According to the Forrester Total Economic Impact (TEI) study commissioned by Microsoft (June 2025), organizations that implemented Microsoft Defender, including Microsoft Sentinel SIEM capabilities, saw clear and quantifiable outcomes over three years.

For a composite organization modeled in the study (a retail company with 10,000 FTEs and $5 billion in annual revenue), the results were:

• Total quantified benefits: $17.8 million (risk-adjusted present value over three years).
• Total costs: $5.2 million (including licenses, deployment, training, and administration).
• Net present value (NPV): $12.6 million.
• Return on investment (ROI): 242%.
• Payback period: about 6 months.

Operationally, organizations reported that Microsoft Defender helped them:

• Cut mean time to acknowledge (MTTA) from 30 minutes to 15 minutes.
• Reduce mean time to resolve (MTTR) from up to 3 hours to under 1 hour in many cases.
• Move from reactive “firefighting” to more proactive, engineering-driven security operations.

These outcomes were driven by AI-driven defense, native integrations, and a unified analyst experience that together helped organizations anticipate, detect, and stop attacks more efficiently while improving overall cyber resilience.

The organizations Forrester interviewed were dealing with complex, hybrid and multicloud environments, multiple point solutions, and high overhead to manage legacy on-premises tools. Microsoft Defender, together with Sentinel SIEM, was used to rethink and simplify this landscape.

Key cost and consolidation impacts for the composite organization over three years included:

• Vendor consolidation savings: 60% reduction in costs from consolidating tools, leading to about $12 million in multicloud security savings.
• Lower SOC engineering overhead: Improved automation and low-code/no-code workflows reduced the need for specialized coding skills and external contractors, cutting SOC engineering costs by about $513,000.
• Reduced incident response effort: An 80% reduction in incident response effort, translating into approximately $2.4 million in SecOps optimization benefits.
• Lower breach-related costs: By consolidating siloed systems into a unified Defender platform and improving detection and response, the composite organization reduced exposure to external breach costs by 75%, avoiding an estimated $2.8 million in breach impact.

On the cost side, the investment profile for the composite organization looked like this:

• Licensing: About $5.1 million over three years for Microsoft Defender for Cloud and E5 security licenses for 10,000 FTEs, plus Sentinel data ingestion (starting at 1 TB/day in Year 1 and scaling to 2 TB/day by Year 3, with 25% retained in auxiliary logs).
• Deployment and training: A three-month initial phase within a broader six-month rollout of the full platform, with total deployment and training costs of about $109,000 over three years.
• Ongoing administration: Around 2 hours per month of admin time, estimated at $20,000 over three years.

By decommissioning legacy agents, hardware, and overlapping licenses, and by using Defender’s automation and AI to streamline operations, organizations were able to reshape their security stack into a more unified, cost-efficient platform.

The Forrester TEI study highlights that many security operations centers (SOCs) were struggling with:

• High alert volumes and false positives.
• Tool silos that slowed investigations and response.
• Burnout and disengagement among analysts and engineers.

After adopting Microsoft Defender and Sentinel, organizations reported several changes in how their SecOps teams operated:

1. Faster, more consistent incident handling

• MTTA reduced from 30 minutes to 15 minutes.
• MTTR reduced from up to 3 hours to under 1 hour in many cases.
• Native integrations and a unified analyst experience meant fewer manual handoffs and more complete context in a single view.
• Automation and AI-driven correlation reduced alert fatigue and made alerts more actionable.

One CISO in financial services noted that the time to detect, investigate, and resolve incidents “reduced quite significantly,” allowing analysts to focus on additional tasks and better meet SLAs.

2. Stronger, more proactive security posture

• Defender uses AI-driven defense, predictive graphing, and embedded threat intelligence to help teams anticipate and stop attacks, not just react to them.
• Consolidating data into Sentinel’s SIEM and data lake provided real-time visibility across domains and environments.
• Enhanced automation and proactive threat hunting helped reduce dwell time and the likelihood and impact of breaches (with a 75% reduction in external breach exposure for the composite organization).

3. Healthier team dynamics and talent development

• By automating routine tasks and reducing noise, analysts had more time for strategic work and learning.
• Defender’s workflows and automation capabilities allowed SOC engineers to operate with greater agility and precision, without needing deep coding skills for every change.
• This shift helped reimagine the SOC from a burnout-prone environment into more of a talent development engine, where junior analysts could gain hands-on experience across the full detection and response lifecycle.

Overall, Microsoft Defender and Sentinel helped organizations move from fragmented, reactive security operations to a more unified, proactive, and sustainable SecOps model that supports both cyber resilience and team well-being.