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.
$2.46
per GB ingested
Recorded Future Intelligence Cloud
Score 9.3 out of 10
N/A
Recorded Future is an intelligence company. Its Intelligence Cloud provides coverage across adversaries, infrastructure, and targets. Combining persistent and pervasive automated data collection and analytics with human analysis, Recorded Future provides visibility into the digital landscape, enabling countries and organizations to take proactive action to disrupt adversaries.
Specifically for Microsoft Sentinel, it's going to have what's next to no value if you're not on Azure. You have to be in as your customer. If you want greater insight into what is going on in your cloud environment, turn Microsoft Sentinel on, but focus on where you enable it. You're not going to turn it on to see everything because it's not like focus on the areas where you are at risk or you believe you're at risk or something that you're, depending on your environment, do you have multiple subscriptions? Do you have a Microsoft Sentinel subscription that you just turned on, but it's not getting the visibility, and then you can alert on stuff that goes out of trend, etc.?
If you want a platform that is covering thousands of sources, and that includes deep, dark web, clear web forums, blogs, newspapers, social media networks, etc. Recorded Future is the most complete solution that I have seen. On the other hand, if you are looking for a really advanced platform with lot of human added value, research papers, advanced investigations, etc. Recorded Future might not be the ideal solution.
Strong integration with the Microsoft security ecosystem allows seamless connection to services such as Microsoft Defender, Microsoft 365, and Azure. This makes it easy to bring together identity, endpoint, and cloud signals to support investigation and detection scenarios.
Effective correlation of alerts and incidents in collaboration with Microsoft Defender XDR helps combine related signals into higher‑fidelity incidents. This reduces noise and improves visibility into attack context, making investigations more efficient.
High scalability for data ingestion and processing enables large volumes of security telemetry to be handled efficiently.
I think it's primarily going to be cost, since Microsoft Sentinel uses Microsoft Log Analytics as its base, right? So storing the logs and log retention is very expensive. That might result in users not adopting it as quickly. Second, I think Copilot for security can just do summarization and not many remediation tasks. In the future, we would like to see Copilot create many playbooks, including all box playbooks, to remediate many security issues.
E-Mail reports can show unrelated content, especially sometimes you'll see alerts popping up for articles which have been published years ago but for some reason were just recently discovered by RF.
Yara rules from their insikt blog sometimes are not syntactically correct and need to be manually edited to actually work. There's some proper QA missing.
Their global and 3rd party risk reports could be more tailored towards the industries of their client. There is entries for totally unrelated security incidents. Of course a global list aims to find incidents on a global view, but it doesn't add much value at that point.
The Microsoft Azure Sentinel solution is very good and even better if you use Azure. It's easy to implement and learn how to use the tool with an intuitive and simple interface. New updates are happening to always bring new news and improve the experience and usability. The solution brings reliability as it is from a very reliable manufacturer.
I've had an issue with their browser-plugin which didn't want to authenticate correctly. RF's support could arrange for a session with me and identify and solve the issue. I was very pleased how serious they took my problems and also how knowledgeable they are.
If I have more general questions they quickly reply and most likely also have a solution at hand.
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.
It is the most complete solution of these three, as the others are focused in specific areas and having really detailed analysis about threat actors, APT groups, etc. Recorded Future is not having this level of knowledge in really specific areas but doing a really good work covering thousands of sources and the most relevant forums.
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.
Recorded Future crashes my web browser in cases I have to open a web page containing hundreds of IPs. A quick disable feature for a particular tab would be beneficial for someone like me.
