4 SIEM Price Reduction Tactics Examined
A SIEM’s price can be a bit of a shock.
As we’ve covered in another blog, the price of a security information and event management (SIEM) solution is never just about licensing (or whatever you initially agree to pay a vendor for data processing). Even though SIEM licensing costs can easily be tens of thousands of pounds for a small organisation with less than 20 GB of monthly data flow.
Typically, SIEM price consists of three parts:
Licensing
Extra data processing you will need
Operational cost of running a SIEM (which is just as large as the above two).
You might need a SIEM’s capabilities, but you do not need to add these often spiralling costs to your security budget request this year.
This blog examines four common SIEM price reduction tactics that could bring down the cost of your SIEM by thousands of pounds each month and helps you understand the best ways to reduce your SIEM’s price.
Using an Open-Source SIEM
Low-cost or free SIEM systems can remove a SIEM's initial upfront (or annual) price but often harbour hidden costs.
Extensive staff time required for system management and higher data storage and log processing expenses can cost thousands of pounds monthly. Free SIEMs can also be challenging to scale.
This blog post further details why free or low-cost SIEMs are not a great SIEM price reduction strategy.
SIEM price reduction: Low
Augmenting Your SIEM
SIEM log normalisation, the process of converting “raw” event logs into a readable and consistent format in whatever SIEM you use, can leave you with much larger data processing and storage bills than you expect.
A SIEM augmentation solution like SenseOn can reduce this price by identifying the most voluminous logs sent to your SIEM and assessing their security value. By filtering out expensive and low-value logs, SenseOn can cut SIEM data processing costs by as much as 67%.
SIEM price reduction: High
Using a SIEM Alternative
Why do you need a SIEM again? Break down the business case for a SIEM, and you might find more cost-effective alternatives for the same use cases.
If you need to store logs over a long period, you could send raw event logs directly to a cloud storage solution like Azure Blob storage or an Amazon S3 bucket.
Or, if your business goal for deploying a SIEM is to find suspicious activity in your environment, using a security platform like SenseOn makes much more sense.
With a standard SIEM solution, data flows into a centralised system from a range of different sources across network sensors and endpoints. Data is often encrypted and always voluminous. This means it can be extremely time-consuming for any analyst to look at the information and understand the context of the behaviour they are observing. The ultimate price issue here is the extra time required.
The price benefit of a security automation platform like SenseOn is that analysts get a connected picture from the get-go. Instead of inputting a range of disparate data sources into a single platform as XDR does, SenseOn uses a single universal sensor across all parts of your environment, including networks, servers, and endpoints.
This can reduce the volume of false positive alerts by over 90% while saving hours of threat investigation time.
SIEM price reduction potential: High
Next-Gen SIEMs
Cloud-based “next-gen” SIEMs promise reduced infrastructure and maintenance costs. They work by being cloud-native and plugging in multiple detection methods in a single SIEM platform. This can reduce your SIEM price.
However, any price savings from using a next-gen SIEM can be offset by extra subscription fees and cloud storage expenses.
SIEM price reduction potential: Moderate
SenseOn SIEM Price Reduction Advantage
As we’ve touched on above, SenseOn can help reduce SIEM price by either:
Augmenting your SIEM and reducing your data processing costs.
Replacing your SIEM altogether with a more efficient and lower-cost threat detection and response solution.
More UK companies are choosing SenseOn to reduce the price they would otherwise pay for SIEM-like capabilities.
Try a demo to learn more.
