Microsoft Security Community Spotlight: Marcel Graewer

Globally, Marcel shares practical detection engineering insights on Microsoft Sentinel and Microsoft Defender XDR through forums and blog posts. Locally, he represents his employer in the IT-Security group of the Microsoft Business User Forum, where German companies using Microsoft technologies exchange real-world experience and expertise.

The work Marcel values most is helping people enter the IT field. In Germany, "Fachinformatiker" is a recognized IT profession learned through a multi-year apprenticeship, and he is proud to have trained apprentices. He also serves as an examiner for the IHK (the German Chamber of Industry and Commerce), evaluating the final exams of these IT apprentices.

This commitment also led him to support younger learners by teaching school cybersecurity classes and participating in Girls’ Day, where he introduced female students to the field. “I do this because most people don’t get an honest view of security work until much later in their education—if they see it at all. Showing someone early that this field is creative, varied, and genuinely interesting can change their path. Being part of that, even for a few people, means more to me than anything that fits neatly on a CV.”

Let’s hear more from Marcel about his Microsoft Security Community and product paths.

 
All responses to questions are direct quotes from Marcel.

What do you find most rewarding about being a member of the Microsoft Security Community?

The most rewarding part for me is how practical the exchange is. Microsoft security tooling moves fast -  Microsoft Sentinel, Microsoft Defender XDR and Microsoft Security Copilot all change month to month- and no single person keeps up with all of it alone. The community is where that gap gets closed. When I read how someone else tuned a detection in their environment, or when someone responds to something I posted with a problem I hadn't considered, my own work gets better. It's a feedback loop you don't get from documentation. The other part I value is that it works in both directions: I started as a reader, learning from people more experienced than me, and now I'm at a point where I can give some of that back. Watching that shift happen has been genuinely motivating.

How long have you been working with Microsoft Security Products?

Over ten years! My way into Microsoft security ran through infrastructure rather than security itself. I started out administering Active Directory and VMware environments, the on-premises world, and that is where I first understood identity, endpoints and the quiet attack surface they create. At the time, security was something layered on top of infrastructure. What changed everything was the shift to the cloud. 

As the environments I worked in moved into Microsoft Azure and Microsoft 365, the old separation between "running things" and "securing things" stopped making sense. In a cloud-first world, the identity is the perimeter, the sign-in log is the crime scene, and the telemetry that used to be scattered across servers suddenly lives in one place you could actually query. That was the moment Microsoft's security stack became less of a product set and more of a working environment for me. 

As I moved from running infrastructure into roles centered on defending it, first leading IT infrastructure and security as a team lead, then as an IT Security Expert, and now as IT Security Manager focused on architecture and incident response in an Azure and M365 environment, Sentinel and Defender XDR went from tools I knew of to tools I work in every day. The infrastructure background turned out to be an advantage rather than a detour. Detection engineering makes far more sense once you have run the Active Directory and the endpoints that generate the very signals you are now writing detections against, and cloud security makes far more sense once you have felt the limits of the on-premises model it replaced. The part that keeps me engaged is that none of this stands still. The cloud security landscape changes constantly, the work is never quite finished, and that is exactly what I like about it.

What Microsoft Security features or products have provided the most impact?

The single biggest impact for me comes from Microsoft Sentinel as a cloud-native SIEM and SOAR platform. The move away from a self-hosted SIEM matters more than it first appears. A traditional SIEM is itself a piece of infrastructure that has to be sized, hosted, patched, and scaled, and that effort constantly competes with the actual security work. Microsoft Sentinel removes that layer. There is no platform estate to keep alive and no capacity planning for the SIEM itself, which frees attention for what actually matters: getting the right telemetry in and getting detection and response right. 

What I value most is how naturally Sentinel fits into modern, cloud-first environments. When the landscape you are protecting already lives in Azure and Microsoft 365, a security platform that lives in the same place removes an entire class of integration friction. The other strength is the breadth of data onboarding. With a traditional SIEM, connecting a new log source was often a small project of its own, with connectors to build and parsers to maintain. With Sentinel, that friction is largely gone. Whether a source sits on-premises, in another cloud or in a third-party product, getting it in is straightforward, and the platform still provides the integration depth that genuinely matters rather than a shallow connection. Microsoft Sentinel handles almost anything you point it at.

Equally important is that SIEM and SOAR are not two separate platforms here. The orchestration and automation layer is built into the same solution, so response playbooks run on the same data that the detections are built on. For architecture, that is a real advantage: detection and response are designed as one system rather than stitched together afterwards. The central telemetry layer is one of the few decisions that is genuinely hard to reverse later, and Sentinel makes that an easy one to defend.

What advice do you have for others who would like to get involved in the Microsoft Community?

My advice is to start before you feel ready. I read Microsoft Tech Community (forums) for years before I posted anything myself, always with the feeling that I needed more experience first, that I would just be adding noise. That was the wrong instinct. The moment I actually started contributing, the feedback I got back made my own work better, and I realised the bar for being useful is far lower than it looks from the outside. You do not need to be the leading expert on a topic. You need a real problem you have worked through and the willingness to write down how you solved it. Someone else is stuck on exactly that problem right now. Start small, stay consistent, and treat the community as an exchange rather than a stage. Consistency matters more than any single brilliant post.

Alles rund um sein Buch (All About His Book)

Last year, I published "Die neue Realität der Cybersecurity" (2025). It tackles a question every security team is dealing with right now: “Where does AI genuinely strengthen security architecture and incident response, and where is it just noise?” Rather than staying abstract, the book takes the practitioner's side of that question, looking at how AI actually changes the work of designing defensible systems and responding to incidents, and where the limits and risks really are. It is written for the people doing the work, security architects, IR practitioners and the leaders who have to make decisions about AI without the marketing gloss. If that question is on your desk too, it is worth a look.

Connect with Marcel

• Microsoft Tech Community: @marcel_graewer
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mgraewer/
• Github: https://github.com/bifrost0x
• Blogs: graewer.com and magra-sec.de
• Book: Die neue Realität der Cybersecurity (ISBN: 9783695708833)
  
  

Marcel Graewer is currently an IT-Security Manager at Festool Group and holds the CISSP certification. Outside of work, he is happiest when experimenting with

technology on his own terms. He runs a Proxmox-based homelab with a range of self-hosted services and Docker containers, using it as both a playground and a testing ground. It gives him space to break things, learn, and explore without the constraints of formal change processes. He also spends time on Hack The Box and TryHackMe, believing that staying sharp on the offensive side makes him a stronger defender. Away from the keyboard, his life is refreshingly analog. He and his family, including two children, live in an old house that always seems to have one more project waiting. Between the homelab and the house, there is never a shortage of things to fix, and that suits him just fine.

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