Estimate the total cost of ownership (TCO) for Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) systems including licensing, infrastructure, storage, and personnel costs.
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Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) systems are critical for threat detection and compliance, but costs can quickly escalate. Our SIEM Cost Calculator helps security teams estimate the true Total Cost of Ownership including licensing, infrastructure, storage, personnel, and hidden costs across different deployment models and vendor tiers.
SIEM vendors use various pricing models: data ingestion ($/GB/day), events per second (EPS), or entity-based licensing. Beyond license fees, organizations must account for infrastructure costs (on-premise or cloud), storage for long-term retention, security analyst salaries, training, and support. Enterprise SIEM like Splunk or IBM QRadar can cost $150-500K+ annually, while mid-market and open-source options offer lower TCO with different trade-offs.
TCO Formula
TCO = License + Infrastructure + Storage + Personnel + Training + SupportSIEM projects frequently exceed budgets due to unexpected data growth, longer retention requirements, or additional analyst needs. Accurate TCO modeling prevents costly surprises.
Enterprise, mid-market, and open-source SIEM solutions have vastly different cost structures. Understanding true costs helps select the right tier for your needs.
Quantifying SIEM costs alongside breach prevention value (avg $4.45M per incident) helps build the business case for security investment.
Data volumes grow 25-40% annually. Understanding cost scaling helps plan for future requirements and negotiate better contracts.
Identify cost reduction opportunities through log filtering, tiered storage, or deployment model changes.
Compare commercial SIEM costs against open-source alternatives factoring in additional engineering and operational overhead.
Early-stage security teams evaluating initial SIEM investment. Compare open-source options like Wazuh or Elastic against managed cloud solutions for 10-50 GB/day volumes.
Organizations migrating from legacy SIEM to modern platforms. Calculate TCO for Splunk, Microsoft Sentinel, or Elastic Cloud including migration costs.
Healthcare, finance, or retail organizations requiring SIEM for HIPAA, SOX, or PCI-DSS compliance with extended retention periods (1-7 years).
Managed Security Service Providers calculating per-customer SIEM costs to set pricing and margins for security monitoring services.
Organizations deciding between cloud SIEM (lower ops, higher variable cost) and on-premise (higher capital, lower variable cost).
Teams preparing for SIEM contract renewals, understanding current costs to negotiate better terms or evaluate alternatives.
Sum log sources: Windows event logs (~1-2 GB/server/day), firewall logs (~0.5-2 GB/1000 connections), cloud audit logs (~100-500 MB/service). Most organizations underestimate by 30-50% - add buffer for growth and new sources.