Azure Sentinel vs Security Center: What’s The Difference?

[Sassy_Social_Share]

Two leading products for the security of your cloud services are Azure Sentinel vs Azure Security Center. And while there is a wide range of products to help you secure your data on the cloud, Microsoft is the leader in the space.

For cloud engineers, it can be difficult and confusing to understand what makes Azure Sentinel and Azure Security Center different, especially if your needs are specific.

» LEARN MORE: See Why Azure Makes The Difference Both in Performance & Costs

Both have similar features and aims, are offered by Microsoft, and are designed to secure cloud infrastructure in Azure. The most confusing aspect is perhaps that they are both mentioned together a lot, even in Microsoft documentation. So what is the difference?

What is Azure Sentinel?

There are many different stages to protecting your cloud services. You need to be able to collect data and assess whether there are any threats, with a team of people who can respond to these threats.  For the cloud, there are many products that can assist with these tasks.

Azure Sentinel is a cloud-native security information and event manager (SIEM). SIEMs are cyber security products that combine the long-term storage, analysis, and reporting of log data with real-time monitoring and notifications. These tools have now evolved to use machine learning, statistical analysis, and complex algorithms to improve the security offered.

Azure Sentinel is a market leading SIEM product. 

It has features in 4 connected steps of the cyber security process.

Azure Sentinel collects data across infrastructure, applications, devices, and users. 

All of this data relates to keeping cloud services secure. 

With the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning, Azure Sentinel investigates the threats to find malicious activities. 

The product is then able to automatically respond to issues without input from professionals or send alerts to your organization about the malicious activities.

One of the main draws of Sentinel is its ability to investigate and automatically respond to security threats. This is done through machine learning. 

Products that use machine learning need a lot of data. That is why Sentinel also has a lot of data collection capabilities, to ensure that it can make the correct decisions.

What is Azure Security Center?

When first moving their tools and products to the cloud, there was confusion as to whether organizations were responsible for the security of their cloud-based software. 

While cloud providers are responsible for securing the cloud infrastructure stack, individual organizations are responsible for securing applications and data.

Most cloud breaches are the result of misconfigurations.  

Gartner, a global IT research organization, found that more than 90% of cloud security issues are directly caused by misconfigurations. 

This is the responsibility of individual organizations, and there is a clear need to prioritize these issues due to their frequency as well as the potential damage caused.

Fortunately, different products exist to help your organization find these problems. Cloud security posture management (CSPM) solutions were developed to automatically check for misconfigurations that could lead to cyber security issues. 

They are able to detect problems such as misconfigurations, permission errors, lack of encryption, and public-facing data storages. 

Azure Security Center is one such CSPM solution offered by Microsoft.

Security Center provides an Azure Secure Score for your enterprise, allowing you to quickly assess the security of your resources. 

With your Azure Secure Score, you can also receive checkpoints and advice on how to improve your score – which leads to an improvement in security. 

There are also regulatory compliance checks to ensure that security regulations are met.

Through Azure Security Center, you are able to assess the security state of all cloud services running in Azure. This includes storage, servers, databases, networks, and applications. 

No stone is left unturned when assessing the security of your cloud products.

What is the Difference Between Azure Sentinel and Security Center?

Azure Sentinel is a security information and event management system for detecting and responding to threats. Azure Security Center is a cloud security posture management system, automatically checking for misconfigurations in the cloud set-up.

There is some overlap in what these two tools can achieve. Both tools play vital roles in the collection of security data, and the detection (or analysis) of issues. 

For Security Center, this is the main focus of the product – detecting security issues with cloud services. Sentinel goes further through the cybersecurity life cycle by also investigating incidents and then automatically responding to them.

Within the roles of collection and detection, these two tools do slightly different things. Azure Sentinel is an SIEM. This means that the background of the product is in data logs, although modern products such as Sentinel try to broaden their background. 

Sentinel’s background is in data logs, and it works as an SIEM, whereas Security Center is focused on completing compliance checklists as a CSPM.

Security Center, on the other hand, is focused on completing compliance checklists. This includes ensuring that the cloud services of your organization meet the necessary regulation compliances and best practices in the cyber security industry.

An organization will use Security Center so that its security team can continuously check that cloud services are secure and up to date. As software updates or installs happen frequently, it is important to have a dashboard that can inform you when you need to make changes.

Azure Sentinel can be thought of as the artificial “guard dog” of the organization. You do not need to train it, as it is powered by artificial intelligence from Microsoft. 

You do not need to keep giving it instructions either. 

Sentinel will go off on its own and explore possible threats in your cloud environment. Sentinel can then try to deal with it on its own, or alert you to the problem, but it’s not a replacement for your security team, but an asset that they can utilize.

Can Azure Sentinel and Security Center Be Used Together?

Azure Sentinel and Security Center tools can be used together. In fact, this is common practice for many organizations working in the cloud.

Azure Sentinel requires data to perform its activities such as detecting and responding to threats. Security Center can be used as one of many different sources of information for Sentinel, allowing the tool to give a wider and more holistic view of the organization.

Microsoft makes it easy to use the two tools together. 

With just a few clicks on the console, it is possible to join Security Center into Sentinel. Once the connection has been made, the data can be shared between the tools. 

“Azure Security Center will continue to be the unified infrastructure security management system for cloud security posture management and cloud workload protection. Azure Sentinel will continue to focus on SIEM.”

John Yoon

For state-of-the-art solutions such as machine learning, it is necessary to have a lot of data. In many cases, more quality data can result in the machine learning tools performing better. 

In the case of Sentinel, more data allows it to detect more issues or threats and respond to these threats in a more efficient way.

Although they are better together, Microsoft continues to view these two as separate products. Microsoft has committed to investing in these two products separately. 

What About the Debate Between Azure Sentinel and Security Center?

Azure Sentinel and Azure Security Center are two different products offered by Microsoft. Sentinel is a complete SIEM package that collects data, detects issues, investigates threats, and automatically responds to the malicious threats. 

Security Center is a cloud security posture management solution. 

The main purpose of this product is to identify misconfigurations in the cloud set-up which are the most common security issues in cloud services.

They are different products, offering different things. You would not use Azure Sentinel to check for your compliance with local laws, you would use Security Center for that. Likewise, you wouldn’t use Azure Security Center to respond to threats as the software is not capable of that.

However, they can both work in parallel to help secure services. 

Security Center can collect huge amounts of data that can be used by the data-hungry artificial intelligence of Sentinel. Microsoft recommends that you use both together.

You may already have products in your suite that offer similar features to either product. But now that you understand what they both can do for your organization, and what they can do together, you may want to switch to Azure Sentinel and Azure Security Center.

Ultimately, it is up to you to decide whether you need the services of both products. It’s something to consider as they both provide substantial benefits to the security of your cloud services.

The debate is not so much Azure Sentinel vs Security Center, but what the difference is, and how can they be used together.