Make the financial case for modernizing your security stack with this guide to measuring the return on investment (ROI) of your SIEM migration
Legacy SIEM platforms are reaching their limits not just technically, but also economically. Licensing costs are creeping upwards, storage requirements are growing faster than budgets, and security teams are increasingly overloaded with alerts.
On top of that, regulatory and business expectations are rising, with faster incident reporting, deeper visibility, and more precise audit trails required.
With that in mind, modern, cloud-native SIEMs offer a compelling alternative. Microsoft Sentinel, for example, has been shown to deliver a 234% three-year ROI, with payback in under six months, according to a Forrester Total Economic Impact (TEI) study published earlier this year.
But while the technical advantages of a SIEM migration may be clear to CISOs, convincing a CFO or board demands something more concrete: a business case grounded in measurable ROI.
This article provides a practical framework for calculating SIEM migration ROI, which will give you some financial clout to back up an already strong security case.
Many SIEM migrations begin with frustration. Security teams are stuck paying for expensive ingestion licenses while having to deal with low signal-to-noise ratios and a flood of irrelevant alerts.
The financial impact of those inefficiencies is often hard to measure, but the economics are hard to ignore:
Turning a blind eye to these considerations can leave your organization exposed to significant financial risk.
By accurately predicting and presenting the potential ROI of the SIEM migration to the board, you will stand a much greater chance of convincing them to invest.
To convince boards and finance teams, you’ll need to provide clarity. That means moving beyond projections and potential savings.
Below are the key elements to include.
Remember, the goal isn’t to guarantee a return, it’s to show that the investment has a strong likelihood of delivering one, with the existence of levers to manage risk.
Start by calculating your current total cost of ownership (TCO), which involves more than just the license.
Many traditional SIEM platforms charge based on peak data ingestion, regardless of whether that data is actionable. As mentioned above, a Splunk license, for instance, could cost $18,000 per year for 10 GB/day – before you’ve factored in support and retention costs.
On-prem deployments require hardware, SANs, backup media, and power. These costs can account for a significant proportion of a SIEM’s total footprint.
Furthermore, all this hardware requires technical teams to install, maintain, and monitor 24/7 in an emergency. Not only is this costly, but it distracts valuable talent from other technical requirements, which leads neatly to the next point.
Manual alert triage can consume a lot of your SOC team’s time. With the security skills gap reportedly rising to 4.8m in 2024, this time is more precious than ever and could undoubtedly be better spent in other areas.
Even a well-run SOC will miss alerts. A single breach, by IBM’s estimates, can cost nearly $5 million. If cloud-native, automated AI tools reduce that probability by even 10%-15%, the potential risk-adjusted savings are significant.
Cloud-native SIEMs introduce a true pay-as-you-go model that easily scales up and down, with options to offload cold data into lower-cost storage tiers. But cost savings are only the start.
The Sentinel TEI study mentioned above reports a 44% reduction in total cost of ownership. These gains come from lower license fees, no on-prem hardware, and reduced support overheads.
The same study quoted 93% faster connector deployment, 79% fewer false positives, and 85% reduction in investigation effort. For a typical SOC, that could free up the equivalent of multiple full-time staff members who can be redeployed to higher-value activities.
The same study claims that the chance of experiencing a significant breach post-migration is 35% lower. Even if you apply a more conservative 10%-20% figure, the savings in avoided incidents could be substantial.
Because modern SIEMs scale automatically, organizations avoid the sudden spikes in capital expenditure caused by new compliance rules or unexpected data growth. This turns what used to be reactive spending into predictable operational expenditure.
In addition to what you can see easily, there are many important SIEM migration benefits that are harder to quantify, but still highly worthy of consideration.
Cloud-native SIEMs enable acquired businesses to connect securely within days, not months. This can significantly accelerate timelines and reduce transitional service agreement costs.
Reducing alert fatigue has a direct impact on analyst wellbeing. Given high burnout rates in security operations, this can stabilize teams and reduce hiring churn.
Modern SIEMs often come with pre-configured compliance dashboards for GDPR, HIPAA, PCI-DSS and more. This can shorten audit preparation from weeks to hours.
An AWS study found that cloud workloads can be 4.1 times more energy-efficient and reduce carbon emissions by up to 99% compared to on-prem environments.
With sustainability now playing an important part in many RFPs, moving security analytics to the cloud contributes to ESG goals and can provide a competitive advantage in procurement.
Many board members will view SIEM migration as just a technical upgrade, but in reality it is much more than that,
Done right, it reduces costs, improves analyst effectiveness, strengthens your security posture, and pays for itself quickly. Ultimately, it should be viewed as a financial opportunity.
For CISOs and CTOs, the above SIEM migration ROI model can pave the way for transforming operational pain into strategic investment. For CFOs, it offers a clear demonstration of potential value creation.
So, what are you waiting for? Plug your numbers into the above blueprint and arm yourself with a case no-one can argue with.
If you need help understanding the financial benefits of migrating your SIEM to a newer platform, get in touch with our friendly team. We’re vendor agnostic, so our advice is always impartial. Plus, we have more than 100 migrations under our belt, so we know our stuff.
If you’ d like to do some more research, why not download our free whitepaper, The SIEM Migration Buyer’s Guide 2025? It offers a broad range of useful insights for anyone looking to upgrade.