat hunting with pre-built queries depending on years of security experience.
- Thirdly, Azure Sentinel can allow checking the prioritized list of alerts. Moreover, you can have a correlated analysis of security events and visualize the complete scope of every attack.
- Lastly, it enables you for simplifying security operations and speeding up threat response with integrated automation and orchestration of common tasks and workflows.
3. Behaviour analytics for staying ahead of evolving threats
By detecting unknown threats and anomalous behavior of compromised users and insider threats, you can get a new level of insight with user and entity profiling that supports peer analysis, machine learning, and Microsoft security expertise. Moreover, Azure Sentinel lets you acquire more information for threat hunting, investigation, and response using behavioral analytics.
4. Streamlined and cost-effective security data collection
In Azure Sentinel, using connectors you can simplify data collection over several sources, including Azure, on-premises solutions, and over clouds. Moreover, this enables you to connect with data from your Microsoft products in just a few clicks. And, using the Microsoft threat protection solutions, you can freely import Office 365 audit logs, Azure activity logs, and alerts. This lets you analyze and draw correlations for deepening your intelligence.
5. A place for all your tools
Using Azure Sentinel, you can connect and gather data from all your sources. This can be users, applications, servers, and devices running on-premises or in any cloud. Moreover, here, you can also integrate with existing tools, whether business applications, other security products, or homegrown tools and use your own machine-learning models. Further, you can optimize for your requirements by bringing your own insights, tailored detections, machine learning models, and threat intelligence.
Features of Azure Security Center
With provides secure and safe environment, Azure Security Center offers various features, such as:
1. Strengthening the security posture of cloud workloads
- Azure Security Center allows you to examine the security state of all cloud resources, including servers, storage, SQL, networks, applications, and workloads that are running in Azure, on-premises, and in other clouds.
- Secondly, you can visualize your security state and make better security posture by using Azure Secure Score recommendations.
- Thirdly, you can view your compliance against a wide variety of regulatory requirements or company security requirements by centrally managing security policies.
- Lastly, Azure Security Center allows you to execute ongoing assessments and get actionable insights and reports for simplifying compliance.
2. Protecting hybrid cloud workloads with Azure Defender
We have already understood the basics of Azure Defender above. However, this allows you to secure hybrid cloud workloads including servers, data, storage, containers, and IoT. And, Azure Defender uses Microsoft Defender for Endpoint for protecting Windows servers and clients. Furthermore, one of the benefits of Azure Defender is that,
- Firstly, you can examine application vulnerabilities in virtual machines.
- Secondly, it helps in securing data hosted in Azure Virtual Machines, on-premises, and also discovers unusual attempts for accessing Azure Storage accounts.
- Lastly, it scans for vulnerabilities in container images in Azure Container Registry and protects managed Azure Container Service instances.
3. Streamline security management
In Azure Security Center, you can easily deploy and configure Security Center on large-scale environments, using policies and automation. Moreover, with the support of AI and automation, this quickly identifies the threats, streamlines threat investigation, and helps in automating remediation. This as a result empowers your team for focusing on business priorities, even as the threat landscape evolves. Further, you get the option to connect to existing tools and processes, such as Azure Sentinel and other SIEM, or integrate partner security solutions for streamlining threat mitigation.
Above we have covered the features for both Azure Security Center and Azure Sentinel. I guess now you will have an idea about these two services. Moving on, now we will talk about the pricing related to these services.
Azure Sentinel pricing
The data for this study is kept in an Azure Monitor Log Analytics workspace, and Azure Sentinel provides intelligent security analytics. Azure Sentinel, on the other hand, is charged according on the amount of data ingested for analysis and kept in the Monitor Log Analytics workspace. In this, the pricing options include:
1. Commitment Tiers
Using Commitment tiers you are billed a fixed fee depending on the selected tier, allowing a predictable total cost for Azure Sentinel. However, the Commitment tier offers a discount on the cost depending on the selected commitment tier compared to Pay-As-You-Go pricing. This also provides the flexibility to leave the capacity tier any time after the first 31 days of commitment.
2. Pay-As-You-Go
In Pay-As-You-Go pricing, you are billed per gigabyte (GB) for the volume of data ingested for analysis in Azure Sentinel and stored in the Azure Monitor Log Analytics workspace. However, here, the data volume is measured by the volume of data that will be stored in GB (10^9 bytes).
3. Free Trial
For the first 31-days, Azure Sentinel can be enabled at no additional cost on an Azure Monitor Log Analytics workspace. However, usage beyond the first 31-days will be billed per pricing. And, the bring your own machine learning are still applicable during the free trial.
4. Data Retention
After enabling Azure Sentinel, every GB of data ingested into the workspace can be maintained at no charge for the first 90 days on your Azure Monitor Log Analytics workspace. However, the retention beyond 90 days will bill as per the standard Azure Monitor Log Analytics retention prices.
5. Azure Monitor Log Analytics
Azure Sentinel is created on the foundation of the Azure Monitor Log Analytics platform that enables extensive query language for analyzing, interacting, and deriving insights from big volumes of operational data quickly. The charges in this depend on the volume of data ingested for analysis in Azure Sentinel and stored in Azure Monitor Log Analytics workspace.
6. Automation and Bring your own Machine Learning
Azure Sentinel combines with many other Azure services providing increased capabilities for Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) and Security Orchestration and Automation and Response (SOAR). However, some of these services may have additional charges:
- Firstly, you can use Azure Logic Apps for automating your security responses.
- Secondly, for customized analysis you can bring in your own machine learning models.
Azure Defender pricing
Azure Defender offers Extended Detection and Response for workloads running in Azure, on-premises, and in other clouds. However, combined with Security Center, Azure Defender secures hybrid data, cloud-native services, and servers from threats. Moreover, it also combines with existing security workflows that includes SIEM solution and Microsoft’s huge threat intelligence for streamlining threat mitigation.
Further, Azure Security Center uses the Free tier and its integration with Azure Defender for protecting Azure, on-premises, and hybrid resources. And, after enabling Azure Defender, it automatically enrolls and begins the securing process for all your resources unless you clearly decide to leave. And, for any resource that Azure Defender protects, you will charge per the pricing model. However, the pricing options include:
1. Azure Defender for IoT
Azure Defender for IoT provides unified security for IoT/OT environments by offering two different sets of abilities depending on whether you need to secure existing IoT/OT environments or are protecting new IoT/OT devices that are provisioned and managed via IoT Hub.
2. Agentless monitoring
Azure Defender for IoT’s agentless monitoring capabilities is responsible for securing existing enterprise IoT/OT environments, offering automatic asset discovery, vulnerability management, and threat detection. This monitoring capability is free of charge for the first 1,000 devices for the first 30 days. After that, customers will automatically be billed per the pricing.
2. Security for new devices provisioned through IoT Hub
Azure Defender for IoT also provides security for new devices provisioned and managed using IoT Hub. This is the same as those that have the Azure Defender for IoT security agent installed. However, these security capabilities are free of charge for the first 30 days. However, after that, you will automatically charge per the pricing.
Concluding
Above we have understood the basics of Azure Security Center and Azure Sentinel by covering its basic, features comparison and discussing pricing. Both of these services have the same level of importance when it comes to proving a safe and secure environment. Where Azure Security Centre refers to a security posture management for offering threat protection for hybrid cloud workloads and Azure Sentinel can stand by your side by providing intelligent security analytics for full enterprise. So, the best way to choose one is to go through the features and concept of these services and then, select as per your requirement.
