Enhancing the Skills and Threat Detections of In-House SOCs and Security Teams

You've made the investment. Microsoft Defender XDR is deployed across your endpoints while Sentinel aggregates logs and generates alerts. Your security operations team completed initial training and familiarized themselves with the new tools. On paper, you have a modern security operation powered by Microsoft's robust security stack. 

Your organization chose to keep the detection and response capabilities for these tools in-house for business reasons such as complying with industry or governmental regulations, data sovereignty and privacy needs, faster decision-making, highly customized organizational security needs, etc.

A few months later, challenges emerge. Your team experiences alert fatigue, with analysts spending hours investigating false positives. Sentinel's data ingestion costs exceed projections. Your detection capabilities remain limited to out-of-the-box rules that don't address your specific threat landscape. Security analysts find themselves becoming technology administrators rather than threat hunters.

If this scenario unfolds in your organization, what would you do if you are not comfortable or allowed to fully outsource to a Managed Detection and Response (MDR) provider?  How can you overcome the key challenges your team is facing? Here are some potential issues to consider: 

• Detection engineering expertise gaps: Creating effective detection rules requires specialized knowledge combining threat intelligence and Microsoft-specific query languages
• Cost optimization complexity: Managing Sentinel data costs effectively requires expertise in data normalization and filtering strategies
• Configuration management: Each security product has numerous configuration options impacting both security efficacy and operational efficiency 

Continuous Optimization Solutions: Bridging Your Gaps 

BlueVoyant's Continuous Optimization for Microsoft Security (COMS) service bridges these gaps without requiring organizations to fully outsource their security operations. Instead, COMS complements existing security teams with specialized expertise and ongoing optimization. 

This approach directly addresses common pain points: 

• Skills development: Through expert-led training in your own environment, teams develop advanced Microsoft security skills tailored to your specific deployment
• Alert fatigue reduction: Custom threat detection analytics improve signal-to-noise ratio by focusing on relevant threats to your organization
• Cost management: Monthly optimization reviews identify opportunities to reduce data costs while maintaining security coverage
• Technology expertise: Access to Microsoft security architects provides support for complex configuration challenges or implementing new features 

Real-World Outcomes 

Organizations implementing continuous optimization approaches with Microsoft Security tools are seeing measurable improvements across key metrics: 

• Enhanced detection capabilities: Enhanced detection capabilities through EDR (60%) and SIEM (52%) integration enable organizations to detect 76% of incidents within 24 hours, while continuous optimization of manual process (40% still manual) can further accelerate detection-to-response workflows ¹
• Reduced security risk: Continuous optimization of security controls helps reduce threat exposure, eliminate redundant tools, and improve the effectiveness of existing investments
• Cost optimization: Through proper log management, data filtering, and automation, enterprises typically achieve significant reductions in both Microsoft Sentinel data ingestion costs and manual security operations overhead
• Cyber insurance benefits: Organizations demonstrating improved security posture through optimized Microsoft security implementations often qualify for reduced cyber insurance premiums ²
• Risk avoidance: Given that the average cost of a data breach reached $4.88 million in 2024, even modest improvements in security posture translate to substantial risk avoidance value ³

Through the use of BlueVoyant’s COMS service, organizations can combine the control of in-house security operations with specialized Microsoft security expertise, thereby maximizing their existing investments while steadily improving security outcomes. In this manner, COMS provides a compelling alternative to traditional build-or-buy approaches for enterprises with established security teams looking to enhance their Microsoft security capabilities. 

Rickey Olsen is project coordinator at BlueVoyant.  
Michael Hans, senior security engineer, contributed to this blog. 

Sources

1. SANS 2023 Incident Response Report: https://www.sans.org/white-papers/2023-survey-event-incident-response/
2. Aon Global 2025 Cyber Risk Report: https://www.aon.com/cyber-risk-report  
3. IBM X-Force Threat Intelligence Index 2025: https://www.ibm.com/reports/threat-intelligence