Overview 

Our client is a large energy provider serving residential, commercial, and industrial customers across Australia. Their IT infrastructure was distributed across on-premises servers and Azure environments in multiple locations. Due to this setup, security visibility was limited, making it difficult to detect threats on time and resulting in slower incident response. 

We implemented a unified monitoring solution that consolidated all systems into a single, centralized view. We automated threat detection and response that improved visibility, reduced response times, and improved the overall security posture. 

Client Background 

Our client is one of Australia’s top energy suppliers, offering electricity to commercial, industrial, and residential clients. They have a nationwide operations footprint, on-premises systems, and Microsoft Azure cloud environments spread across several sites. 

Challenges 

• Lack of Security Visibility: Insufficient visibility of threats and a slow response due to security logs spread across on-premises devices and cloud platforms. 
• Lack of Centralised SIEM and SOAR Platform: Limited log correlation, automated response, and effective security operations due to the absence of a SIEM with SOAR. 
• Manual Alert Triage and Response: Increased response time and operational failures across incidents as security teams relied on manual investigation. 
• Limited Integration with Microsoft Security Tools: Ineffectiveness of monitoring and coordinated threat response due to the lack of integration of native Microsoft security data sources. 
• Compliance Complexity in the Energy Sector: Meeting Australian energy sector security mandates required extensive manual reporting, making compliance tracking inefficient and resource-heavy. 

Solutions 

• Unified Log Ingestion: Connected 40+ Ubiquiti network devices, servers, virtualization, and Microsoft cloud logs into Sentinel using native connectors and centralized Log Analytics. 
• Analytics Rules and Detection Engineering: Implemented 256 custom and built-in analytics rules detecting identity abuse, network and endpoint threats, and data theft. 
• Noise Reduction and Precision Tuning: Used KQL to fine-tune detection thresholds, reduce false positives, and improve alert accuracy for security operations teams across large environments. 
• Automated IR and SOAR Orchestration: Deployed Sentinel playbooks automating enrichment, notifications, created ServiceNow tickets, isolated risky devices, and locked compromised user accounts, without manual work. 
• Governance, Compliance, and Behaviour Analytics: Applied RBAC, retention policies, long-term archiving, and UEBA to support compliance. Security records were stored safely for required periods, and unusual user actions were monitored to catch insider risks early. 

Business Value Propositions 

• Unified Security Visibility Across Environments: Delivered centralized SIEM dashboards enabling real-time threat visibility. 
• Faster Incident Response Through Automation: Reduced manual triage, cutting incident response and resolution times. 
• Reduced Alert Noise with Smarter Detection: Optimized analytics rules lowered false positives by 60%. 
• Stronger Compliance and Audit Readiness: Enabled continuous compliance with Australian energy regulations through comprehensive logging and retention policies. 

Final Perspective 

Our deployment of Microsoft Sentinel brought together all security operations into a single, automated model. Faster threat response, fewer false alarms, simpler compliance reporting, and better security supervision all helped the customer maintain stable and safe business operations.