Microsoft Sentinel

Microsoft has launched Sentinel Data Lake in public preview, introducing a transformative approach to security data management within the SIEM landscape. This new capability brings a scalable, cost-efficient, and AI-ready data lake architecture that empowers security teams to retain, query, and analyze vast amounts of telemetry over extended periods—without compromising performance, visibility, or budget.

At the heart of this innovation is a tiered storage model that separates the traditional analytics tier (optimized for real-time detection and dashboards) from a new cold-tier data lake designed for long-term retention and deep forensic analysis. This separation allows organizations to store years of logs at a fraction of the cost, while still enabling powerful querying and threat hunting capabilities.

What makes Sentinel Data Lake especially compelling is its suitability for high-volume log sources—systems that generate massive telemetry streams daily. These include:

• Network infrastructure (routers, switches, IDS/IPS systems)
• Firewall appliances (e.g., Palo Alto, Fortinet, Cisco ASA)
• Authentication and identity platforms like Microsoft Entra ID (formerly Azure AD), which produce extensive sign-in and audit logs
• Endpoint detection and response (EDR) tools
• Cloud workloads and containerized environments with dynamic logging

Traditionally, storing and analyzing logs from these sources over long periods has been prohibitively expensive. Sentinel Data Lake changes that equation by offering low-cost ingestion and storage, making it feasible to retain months or even years of telemetry for compliance, threat detection, and historical investigations.

Tiered storage model

• Analytics Tier: Hot path, optimized for fast querying, real-time alerting, and dashboards.
• Data Lake Tier: Cold path, low-cost long-term storage for forensic queries.

Seamless Data Mirroring

• Mirror data from the analytics tier to the Data Lake without extra ingestion costs.
• Direct ingestion into the data lake is also supported.

Advanced Querying & AI Integration

• Use Kusto Query Language (KQL) in the Defender portal.
• Leverage Jupyter notebooks and AI-native workflows for automated threat hunting.

Retention & Governance

• Retain logs for up to 12 years.
• Benefit from audit logging, role-based access control, and managed identities.

Compared to the Analytics tier, this model is up to 85% more cost-efficient.

• Detecting low-and-slow threats: Analyze patterns over months or even years
• Forensics & compliance: Affordable long-term log retention
• AI-Powered threat hunting: Use agents AI for deeper and automated insights

Microsoft Sentinel Data Lake redefines how defenders manage, retain, and analyze security telemetry in the modern enterprise. By introducing a tiered architecture and dramatically lowering the cost of long-term data storage and querying, it empowers security teams to shift from reactive detection to proactive, intelligence-driven defense.

This evolution is more than just a technical upgrade—it's a strategic enabler. Organizations can now afford to retain years of high-volume logs, perform deep forensic investigations, and leverage AI-powered analytics to uncover subtle threat patterns that would otherwise go unnoticed. Whether you're a SOC analyst, a compliance officer, or a managed security provider, Sentinel Data Lake offers the flexibility and scalability needed to meet today’s complex security demands.

It also aligns perfectly with the growing need for AI-readiness in cybersecurity. With support for notebooks, agentic AI workflows, and seamless integration with KQL, defenders can build automated hunting routines, enrich investigations with contextual intelligence, and reason over historical data with unprecedented depth.

The future of detection isn’t just what you can see now—it’s what you can retain, correlate, and reason over later. Sentinel Data Lake ensures that your data is not just stored, but made actionable—when it matters most.

Thanks to our strategic partnerships with Microsoft and our broad experience, we are uniquely positioned to deliver a comprehensive, end-to-end solution to keep your security under control.

Let’s talk about how we can help secure your environment via eb.ce1783464607snys@1783464607olleh1783464607 or +32 494 03 28 66