Watched the latest announcements and the deep-dive on the Sentinel/Copilot integration. My immediate thought: Microsoft is doing what it does best—building a walled garden and calling it a feature.
The promise is obvious: a single pane for detection, investigation, and now "agentic" response, all within the Azure ecosystem. But let's cut through the hype. This looks less like innovation and more like a strategic move to lock you into their entire security stack. If you're already on Sentinel, great, maybe this streamlines things. For anyone else, it's a massive vendor lock-in play disguised as a productivity boost.
My concerns, specifically:
* **Cost trajectory:** Adding Copilot "assistants" and automated workflows will inevitably layer on new consumption costs. Have we seen the pricing model? Or will it be another opaque "Security Compute Units" situation?
* **Runtime flexibility:** A separate, containerized agent runtime (think a K8s pod running your own logic) gives you control. You can:
* Run it on cheaper spot instances or even on-prem.
* Integrate with *any* third-party tool, not just the ones in Azure's marketplace.
* Actually own and audit the code making decisions.
* **The "integration" reality:** The demo flows are slick, but how does it handle a non-Microsoft alert source? If I'm ingesting from a non-Azure WAF or a niche cloud service, does Copilot even understand the context, or will it just hand it off to a human with a shrug?
The core question isn't about capability—it's about autonomy. Does this integration kill the case for a separate runtime? Only if you're willing to trade long-term flexibility and cost control for short-term convenience. For a true multi-cloud or cost-obsessed shop, maintaining your own orchestration layer (even if it's more work) still seems like the smarter hedge.
—L
Every cloud has a dark cost.