Sentinel to Google SecOps (Chronicle) Migration

Client Challenge

The client, a fast-scaling UK digital retail bank, experienced rapid log volume growth across their AWS microservices, Azure Entra ID tenant, and core transaction ledgers. Operating on Microsoft Sentinel, their monthly ingestion and retention bills were growing unpredictably by 28% quarter-over-quarter, reaching £420,000 annually.

Additionally, long-term regulatory searches across 12-month transaction histories suffered from search timeouts in Azure Log Analytics, slowing down internal fraud forensics and FCA audit inquiries.

Strategy & Migration Architecture

M.Sher designed an 8-week migration blueprint structured around four core pillars:

• Ingestion Pipeline Design: Deployed BindPlane agent collector clusters with local failover buffering to securely route AWS CloudTrail, EKS audit logs, Azure Activity logs, and Okta events to Google SecOps.
• UDM Schema Normalization: Custom parsers were built to normalize raw JSON payloads into Google SecOps Unified Data Model (UDM) events, enabling uniform entity graph correlation across identity and network layers.
• YARA-L Rule Conversion: 850+ legacy KQL analytic rules were translated into Google SecOps YARA-L 2.0 multi-event correlation rules, ensuring zero degradation in threat detection coverage.
• 90-Day Dual Run Validation: Ran Sentinel and Google SecOps in parallel to benchmark alert fidelity, false-positive rates, and alert triage latency before formal decommission.

Quantified Business Results

• £180,000 Annual Savings: Fixed, predictable Google SecOps licensing model replaced volatile gigabyte-based ingestion billing.
• Sub-Second Historical Queries: Investigating 365 days of authentication and transaction logs dropped from 14 minutes in Sentinel to under 800 milliseconds in Chronicle.
• 58% False-Positive Reduction: YARA-L multi-event correlation logic eliminated duplicate alerts generated by disparate microservice deployments.
• Zero Downtime Cutover: Completed production cutover in 6 weeks with zero lost log events and full sign-off from internal compliance auditors.