What is the difference between Azure Security Center and Azure Sentinel? (2024)

FAQs

What is the difference between Azure Security Center and Azure Sentinel? ›

Here are some key differences: Purpose: Microsoft Sentinel is a SIEM service that provides security analytics and threat intelligence. Azure Security Center, on the other hand, is a security management system that provides advanced threat protection and helps strengthen your security posture.

Microsoft Defender for Cloud (formerly known as Azure Security Center) is a comprehensive security solution that provides threat protection and security management for cloud workloads and services in Azure, as well as on-premises environments and other cloud platforms like AWS and GCP.

Azure Security Center is a built-in feature. As a result, it monitors and protects Azure PaaS services, including database systems, storage accounts, and Azure service fabric, without requiring any deployments. Non-Azure servers and VMs on-premises or in the cloud are likewise protected by Azure Security Center.

By merging Azure Security Center and Azure Defender, the new Microsoft Defender for Cloud offers preventative, detective, and responsive tools in a unified experience. The new product also ensures cross-cloud protection, reducing security blind spots without necessarily increasing complexity.

Here are some key differences: Purpose: Microsoft Sentinel is a SIEM service that provides security analytics and threat intelligence. Azure Security Center, on the other hand, is a security management system that provides advanced threat protection and helps strengthen your security posture.

Microsoft Sentinel also natively incorporates proven Azure services, like Log Analytics and Logic Apps, and enriches your investigation and detection with AI. It uses both Microsoft's threat intelligence stream and also enables you to bring your own threat intelligence.

Azure Sentinel, renamed to Microsoft Sentinel, is a cloud native security information and event management (SIEM) and security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR) solution that runs in the Azure cloud.

As you can see, Microsoft 365 Defender is good when it comes to Endpoints, Services and Identities. However, if you want to include 3rd party cloud systems, firewall logs or other log systems, you need Sentinel. Azure Defender and Microsoft 365 Defender processes the collected data by their own.

Azure platform offers a number of services that can be broadly categorized under Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), and Software-as-a-service(SaaS) delivery models. It supports multiple operating systems, application stacks, the most popular DB platforms, and container-hosting solutions.

Is Sentinel better than Splunk? ›

Microsoft Sentinel is generally rated as being easier to use, set up, and administrate. Splunk generally gets better ratings for quality of support and ease of doing business. Most people trust Microsoft's products more, including its Network Management, Incident Management, and Security Intelligence.

To put it simply - Azure Monitor is a set of services and features to monitor Azure and non-Azure resources. One of these services in Azure Monitor is Log Analytics. Log Analytics is a service to store and query logs and metrics. Azure Sentinel is using certain features of Azure Monitor as a platform.

You can access the Azure Security Center through the Azure portal, from the left menu. Once you've selected it, the overview screen has three main categories: Overview, Prevention, and Detection.

Not a big deal you might think, but the second example is for Azure security center that has a new name called Microsoft Defender for Cloud.

In August 2021, we announced Azure Cloud Services (classic) will be retiring on 31 August 2024. As App Service Environment v1 and v2 run on Azure Cloud Services (classic), we will retire App Service Environment v1 and v2 on the same date.

Microsoft Defender for Cloud (formerly known as Azure Security Center) is your tool for overall security posture management and threat protection.

Effective November 1, 2021, Microsoft Cloud App Security is being rebranded to Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps.

Are you looking for Microsoft Purview Information Protection, formerly Microsoft Information Protection (MIP)? The Azure Information Protection add-in is retired and replaced with labels that are built in to your Microsoft 365 apps and services.