Estimate the total cost of ownership (TCO) for Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) systems including licensing, infrastructure, storage, and personnel costs.
You might also find these calculators useful
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.
EPS (events per second) pricing charges by event volume regardless of size. GB/day (ingestion) pricing charges by data volume. EPS favors small, frequent events; GB/day favors larger, less frequent logs. Most modern SIEM use ingestion-based pricing.
Splunk Enterprise costs approximately $150-500K+ annually for mid-size deployments (100-300 GB/day). Pricing is typically $3-6/GB/day for ingestion-based or $1,800-4,000/GB/day for workload pricing. Contact Splunk for exact quotes.
Open-source SIEM (Elastic, Wazuh, OSSIM) have no license fees but require significant operational overhead. Factor in: infrastructure costs, engineering time (1-2 FTEs), training, and lack of vendor support. True TCO is often 40-60% of commercial alternatives.
Industry benchmarks: 1 analyst per 500-1000 endpoints for 24x7 coverage, or 1 analyst per 50-100 GB/day of log volume. Minimum viable SOC requires 5-7 analysts for 24x7 coverage with shifts and time off.
Compliance minimums: SOC 2 (90 days), PCI-DSS (1 year), HIPAA (6 years), SOX (7 years). Best practice is hot storage (30-90 days searchable), warm (90-365 days), cold archive (1-7 years). Longer retention dramatically increases storage costs.