Security
Microsoft Defender
Threat protection across endpoints, identity, email and cloud, correlated into single incidents rather than four separate alerts.
Professional Services · Managed IT & Security
Incident volume halved, triage time cut by four fifths
A global contract intelligence software company, Global. Introducing generative AI across enterprise contracting brought new security challenges, including prompt injection risk and compliance demands spanning more than 300 cloud subscriptions.
The situation
What the organization was dealing with
Introducing generative AI across enterprise contracting brought new security challenges, including prompt injection risk and compliance demands spanning more than 300 cloud subscriptions.
A software company introducing generative AI into its own product faces a security problem its customers will diligence directly. Prompt injection and data exposure are not internal risks in that setting — they are commercial ones.
What was done
The work, and the part that was actually hard
Security was consolidated onto Microsoft's integrated platform on Zero Trust principles — Defender for endpoint and cloud protection, Sentinel for monitoring, Purview for data governance, Entra for identity and Security Copilot for AI-assisted insight.
The measured outcomes are unusually clean: incident volume halved and triage time down eighty per cent. Both are consequences of consolidation and correlation rather than of new detection capability — the signal existed before; it was arriving in four places with nothing joining it up.
Results
What was published
These are the figures exactly as reported in the source. Nothing has been rounded, extrapolated or restated.
Reduction in incident volume50%
Reduction in triage time80%
Cloud subscriptions covered300+
What changed
- Incident volume cut by half through consolidation and tuning
- Triage time reduced by 80% with AI-assisted investigation
- Generative AI applications secured against prompt injection and compliance risk
- Security embedded into daily operations rather than run as a separate function
Platforms involved
What each product was doing here
Security
Microsoft Sentinel
Centralised security monitoring and correlation across Microsoft and third-party signal sources.
Security
Microsoft Purview
Data classification, loss prevention, retention and the posture management that makes AI adoption defensible.
Security
Microsoft Entra
Identity and access management across the estate, including the conditional access policies that gate everything else.
Security
Security Copilot
AI assistance for security analysts — evidence gathering, triage and investigation support at machine speed.
What transfers
If you were to attempt this
The 50%/80% pattern — fewer incidents through correlation, faster triage through automation — is what a consolidation business case should be built on, rather than on tooling cost alone.
Where it usually gets harder than expected: Three hundred cloud subscriptions is a governance scale that defeats manual review. Posture management only helps if someone owns the remediation queue.
How we would take it on
Our approach to Managed IT & Security work
1
Map coverage honestly
Endpoints, identity, email and cloud — including the gaps. Most organizations have less coverage than they believe, particularly across identity and SaaS.
2
Deploy in audit mode first
Blocking policy on an untuned estate breaks something visible and costs the programme its sponsorship in the first week.
3
Tune until alerts are worth reading
An untuned console is functionally the same as no detection. Tuning is the deliverable, not the deployment.
4
Rehearse the response
Who can isolate a machine at two in the morning, and whether they need permission, is a conversation for a Tuesday afternoon.
Recognise the problem?
If any of the above describes your organization, tell us where it hurts most. We will tell you what the same platforms could realistically do in your environment, what we would measure, and whether we think it is worth doing at all.
Talk to our teamMore Managed IT & Security storiesWe reply to every message within one business day.
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