Microsoft Sentinel’s Role in Compliance for the Defense Industrial Base

For organizations operating in the Defense Industrial Base (DIB), compliance is no longer a paperwork exercise. Frameworks such as NIST SP 800-171 and CMMC Level 2 require organizations to continuously monitor, detect, investigate, and respond to security events—and to prove they can do so during an assessment.

Microsoft Sentinel plays a critical role in this shift. Sentinel is not a compliance checkbox. It is the platform that enables organizations to operationalize compliance, turning written policies into observable, auditable security outcomes.

Compliance Frameworks Demand Visibility, Not Just Controls

Across NIST SP 800-171 and CMMC Level 2, the language is consistent:

• Generate and retain audit records
• Review and correlate security events
• Detect and respond to incidents
• Protect the integrity of logs and evidence

CMMC Level 2 explicitly inherits all 110 security requirements from NIST SP 800-171, making continuous monitoring and incident response mandatory rather than optional.

Sentinel as the Compliance Evidence Backbone

Microsoft Sentinel is a cloud-native SIEM designed to centralize security telemetry, correlate activity across systems, and retain protected audit data. In practice, Sentinel becomes the system of record assessors rely on when asking how events were detected, investigated, and handled.

Monitoring Beyond Microsoft 365

While Sentinel integrates deeply with Microsoft 365 and Defender services, its compliance value extends far beyond Microsoft-native workloads. Sentinel supports hundreds of built-in, partner, and custom data connectors, allowing organizations to ingest telemetry from cloud platforms, on-premises infrastructure, network security devices, and third‑party applications.

This multi-platform capability is essential in CMMC Level 2 and CJIS environments, where regulated data routinely spans identity platforms, endpoints, networks, and non-Microsoft services. Sentinel provides a single analytics and evidence layer, reducing reliance on fragmented logs and manual evidence collection.

How Security and Operations Teams Use Sentinel in Practice

In real-world environments, Sentinel supports the day-to-day activities that make compliance demonstrable:

• Identity and access oversight through authentication monitoring and anomaly detection
• Incident investigation using correlated timelines across identity, endpoint, and network data
• Continuous monitoring through dashboards and hunting queries that reveal trends over time
• Operational consistency via automation and documented response workflows

These activities transform compliance from a static exercise into a living operational capability.

CMMC Level 2 Control Families Impacted by Sentinel

Microsoft Sentinel materially strengthens multiple CMMC Level 2 control families, particularly audit and accountability, incident response, system and information integrity, risk assessment, access control, and identification and authentication. Sentinel provides the monitoring, correlation, and evidence required to demonstrate these controls are functioning in practice.

Where Sentinel Complements—But Does Not Replace—Other Controls

It is important to clearly define Sentinel’s role. Sentinel excels at monitoring, detection, response, and evidence retention. However, it does not independently satisfy every control family. Additional evidence and controls are required for:

• Policies, procedures, and security awareness training
• Preventive and configuration enforcement controls
• Physical and environmental protection requirements

Sentinel supports these areas by making activity visible and auditable, but governance, administrative, and physical safeguards must be addressed through other processes and systems.

Putting Sentinel in Proper Compliance Context

For DoD contractors and the DIB community, Microsoft Sentinel should be viewed as the system that turns security operations into defensible compliance evidence. When deployed as part of a layered security architecture, Sentinel enables organizations to monitor across platforms, investigate incidents consistently, retain audit evidence, and demonstrate operational maturity during assessments.

Compliance is no longer proven by policy alone—it is proven by visibility, response, and evidence. Sentinel provides the foundation that makes this possible.