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Vaikora adds an enforcement gate to your email security layer. Here is what that means for Microsoft 365.

Product Updates · Nov 5, 2026 · 3 min read

Email is still the most common entry point for credential theft and malware delivery. Vaikora's email security component for Microsoft 365 connects through Microsoft Graph, runs analysis on a virtual machine inside your own Azure subscription, and reports into your own Sentinel workspace. No MX record change required.

That last point matters operationally. MX changes carry risk, require DNS propagation time, and often need approval from teams outside security. Removing that dependency means you can deploy without touching your mail routing.

How the architecture works

The integration uses Microsoft Graph's mail APIs to pull messages for inspection. Processing happens on a VM inside your tenant's Azure subscription, which means message content does not leave your environment to reach a third-party cloud for analysis. Results feed directly into your existing Sentinel workspace.

This approach preserves data residency and keeps the audit trail inside infrastructure you already control. It also means that whatever retention and access policies you have on your Sentinel workspace apply equally to email security telemetry.

What is being inspected

Vaikora's gateway ships six content inspection modules. Applied to email, these evaluate message content, links, attachments, and sender signals against policy before flagging or acting. The enforcement model is deterministic: identical input produces an identical policy decision. That consistency is what makes the audit log meaningful.

Every decision is written to a SHA-256 hash-chained, tamper-evident audit log. If a regulator or internal investigator asks why a specific message was flagged or passed, the record is there and cannot be quietly altered after the fact.

Where this fits with Cyren

If your organization also uses Cyren for inbound threat intelligence, the two signals are complementary. Cyren's GlobalView telemetry network processes over a billion email, URL, and file transactions daily and detects phishing infrastructure during the staging phase, before campaigns are weaponized. That intelligence can land in your Sentinel workspace through the Cyren Microsoft Sentinel Content Hub solution, alongside Vaikora's per-message enforcement decisions.

The practical effect: Cyren tells you a domain was flagged as malicious infrastructure three days before a campaign launched against your users. Vaikora tells you, with a signed audit record, what happened when a message from that domain arrived in your environment and what policy fired on it.

The Sentinel reporting layer

Because Vaikora email security reports into your own Sentinel workspace, you can write detection rules, hunting queries, and workbooks on top of the same data you use for the rest of your environment. There is no separate console to check and no alert silo.

• Correlate email enforcement decisions with identity signals from TacitRed or endpoint telemetry from CrowdStrike or SentinelOne.
• Use Sentinel's incident workflow to route high-severity email threats to the appropriate SOC queue.
• Pull the tamper-evident audit log into compliance exports for HIPAA, PCI-DSS, GDPR, SOC 2, or ISO 27001 reporting. Vaikora ships presets for all five.

What to check in your current setup

Before deploying, verify three things. First, confirm your Azure subscription has the capacity to run the inspection VM without competing for resources your detection infrastructure already uses. Second, check that your Sentinel workspace retention policy matches your compliance requirements for email security records. Third, review your Microsoft Graph API permissions to confirm the required mail scopes can be granted by your tenant administrator without an extended approval chain.

The Vaikora email security integration for Microsoft 365 is available through AWS Marketplace and the Azure Sentinel content hub as the Vaikora-AzureSecurityCenter solution. Start by auditing what your current email security layer logs and whether that log is tamper-evident. If the answer to the second question is no, that is the gap to close first.

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