HOT OFF THE PRESS: Microsoft Sentinel Data Lake 🔥

A Modern Architecture for Security Data at Scale

Now in Public Preview: Microsoft Sentinel Data Lake

Security data volumes are exploding, and traditional SIEM architectures struggle to keep up—especially when you need to retain telemetry for months (or years), support retrospective threat hunting, or run machine learning pipelines across all your logs.

With the introduction of Microsoft Sentinel Data Lake, we now have a fully managed, cloud-native, open-format data lake built into Microsoft Sentinel, giving security teams the architectural control they’ve been waiting for.

🔎 Key capabilities include:

1️⃣ Separation of ingestion, storage, and analytics
Design your own data flow. Send high-volume, low-fidelity logs to the lake tier for long-term retention, and use analytics tier only for high-signal, high-frequency analysis. Reduce costs without losing visibility.

2️⃣ Open format + schema support
Sentinel Data Lake stores data in an open-source format aligned to Sentinel’s native table schemas, enabling analysts to query it using Kusto (KQL) directly in the Defender portal. This avoids schema mapping overhead and ensures compatibility with existing detection logic.

3️⃣ Integrated asset enrichment
New connectors bring user, device, and workload context into the lake, enabling deeper correlation between logs and asset data—critical for threat intelligence matching, anomaly detection, and attack surface reduction.

4️⃣ Advanced data analysis with notebooks
Use the new Sentinel Visual Studio Code extension to connect directly to the lake. Run scheduled or on-demand Python notebooks with Spark, ML libraries, and GitHub Copilot. No infrastructure to configure. No compute cluster to manage.

5️⃣ Job orchestration and promotion
Run long-duration queries or machine learning jobs on historical data and promote insights into the analytics tier—so they can be actioned immediately in Sentinel via analytics rules, hunting queries or SOAR playbooks.

✅ The entire experience is natively managed in the Microsoft Defender portal, with simplified onboarding, flexible retention policies, and centralised control over your entire security data estate.

📘 Read the full technical overview:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-gb/azure/sentinel/datalake/sentinel-lake-overview

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