End-to-end Defender XDR — identity, email, endpoint, and cloud apps — wired into incident playbooks your security team has actually tested.
Defender XDR is four products that share information — Defender for Identity, Defender for Office 365, Defender for Endpoint, and Defender for Cloud Apps. Each one watches a different surface. When they're connected, an attack that touches two of them gets correlated into a single incident with the full story attached, instead of two unrelated alerts your analyst has to piece together at 3am.
Most environments we walk into have one or two of the products turned on and the others either off or running unmonitored. The deployment work itself isn't hard. The harder part is the tuning afterwards — turning the volume down on the false positives so the real signals are visible.
Microsoft publishes a pilot-and-deploy sequence for this — start with one product in a small subset of production, learn what it surfaces, tune it, then expand. We follow that sequence because skipping it tends to produce a SOC that ignores its own alerts.
All four Defender products deployed, connected to the unified Defender XDR portal, with analytics tuned to your environment rather than left on Microsoft defaults. Real incidents from your tenant, not synthetic test data, used to validate that the correlation works.
Incident response playbooks for the top scenarios your business actually faces — phishing with credential theft, ransomware on an endpoint, OAuth app abuse, lateral movement through identity. Each playbook tested with a tabletop exercise before handover, so the SOC has done it once before they do it for real.
And the part most XDR projects skip — a runbook for tuning. Detection rules don't stay tuned by themselves. We leave your team a process for reviewing alerts monthly and adjusting thresholds, so the system stays useful past the engagement.
Weeks 1–4. We start with whichever product fits your highest current risk — usually Defender for Identity or Defender for Office 365. Deploy to a pilot group inside your production tenant, not a separate lab. The point is to see real signal. By the end of this phase you know what to expect from the other three.
Weeks 5–10. Add the remaining Defender products one at a time. Endpoint usually goes second — onboarding agents across Windows, macOS, Linux, and mobile. Then Office 365 and Cloud Apps to complete the picture. Each addition gets the same pilot-then-expand treatment.
Weeks 11–14. This is where the engagement earns its weight. Review alerts from the first weeks of pilot, suppress false positives, write custom detection rules for the things specific to your environment. Build incident response playbooks for the top scenarios. Run a tabletop exercise with your SOC to validate that everyone knows their role.
If you want to talk through your situation — products you've already deployed, the SOC team you have or don't have, the incidents that worry you — write to us.
We usually reply the same day.