Introducing Microsoft Sentinel Data Lake
The product provides a unified approach to data ingestion, supporting over 350 native connectors for Microsoft services like Microsoft 365, Azure, Defender XDR, Entra, and Intune.
The Microsoft Sentinel Data Lake, launched in public preview in July 2025, is a cloud-native, fully managed security data lake integrated into Microsoft Sentinel, Microsoft’s Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) platform.
Designed to tackle the challenges of managing vast amounts of security data, it offers cost-effective, long-term storage, advanced analytics, and AI-driven threat detection.
By centralizing security data in an open-format repository, it eliminates data silos and supports hyperscale ingestion, making it a transformative solution for modern Security Operations Centers (SOCs).
Unified Security Suite
The product provides a unified approach to data ingestion, supporting over 350 native connectors for Microsoft services like Microsoft 365, Azure, Defender XDR, Entra, and Intune, as well as third-party sources such as AWS, GCP, Palo Alto, and Cisco.
Organizations can also use custom connectors to ingest raw or transformed data, including firewall logs, DNS data, and asset inventories. Integration with Microsoft Defender Threat Intelligence (MDTI) enriches this data with insights from 84 trillion daily signals at no additional cost, enabling comprehensive threat analysis across cloud and on-premises environments.
The Sentinel Data Lake leverages advanced analytics and AI to empower security teams. It supports Kusto Query Language (KQL) for querying across both tiers, enabling threat hunting, forensic analysis, and compliance reporting.
Integration with Jupyter notebooks, Python, and Apache Spark facilitates advanced analytics, machine learning, and visualizations, such as anomaly detection and behavioral baselining.
Copilot AI Security
By providing a unified data foundation, it powers Microsoft Security Copilot and custom AI models, helping detect subtle attack patterns and generate high-fidelity alerts. The decoupled storage and compute architecture allows organizations to query data only when needed, further optimizing costs.
Management is streamlined within the Microsoft Defender portal, eliminating the need for complex infrastructure like Azure Data Explorer or storage blobs. Automated onboarding, audit logging, and table management simplify operations, while KQL jobs enable one-time or scheduled data promotion from the data lake to the analytics tier with cost-optimizing filters.
The platform supports long-term threat detection, allowing retroactive threat hunting and incident reconstruction over years, which is ideal for identifying “low and slow” attacks or meeting regulatory requirements like GDPR, FCA, or NIS2. Its multi-tenant flexibility also makes it suitable for Managed Security Service Providers (MSSPs) and Managed Detection and Response (MDR) providers, offering tenant-specific workflows and data isolation.
