Plan for Incident Response
Implementation Effort: Medium – Requires coordination between security operations, IT teams, and integration with Microsoft Defender XDR and Sentinel for automation and response workflows.
User Impact: Low – Incident response planning and execution are handled by security teams; end users are not directly involved.
Overview
Planning for incident response in Microsoft Defender for Servers involves creating a structured workflow to detect, investigate, contain, and recover from security incidents. This process is managed through the Microsoft Defender portal, where incidents—collections of related alerts—are triaged, analyzed, and resolved. The workflow includes steps such as prioritizing incidents, investigating attack stories, isolating affected devices, disabling compromised accounts, and documenting findings for post-incident learning.
Security teams can enhance their response capabilities by integrating Microsoft Sentinel for automation and using Defender XDR to correlate signals across endpoints, identities, and cloud workloads. This planning ensures that threats are addressed quickly and consistently, reducing the risk of prolonged exposure or repeated attacks.
This capability supports the "Assume Breach" principle of Zero Trust by ensuring that organizations are prepared to respond to threats as if a breach has already occurred, minimizing damage and accelerating recovery.