The New Economics of Visibility: Breaking the Ingest Trap for SIEMs

There are a lot of costs associated with security data storage, monitoring, and investigation, some more obvious than others. This grows even more complicated for highly regulated organizations. Compliance mandates often require retaining logs for years, turning long-term visibility into a growing financial burden.  

When the CTO, CISO, and the architecture teams discuss what they’re going to buy for security monitoring and response - and how they’re going to use it - budget is always top of mind. There is also an increased focus on how to design a SIEM architecture, with more security leaders shifting away from consumption-based models.

New research by Software Analyst Cyber Research notes that rising data volumes and unpredictable ingest pricing are pushing organizations toward platforms that unify data, intelligence, and AI while maintaining cost transparency.  According to analyst Francis Odum, “Rising data volumes and ingestion-based pricing models push buyers toward platforms that offer predictable costs, flexible storage, and reduced management overhead.”

Not only can ingest and storage pricing be high, but potential added data egress fees that surface while coordinating security plans can quickly run up a bill where security costs rival IT infrastructure spending. Teams in large organizations often split responsibilities - insider threat teams need advanced analytics and threat hunting tools but not long-term storage.  Sustained 24/7/365 visibility is essential for SOCs to uphold compliance mandates and ensure quick incident escalation when attacks occur.

This holds true for both organizations managing their own SOCs and for Managed Security Service Providers (MSSPs) who must maintain positive margins while demonstrating value to customers. Everyone is looking for a force multiplier, and the modern SIEM must make it possible for analysts to monitor more systems, detect threats faster, and automate response with precision and confidence.

Breaking the Ingest Trap

Legacy SIEM economics are built on volume, not value. The more data you ingest, the more you pay. But in an era of exploding telemetry, that model collapses under its own weight. Anomali offers a solution that redefines the SIEM model: a decoupled compute and storage architecture with an open, AI-powered data lake that delivers predictable costs and total visibility without compromise.

The Anomali data lake stores log data in open formats, limiting vendor dependency and enabling flexible, cloud-agnostic scaling. The data remains under the customer’s ownership and governance, including full control over access and retention policies. This decoupling of storage and compute architecture dramatically reduces ingestion-based pricing constraints. Organizations can see an average 40–60% cost reduction while gaining full visibility across years of data, unlocking both economic efficiency and operational intelligence.

“Pricing is positioned as 40–60% lower than comparable SIEMs, and because all data remains ‘hot’ for seven+ years, customers avoid surprise retention costs.”- Software Analyst Cyber Research ‍

From Ingest to Insight: A New Model for SIEM Economics

Anomali’s AI-native foundation transforms data economics by removing the penalty for visibility.  Instead of paying to hold data, you’re investing in the insights that drive action.
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When all telemetry, threat intelligence, and behavioral data live within a single high-speed data lake, OSC analysts gain instant access to years of searchable context, fueling faster investigations, smarter detection, and more confident automation.

Want to explore how leading analysts see the future of SIEM evolving? The new Software Analyst Cyber Research report, The Convergence of SIEMs and Data Lakes, details how modern platforms like Anomali are driving flexibility, visibility, and cost control through decoupled, AI-native architectures. Get the report now.  

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