Microsoft Defender XDR
Hunting and detection

Defender Experts Hunting Prerequisites

In brief

The prerequisites now document storage locations for hunting, reporting, and operational data; retention of up to 90 days after subscription expiry and deletion within 30 days after termination; and availability for eligible GCC customers through Defender Experts Hunting for Gov.

What Defender admins need to know

Review the updated data residency, retention, and regional availability details to confirm they meet your organization’s requirements. No administrator action is stated.

Summaries are generated from the documentation change itself.

Documentation change

The comparison below shows only the changed extract. Use the full-page view for complete context.

Data collection, usage, and retention

  • All data used for hunting from existing Defender services will continuecontinues to reside in the customer's original Microsoft Defender service storage location. Learn more

  • Data generated for Defender Experts reports and other experiences in the Defender portal is stored in the customer's Microsoft Defender service storage location.
  • Defender Experts Hunting for Gov operational data, such as case tickets and analyst notes, is generated and stored in Microsoft data centers in the US region for GCC customers.
  • Defender Experts Hunting operational data, such as case tickets and analyst notes, areis generated and stored in a Microsoft data centercenters in the EU region for customers whose Defender data is in scope of European Union data boundaryboundary.
  • Defender Experts Hunting operational data, such as case tickets and analyst notes, is generated and stored in the US regionMicrosoft data centers worldwide for other customers, for the length of the service, irrespective of thetheir Microsoft Defender service storage location. Data generated for the reporting dashboard is stored in customer's Microsoft Defender service storage location.
  • Reporting data and operational data will be retained for a grace period of no more than 90 days after a customer's subscription expires. If the customer terminates their subscription, data will be deleted within 30 days.

  • Microsoft experts hunt over advanced hunting logs in Microsoft Defender advanced hunting tables. The data in these tables dependdepends on the set of Defender services the customer is enabled for (for example, Microsoft Defender for Endpoint, Microsoft Defender for Office 365, Microsoft Defender for Identity, Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps, and Microsoft Entra ID). Experts also use a large set of internal threat intelligence data to inform their hunting and automation.

Availability

Defender Experts Hunting follows Microsoft 365 and Office 365 international availability. The service is available for customers in our commercial public cloud. In addition, the Defender Experts Hunting for Gov service is available to GCC customers who do not require FedRAMP authorization, such as many State & Local Government (SLG) customers. Defender Experts Hunting is not available in government cloud (i.e. to GCC-H, DoD, etc. customers) and sovereign cloud at this time.

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