As part of the Fortinet Security Fabric, FortiAnalyzer provides security fabric analytics and automation to provide better detection and response against cyber risks.
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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.
FortiAnalyzer is a must have when you administer multiple FortiGate firewalls in a defense in depth enterprise environment. Total visibility can be achieved across multiple physical and virtual firewalls. Complete analysis of your threat landscape is possible along with real time detection, compliance reporting, and wholistic firewall rule analysis and reporting. Eliminating shadow rules, tuning unnecessarily permissive rules, automation and other analysis are built in to this easy to deploy software.
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.
FortiAnalyzer is easy to deploy are ready to use right out of the box. The user interface is intuitive and the reporting engine is very customizable however most of the 'canned' reports are usable right away. It is easy to add firewalls under management and event correlation happens immediately. FortiAnalyzer is a great log aggregator for all of your firewalls and then upload meaningful data to a SEIM.
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 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!
The cost of FortiAnalyzer is lower compared to other products, and the benefits it provides at this cost are notably superior. Given the presence of multiple FortiGate products in our network, its seamless integration enhances efficiency and usage, allowing us to maximize the utility of the product to a great extent.
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.
We are able to report to the management the real-time attacks on the network
User behavior analysis has become easy
Achieving a favorable return on investment (ROI) is easily attainable, given that the product cost is relatively moderate. Without the product, the amount of human work time required is significantly higher, further emphasizing the cost-effectiveness of its implementation.
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.
