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
Rapid7 InsightConnect
Score 10.0 out of 10
N/A
Rapid7 offers InsightConnect, a SOAR solution that integrates with existing solutions to orchestrate vulnerability management processes from notification to remediation, so users can ensure critical issues are being addressed with every security advisory that comes in—while leaving human decision points where most critical. Automate actions to scan, find patches, and verify remediation.
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.
Where Rapid7 InsightConnect excels is in environments needing the whole suite of virus protection and monitoring. In our environment we use it to make sure we have visibility over all endpoints, servers, hosts, and clusters to make sure that there are no vulnerabilities being left unattended too. It is also best in large environments. Since there are many endpoints, the automation from Rapid7 helps manage them all in an efficient manner.
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.
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!
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.
Palo Alto was slightly cheaper, but more complex and would need the training to be effective. Splunk was comparative from a price standpoint, but the automation features of Rapid7 InsightConnect outweighed those of Splunk SOAR. Honestly, all of these are great choices, but for our environment, it made more sense to go with Rapid7.
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.
