The Forrester Total Economic Impact (TEI) study, commissioned by Microsoft, modeled a composite retail organization with 10,000 FTEs and $5 billion in annual revenue to understand the impact of Microsoft Defender and Sentinel.

Over three years, the composite organization experienced:

• $17.8 million in total quantified benefits (risk-adjusted present value).
• $5.2 million in total costs, including licenses, deployment, training, and ongoing management.
• A net present value (NPV) of $12.6 million.
• A return on investment (ROI) of 242%.

Key financial drivers behind these results included:

• $12 million in multicloud security cost savings by decommissioning legacy agents, hardware, and licenses, and reducing data ingestion and management costs.
• $2.4 million in SecOps optimization benefits from fewer false positives, more actionable alerts, and less time spent on triage and investigations.
• $513,000 in reduced SOC engineering overhead thanks to improved automation and low-code/no-code workflows.
• $2.8 million in reduced breach impact, supported by a 75% reduction in exposure to external breach costs.

On the operational side, organizations reported that mean time to acknowledge (MTTA) dropped from 30 minutes to 15 minutes, and mean time to resolve (MTTR) went from up to 3 hours to less than 1 hour in many cases. This shift allowed analysts to spend more time on higher-value work instead of constant firefighting.

Microsoft Defender is designed to help SecOps teams reimagine how they handle detection, investigation, and response by unifying tools and applying automation and AI.

From the Forrester interviews, organizations reported that before Defender they struggled with:

• High alert volumes and a high false-positive rate, especially across ransomware, phishing, and cloud attacks.
• Analysts logging into multiple tools with limited cross-domain visibility.
• Complex, on-premises SIEM setups that required specialized skills and extra infrastructure just to ingest logs.

After adopting Microsoft Defender and Sentinel, SecOps teams saw several changes:

• Unified analyst experience: Defender builds on Sentinel’s data lake, graph, and SIEM capabilities to bring signals together, so analysts don’t have to jump between many consoles.
• AI-driven defense and automation: Native integrations automatically correlate signals, prioritize alerts, and reduce false positives, cutting down manual triage work.
• Faster incident handling: Mean time to acknowledge dropped from 30 to 15 minutes, and mean time to resolve shrank from up to 3 hours to under 1 hour in many cases.
• Agentic assistance and predictive graphing: Embedded threat intelligence and real-time posture insights help analysts understand attack paths and respond more confidently.
• Less specialized coding required: SOC engineers can build sophisticated workflows without deep coding skills, reducing reliance on external contractors and lowering engineering costs by about $513,000 over three years for the composite organization.

Overall, organizations shifted from reactive firefighting to more proactive operations, with improved SLA adherence, streamlined containment, and better collaboration across security teams.

The TEI study highlights several concrete cost-saving and cost-avoidance areas when organizations move to Microsoft Defender and Sentinel.

1. Multicloud security and infrastructure savings

• Decommissioning legacy agents on physical appliances and retiring on-premises hardware and software licenses.
• Lower data ingestion and consumption costs compared to legacy SIEM setups.
• Reduced internal and external effort to manage, patch, and maintain multiple security products across hybrid and multicloud environments.

For the composite organization, these changes added up to about $12 million in multicloud security cost savings over three years.

2. SecOps efficiency and staffing leverage

• Fewer false positives and more actionable alerts mean less time spent on low-value triage.
• Shorter investigation and resolution times free analysts to focus on proactive threat hunting and strategic work.

These SecOps optimization benefits were quantified at $2.4 million over three years.

3. Lower SOC engineering and automation costs

• Improved automation capabilities allow teams to build time-saving workflows without specialized coding skills.
• Reduced dependence on external consultants for detection engineering.

This translated into about $513,000 in reduced operational overhead for SOC engineering.

4. Reduced breach impact and incident costs

• Consolidated visibility and better detection reduce the likelihood and impact of breaches.
• Enhanced automation and proactive threat hunting minimize dwell time and incident response costs.

The composite organization saw a 75% reduction in exposure to external breach costs, equating to roughly $2.8 million in avoided breach impact.

These benefits were achieved against three-year, risk-adjusted costs of about $5.1 million for licenses (including Defender for Cloud and E5 security for 10,000 FTEs, plus Sentinel ingestion of 1–2 TB/day) and around $129,000 for deployment, training, and ongoing management.