Create & Manage Azure Sentinel Workspaces

By Ashwin Venugopal -

 



Plan for the Azure Sentinel Workspace 

You can install the Azure Sentinel solution in Log Analytics Workspace, whose implementation is mostly focused on the Log Analytics Workspace creation. The only important option when creating a new log on the Log Analytics Workspace is the region which specifies the location where the log data will reside. The three implementation options are:   

  • Single-Tenant with a single Azure Sentinel Workspace
  • Single-Tenant with regional Azure Sentinel Workspace
  • Multi-Tenant

Single-tenant single workspace

This workspace can receive logs from resources in other regions within the same tenant. Generally the log data (when collected) always travel across different regions and stored in another region, which creates two possible concerns- first, it can incur a bandwidth cost. Second, if there is a data governance requirement to keep data in a specific region, then the single workspace option would not be an implementation option. Its pros and cons includes:

Pros

Cons

Central Pane of Glass

May not meet Data Governance Requirement.

Consolidates all security logs and information

Can incur bandwidth cost for cross region.

Easier to query all information

 

Azure Log Analytics RBAC to control data access

 

Azure Sentinel RBAC for service RBAC

 

 Single-tenant with regional Azure Sentinel Workspaces

It contains multiple Sentinel workspaces which requires the creation and configuration of multiple Azure Sentinel and Log Analytics Worspaces. Its pros and cons are:

Pros

Cons

No cross-region bandwidth costs

No central pane of glass. You are not looking in one place to see all the data.

Maybe required to meet Data Governance requirements

Analytics, workbooks, etc. must be deployed multiple times.

Granular data access control

 

Granular retention settings

 

Split billing

 


 Multi-tenant workspaces

If you are want to manage an Azure Sentinel workspace, outside your tenant, then using multi-tenant workspaces using Azure Lighthouse is the correct choice whose configuration can grant you access to the tenants. The tenant configuration  within the tenant is the same considerations before.

Azure Sentinel Permissions & Roles

Azure Role-based Access Control (RBAC) is the authorization system that manages access to Azure resources and it is built on Azure Resource Manager, which is capable of providing fine-grained access management of Azure resources. It also allows you to grant appropriate access to Azure Sentinel and different roles to give you specific control over what users of Azure Sentinel can access and do. 

Azure Sentinel-specific roles

The following are the three dedicated, built-in Azure Sentinel roles:
  • Reader- This role can review data, incidents, workbooks, and other Azure Sentinel resources.
  • Responder- This role has all the permissions of the Reader role. Plus, it can manage incidents by assigning or dismissing them.
  • Contributor- This role has all the permissions of the Reader and Responder roles. Also, it can create and edit workbooks, analytics rules, and other Azure Sentinel resources.

 All the built-in Azure Sentinel roles grant read access to the data in your Azure Sentinel Workspace and can apply to all the resources that deploy to support Azure Sentinel, if those resources are in the same resource group. 

Azure Roles & Azure Monitor Log Analytics Roles

These roles includes access to your Azure Sentinel workspace and other resources. Azure roles grants access across all your Azure resources, including Log Analytics workspaces and Azure Sentinel Resources- Owner, Contributor, and Reader. 

Log Analytics roles grants access across all your Log Analytics workspaces- Log Analytics Contributor, and Azure Sentinel Resources. 

Custom Roles & Advanced Azure RBAC

If the built-in Azure roles doesn't meet the specific needs of your organization, your own custom roles can also be created. Similar to the built-in roles, they allow you to assign custom roles to users, groups, and service principles for management-group, subscription, as well as resource-group scopes. 













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