Industry
Payroll & Workforce Management
Challenge
A payroll services company needed a centralized way to monitor security across a complex environment that included Office 365, firewalls, and servers — all while meeting client-driven compliance requirements. They didn’t have a formal SOC, so they needed a solution their in-house IT team could manage directly.
Solution
We deployed Microsoft Sentinel as the company’s cloud-native SIEM. Over just a few days, we integrated key log sources including:
- Entra ID (Azure AD) for SSO activity across all critical systems
- Office 365 for mailbox activity and email threat detection
- Firewall logs for network activity
- Windows server logs for endpoint visibility
The company’s internal IT team took responsibility for ongoing monitoring, with an on-call technician receiving PagerDuty alerts for high-priority incidents.
The Incident
Just weeks after deployment, Sentinel detected a suspicious login tied to a user who had unknowingly submitted credentials to a phishing site. The system triggered an immediate alert.
Thanks to Sentinel’s integration with Entra ID, the alert included rich context about the login attempt — including geolocation, device info, and failure patterns. The on-call technician was paged, and within one hour of the initial compromise:
- The attacker’s session was terminated
- Login tokens were revoked
- The user’s password was reset
- An investigation was launched
Because of the rapid response and comprehensive visibility provided by Sentinel, no sensitive data was accessed or exfiltrated.
Aftermath & Improvements
Following the incident, we led a full security review and identified several opportunities for improvement:
- Rolled out phishing-resistant MFA to all users
- Conducted additional security awareness training
- Tuned Sentinel detections for greater coverage without alert fatigue
Outcome
The SIEM investment paid off immediately. Without a full-time SOC, the company was still able to detect, respond to, and contain a phishing attack before damage was done — maintaining both client trust and regulatory compliance.