Calculating the cost savings of a SIEM solution

If you are a CISO or a decision maker looking to bring value to the table by investing in an effective security information and event management (SIEM) solution, speaking in terms of ROI or cost savings can easily get people to a shared understanding. This is relevant to discussions about IT spending since it is typically seen as a cost center. Too often, the IT department and IT security in particular—is not given the resources it needs to save an organization money in the long term. This blog offers a free calculator to estimate a SIEM solution's cost savings. You can receive your custom cost savings report through email.

Although cybersecurity is often perceived as expensive, in the face of escalating attacks and data breaches, it is clear that decision makers cannot afford to be complacent. What organizations need is to consider the cost savings afforded by using a SIEM solution. Beyond the working time and manual effort saved by using a SIEM solution, organizations can also rest assured that they avoid the fines and penalties associated with a breach of regulatory compliance.

When it comes to budgeting for your security operations center (SOC) or security department, investment in a SIEM tool plays a pivotal role. Let's approach your SIEM investment by exploring 3 avenues of costs: compliance, improving operational efficiency, and mitigating the impact of a breach.

Compliance reporting:

Organizations must conform to high-security standards and complex compliance requirements to protect the data they hold. Notable compliance standards include HIPAA, GDPR, PCI-DSS, and SOX. Failing to comply may result in data breaches and legal fines.

Operational efficiency:

The operating efficiency of your SOC is a great metric that not only reduces financial burdens, but helps reduce alert fatigue and analyst burnout.

Mitigating the impact of a breach:

Using SIEM helps reduce not only the likelihood of a data breach but also the impact of any breaches that do occur and their potential fallout.

Table 1 below highlights each of these three cost metrics, along with a description of the associated costs. It also shows how a SIEM solution helps reduce these costs.

Interested in learning more? Download our free cost savings white paper.

Without a doubt, a SIEM solution, is an essential component of your security architecture—supporting threat detection, compliance, and security incident management through gathering and analyzing security events (both near real-time and historical). Modern SIEM solutions combine threat intelligence, machine learning-based anomaly detection, and rule-based attack detection techniques to identify sophisticated attacks. They also offer security orchestration and automation capabilities for more effective remediation of detected threats.

Here's a calculator that can help you figure out how much money you can save with SIEM. Implementing a SIEM solution is a continuous activity rather than a one-time purchase. Though real-life conditions may change, the calculation you generate may provide an indication of how much you stand to gain.

The calculator can be used to forecast cost savings from a SIEM before purchase, as well as to calculate returns after implementation.