Microsoft recently announced a major expansion of its security platform, Sentinel, transforming its Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) solution into a unified agentic platform. This expansion includes the general availability of the Sentinel data lake.
New Features for Agentic Defense
The company also released a public preview of two new components: Sentinel Graph and the Sentinel Model Context Protocol (MCP) server. According to Vasu Jakkal, Corporate Vice President at Microsoft Security, this platform gives defenders a single place to ingest security signals, correlate data across different areas, and power AI agents built into tools like Security Copilot and GitHub Copilot.
The Sentinel data lake, first released in public preview earlier in July, is a cloud-native tool designed specifically to manage and analyze security data from diverse sources. The purpose of this data lake is to lay the groundwork for an agentic defense by providing AI models, such as Security Copilot, with the complete context needed to spot subtle attack patterns and surface high-fidelity alerts. This shift allows security teams to uncover complex attacker behavior, proactively hunt over historical data, and trigger automatic detections based on the latest attack methods.
How Sentinel Enhances Security
Jakkal explained that Sentinel takes in all types of signals, whether structured or semi-structured, and creates a rich, contextual understanding of a digital environment using vectorized security data and graph-based relationships. By integrating these insights with other Microsoft security tools like Defender and Purview, Sentinel brings graph-powered context directly to the tools security teams already use. This helps defenders trace attack paths, understand the scope of an impact, and prioritize the necessary response, all within their familiar workflows.
Microsoft emphasized that Sentinel helps organizations shift their cybersecurity approach from reactive to predictive by organizing and enriching security data to detect issues faster and respond to events at scale. Furthermore, users can now build specialized Security Copilot agents tailored to their organizational workflows in coding platforms like VS Code, enabled by the new Sentinel MCP server. The company also stressed the need for securing AI platforms themselves and plans to introduce enhancements to Azure AI Foundry to incorporate stronger protections against risks like (cross-)prompt injection attacks.
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