Microsoft offers the Azure Bot Service (replacing the former Microsoft Bot Framework), a managed bot building platform, which provides an integrated environment that is purpose-built for bot development, enabling you to build, connect, test, deploy, and manage intelligent bots, all from one place.
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Microsoft Sentinel
Score 8.6 out of 10
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Microsoft Sentinel (formerly Azure Sentinel) is designed as a birds-eye view across the enterprise. It is presented as a security information and event management (SIEM) solution for proactive threat detection, investigation, and response.
From personal experience, I can recommend the Azure AI service to reduce the burden on your customer service team, as we did. We created a customer service bot and automated our Frequently Asked Questions section, as well as an interactive platform for registering other complaints that the bot cannot handle, which are later addressed by our customer service team.
It's certainly well-suited in environments that rely heavily on Microsoft products, and it's well-suited for environments where you have other business drivers to go to the E5 license. If I were to say where I would not and why, I only gave it a seven on the recommendation, that answer would probably vary if you already owned E5 or not. It's extremely expensive. And if there are other alternatives, if you don't have any other driving reason to go to E5, I would coach you not to go to Microsoft Sentinel. But if you're there, it's a fantastic property. It's certainly part of the cost argument for moving to E5, but it's only a part. It can't by itself justify the move to E5.
It's the scale. Having built-in detections and vulnerabilities and the ability to see into the traffic flows is absolutely key. Look at it from my perspective as network security. We want to see what's going on east, west, between all the kinds of subscriptions and the tenants. We don't have that. We don't have that with any other product. Microsoft Sentinel gives us that kind of visibility.
An area for improvement is how case management is surfaced within the Microsoft Sentinel experience, as clearer integration into Sentinel workflows would reduce context switching and improve incident handling.
There is an opportunity to further expand agentic, autonomous investigation and response capabilities.
Azure AI Bot Service comes with an Integrated Development Environment and Bot Framework SDK that simplifies development. Having a single codebase for multiple channels, such as MS Teams, Facebook, and Slack, makes it easier to target multiple platforms without requiring redevelopment. LUIS and OpenAI can be easily integrated with your Chatbot to provide a seammless chat bot expereince to customers.
Because, as I said, it still lacks a lot of things, like many playbooks outside the Copilot integrations and the actual remediation. For example, for Microsoft Sentinel and SAP, I would want to see Copilot doing a lot of remediations in Microsoft Sentinel at SAPN, like executing the transaction code, maybe creating certain increases, or remediating stuff like that, which is all customized.
Microsoft's customer service staff is friendly and extremely knowledgeable. They are always available to assist you with bot framework-related issues that you may be experiencing. They provide training sessions, manuals, and support personnel, among other things. Bugs were easily spotted and patched, which was one of my pet peeves about patching.
Microsoft support is one of the highest rated on the market. It has global and multilingual support. Calls can be made over the phone and the solution is virtually instantaneous with the help of Microsoft engineers. It's great!
Microsoft Bot Framework is much better and well more established without a lot of proprietary software/coding language. Lex is very limited with integration with standard hardware and network configurations. Lex has performance issues and was too slow to meet near real-time collaboration requirements. Bot Framework complements many other Microsoft communication products and this was key to implementing without a lot of new training required.
Microsoft Sentinel excels in cloud-native scalability, Microsoft ecosystem integration, and AI-driven threat detection with UEBA and Fusion rules, offering faster deployment and lower costs (48% cheaper per Forrester) than Splunk, QRadar, Exabeam, SentinelOne, Securonix, and Wazuh. It lags in third-party integrations and syslog parsing. Organizations choose Microsoft Sentinel for its cost-effectiveness, automation, and Microsoft synergy, especially in Azure-heavy environments, though Splunk and Exabeam lead in flexibility and UEBA, respectively.
As any cybersecurity product, this has to be more with risk to avoid loss in case of a ransomware that more than relate to a productivity increase. Maybe the impact could be that instead of having people that are checking 24/7 the dashboard, you could implement Sentinel and have less people checking that or people with less expertise. So the saving will be a minor but will be a saving in the cost of your team.
