According to the Forrester Total Economic Impact (TEI) study commissioned by Microsoft (June 2025), a composite organization — a retail company with 10,000 FTEs and $5 billion in annual revenue — realized meaningful financial and operational outcomes over three years after deploying Microsoft Defender and Microsoft Sentinel.

Key quantified results over three years (risk-adjusted present value):

• $17.8 million in total benefits vs. $5.2 million in total costs.
• $12.6 million net present value (NPV).
• 242% ROI over three years.

Where the savings came from:

• Multicloud security cost savings – $12 million: By consolidating tools into Microsoft Defender and Sentinel, the organization decommissioned legacy agents, on-premises hardware, and software licenses, and reduced data ingestion/consumption costs and ongoing management and maintenance across multiple vendors.
• SecOps optimization – $2.4 million: Fewer false positives, more actionable alerts, and less time spent on triage, investigations, and resolution led to a more consistent, controlled security environment and freed up analyst capacity.
• Reduced SOC engineering overhead – $513,000: Built-in automation and low-code workflows reduced the need for specialized coding skills and external contractors, while still improving detection quality.
• Lower breach impact – $2.8 million: Consolidated visibility, faster detection and response, and proactive threat hunting helped reduce exposure to external breach costs by 75%.

What it cost:

• Licensing – $5.1 million (3-year PV): Includes Microsoft Defender for Cloud and E5 security licenses for 10,000 FTEs, plus Sentinel ingesting 1 TB/day in Year 1, scaling to 2 TB/day by Year 3, with 25% of data kept in auxiliary logs.
• Deployment and training – $109,000: A roughly six-month rollout of the full platform, plus initial and ongoing training.
• Ongoing management – $20,000: Up to 2 hours per month of internal effort to manage the platform.

Beyond the numbers, interviewees also pointed to non-quantified benefits such as improved collaboration between security and IT teams and a healthier security culture, driven by less burnout and more time for proactive work.

The organizations Forrester interviewed described a clear shift in how their security operations centers (SOCs) functioned once Microsoft Defender and Sentinel were in place.

Before Microsoft Defender:

• Teams were overwhelmed by high volumes of threats such as ransomware, phishing, and cloud attacks.
• Multiple, siloed tools created poor cross-domain visibility and slowed response.
• Analysts faced heavy alert fatigue and high false-positive rates, making it hard to spot real incidents quickly.
• SOC engineers often needed advanced coding skills to build detections in legacy SIEMs, which many teams did not have.

After Microsoft Defender and Sentinel:

• Unified view and context: Native integrations and a unified analyst experience automatically correlate signals across endpoints, cloud, identities, and more. This gives analysts better out-of-the-box context and clearer prioritization.
• Fewer false positives and less noise: Interviewees reported a noticeable reduction in false positives and “noise,” which helped analysts focus on high-risk incidents instead of chasing low-value alerts.
• Faster incident handling:
  • Mean time to acknowledge (MTTA) improved from 30 minutes to 15 minutes.
  • Mean time to resolve (MTTR) dropped from up to 3 hours to less than 1 hour in many cases.
• Automation and AI assistance: Automation and AI-driven defense help autonomously disrupt attackers, streamline containment, and guide analysts through investigations, reducing manual effort.
• Shift from reactive to proactive: With more time and better tools, teams can move from constant firefighting to proactive threat hunting and posture improvement.

One outcome highlighted in the study: by reducing the time needed to detect, investigate, and resolve incidents, analysts were able to take on additional tasks and better meet SLAs, which directly contributed to the $2.4 million in SecOps optimization benefits over three years.

Organizations in the Forrester TEI study moved to Microsoft Defender and Sentinel primarily to simplify their environment, reduce costs, and strengthen their security posture.

1. Excess cost and complexity from tool sprawl

• Many had grown into complex hybrid and multicloud environments with numerous point solutions.
• Legacy on-premises SIEMs and appliances required significant infrastructure and overhead. One cyberdefense leader noted it cost $1.5 million just to run security workloads across servers, VMs, and databases in their prior environment.
• Ingesting logs from cloud applications often required extra infrastructure and effort, which slowed adoption and limited visibility.

2. Limited visibility and high alert fatigue

• Multiple tools meant fragmented visibility across endpoints, cloud, identities, and applications.
• Teams experienced thousands of alerts annually with high false-positive rates, making it hard to distinguish real incidents from noise.
• This delayed investigations and made it difficult to prioritize high-risk incidents.

3. Mounting SOC engineering and skills challenges

• Legacy SIEMs often demanded advanced coding skills to build and maintain detection rules.
• Several organizations lacked these skills in-house and found third-party engineering support too expensive.
• As a result, some tools were underused because they were simply too hard to operate effectively.

4. Need to reduce breach risk and impact

• Interviewees faced a range of threats, including ransomware and phishing, and some had already experienced costly breaches.
• One organization reported an earlier breach tied to an unpatched application that led to an estimated $500,000 in incident response costs and productivity losses over several months.
• Others highlighted that a major breach could disrupt operations immediately — for example, halting distribution of perishable goods.

How consolidation with Microsoft Defender and Sentinel helped:

• Unified SecOps platform: Defender, built on Sentinel’s data lake, graph, and SIEM capabilities, provides a single environment for prevention, detection, and response.
• Cost reduction: Consolidation enabled the composite organization to save $12 million in multicloud security costs over three years by retiring legacy agents, hardware, and overlapping tools.
• Improved detection and response: Real-time visibility, predictive graphing, embedded threat intelligence, and automation helped reduce exposure to external breach costs by 75%, equating to $2.8 million in avoided impact.
• More sustainable SOC operations: By reducing cognitive load (fewer tools to log into, less noise) and enabling automation, teams could reimagine the SOC as a place for talent development rather than burnout.

In short, organizations chose to consolidate onto Microsoft Defender and Sentinel to simplify their stack, control costs, and build a more resilient, future-ready security operations function.