Augmenting Microsoft Sentinel SIEM: The Power of Exabeam for UEBA and TDIR

Modern security landscapes demand not just data collection, but meaningful insights extracted from massive amounts of log data. While Microsoft Sentinel security information and event management (SIEM) excels at log aggregation and basic analysis, security teams often require additional layers of intelligence to detect sophisticated threats and achieve faster incident response. Exabeam user and entity behavior analytics (UEBA) and threat detection, investigation, and response (TDIR) capabilities are powerful tools to augment Sentinel, providing unmatched value and addressing critical customer challenges.

In this article:

• Customer challenges driving SIEM augmentation
• Why Exabeam for augmentation?
• Why it matters for Sentinel customers
• Conclusion

Customer challenges driving SIEM augmentation

• Alert fatigue: Ever-growing log volumes trigger countless alerts, overwhelming security teams and leading to alert fatigue. Traditional SIEM solutions lack context and prioritize poorly, resulting in wasted time chasing false alarms.
• Evolving threats: Malicious actors continuously adapt their tactics, evading signature-based detection. SIEM tools alone struggle to identify anomalous user and entity behaviors indicative of insider threats, lateral movement, or account compromise.
• Limited visibility: Siloed data sources and complex cloud environments hinder holistic security visibility. SIEM systems may lack the flexibility to ingest and analyze data from diverse platforms, leaving blindspots in security coverage.
• Resource constraints: Security teams are often understaffed and lack the expertise to analyze complex data effectively. Manually sifting through logs is time consuming and inefficient, inhibiting proactive threat hunting and investigation.

Why Exabeam for augmentation?

The AI-driven Exabeam Security Operations Platform offers a full stack of security services from basic log management and SIEM all the way up to the most advanced cybersecurity capabilities including the latest innovation in UEBA and TDIR. Given the large amount of effort and resources required to deploy SIEM and connect data sources, many organizations opt to leave their existing SIEM system in place. Augmenting SIEM solutions by layering UEBA and TDIR on top of the SIEM deployment has become a popular and practical option for those who don’t have the resources available for a full SIEM replacement but need a higher level of security and data protection. Exabeam offers complimentary, value-added security capabilities that augment SIEM solutions, such as Sentinel, with advanced capabilities not available with SIEM alone.

First and foremost, augmenting Sentinel with Exabeam Security Operations Platform is easy. Exabeam supports a dedicated Cloud Collector for Sentinel, making it simple to onboard logs into the Exabeam platform.

The Exabeam Security Operations Platform applies AI and automation to security operations workflows for a holistic approach to combat cyberthreats, delivering the most effective TDIR. AI-driven detections pinpoint high-risk threats by learning normal user, entity, and peer group behavior and prioritizing threats with context-aware risk scoring for faster, more accurate, and consistent TDIR.

At the heart of the Exabeam platform is Threat Center. Threat Center simplifies security analyst workflows by centralizing threat management, investigative tools, and automation. Threat Center reduces alert fatigue with prioritization, automated evidence collection, and timeline creation, providing every analyst with a consistent view of the threat. Correlating disparate alerts allows organizations to mitigate an entire threat at once, not just a portion of it. Exabeam Copilot provides generative AI functionality, delivering simple threat explanations and recommended actions. Threat Center offers a unified workbench for TDIR, complemented by AI to uplevel skills and automate tasks for more focused and consistent investigation and response. Augmenting SIEM with TDIR and UEBA doesn’t mean you need to hire more security experts. Threat Center and Exabeam Copilot make it simple to uplevel your security coverage and insights, minimizing the learning curve for your SOC team.

Why it matters for Sentinel customers

By integrating Exabeam with Sentinel, organizations unlock significant benefits:

• Reduced alert fatigue: UEBA filters out noise, prioritizing only the most relevant alerts. Security teams can focus on genuine threats, significantly improving their efficiency and effectiveness.
• Enhanced threat detection: UEBA proactively identifies suspicious activities, including lateral movement, privilege escalation, and insider threats, enabling early intervention and mitigation. Advanced TDIR capabilities available with Exabeam Security Operations Platform improve your ability to protest against credential-based attacks and zero-days. Learn more.
• Improved visibility: Exabeam ingests data from diverse sources, including Sentinel, providing a unified view of your entire security landscape, eliminating blind spots.
• Faster incident response: Advanced Analytics automates investigation workflows, provides context-rich insights, and streamlines remediation efforts, accelerating incident resolution.
• Increased team productivity: Security analysts can spend less time on manual tasks and focus on strategic activities, maximizing their impact.

Conclusion

In today’s dynamic threat landscape, Microsoft Sentinel alone isn’t enough. By leveraging the combined power of Exabeam UEBA and advanced analytics capabilities, organizations can gain deep behavioral insights, prioritize effectively, and respond to threats faster. This translates to reduced risk, improved security posture, and enhanced operational efficiency, making Exabeam an essential complement to Sentinel in your security arsenal.

Learn more about Microsoft Sentinel with Exabeam Analytics

Download this guide to learn how by prioritizing automation, improving visibility, bridging knowledge gaps, and supplementing data ingesting with threat intelligence, organizations can build more resilient and effective cybersecurity defenses.