When organisations evaluate their SIEM investment, license fees are just the beginning. The true total cost of ownership includes data ingestion charges, storage costs, professional services, and the hidden tax of analyst burnout.
The Real Cost Breakdown
Most SIEM vendors price by data volume, typically measured in events per second (EPS) or gigabytes per day. As your organisation grows and your attack surface expands, these costs scale linearly (or worse).
Here’s what a typical mid-market SIEM deployment actually costs:
- License fees: £150K–£400K/year
- Infrastructure: £50K–£150K/year (on-prem) or usage-based cloud costs
- Professional services: £75K–£200K for initial deployment, £30K–£80K/year ongoing
- Staffing: 2–4 dedicated SIEM engineers at £65K–£95K each
- Opportunity cost: Analyst time spent tuning rules instead of investigating threats
The combined TCO often exceeds £500K annually, and that’s before accounting for the inevitable log source additions that trigger overage charges.
The Data Tax
The most insidious cost is the data tax. SIEM vendors incentivise you to ingest less data to keep costs manageable. But reducing telemetry creates blind spots. Security teams face an impossible choice: pay more or see less.
This dynamic creates a perverse outcome where the tool designed to improve visibility actually encourages reduced visibility.
A Different Approach
SenseOn’s platform eliminates the data tax entirely. Our Flexible Intelligence Credit (FIC) model decouples cost from data volume entirely. You commit to an annual credit pool that covers all capabilities, including detection, investigation, compliance, and AI-accelerated resolution, and ingest everything across network, endpoint, cloud, and identity without worrying about per-GB charges. The cross-domain correlation engine processes all available telemetry to deliver high-fidelity detections.
No data compromises. No hidden costs. No SIEM tax.
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