Azure Sentinel at a discount?

In the SIEM world, Azure Sentinel is very much a newcomer, but is already shaking up the enterprise-dominated space. Priced at about 10x cheaper than its competitors ($2.76 per GB), the tool massively undercuts every other product. In very non-Microsoft fashion, it also brings to the table some very cutting-edge features, like Jupyter Notebooks and bring-your-own machine learning (features that will play very heavily in the future of infosec).

But in a very yes-Microsoft move, they’re currently offering a huge discount for switching to Azure Sentinel. If you’re currently consuming less than 5GB per day but commit to scaling up to 50GB per day for three months, they’ll give you a $25,000 credit for Azure services. Let’s break down that deal.

Azure Sentinel is priced at $2.76 per GB. At 50GB per day, you’re looking at $4140 per month, times three months gives us $12,420 you’re committing to spend. In exchange, Microsoft gives you $25,000 in Azure credits. That’s an absolutely smoking deal on an already super inexpensive service.

This is pretty on-brand for Microsoft, though. If you subscribe to the Microsoft Action Pack (MAP) you can get $100 per month in Azure credits, for the low cost of $400 per year. Combined with everything else you get in the MAP, that’s unbeatable. Of course, many Azure services are so ridiculously expensive that you’ll likely blow through those $100/mo credits pretty quick. It’s worth it for enterprise solutions where cost is less of a factor, but for hobbyist developers like me, DigitalOcean is a better prospect. And if you want a discount over DigitalOcean’s already low prices, check out my referral link here for $100 in DO credits (which stretches a lot further than $100 at Azure).