Balancing Cyber Security Budgets: Efficiently Combating Threats Without Compromising on Performance

Revenue and profit growth is a welcome outcome for CEO’s — it’s an indicator that business is healthy. But growth can pose a challenge for CISOs for two reasons. Firstly, growth invariably increases the risk exposure of the organisation (as growth is often correlated with acquisitions, increased headcount or geo expansion). Secondly, larger businesses are often a more attractive target for cyber adversaries.

According to Ponemon, the cost of a data breach is now $3.92 million on average. This figure is 12% higher than it was just five years ago. The financial risk to businesses is more significant than ever, and security teams cannot afford to cut corners.

There’s no doubt, big data volumes are unpredictable and growing at an exponential rate. But there is hope. CISOs and CFOs don’t have to live with the pain, frustration, and unpredictability of consumption-based pricing.

Implications of Growth on Security

Regardless of the type of growth your enterprise is experiencing, it is likely to become a larger, not smaller, target. Meaning it’s even more important to maintain full visibility of the whole IT environment.

Security leaders whose enterprises are undergoing rapid growth have a high likelihood of exceeding their security information and event management (SIEM) budget. It’s difficult to project future SIEM budget needs, especially if the enterprise is undergoing diverse types of growth. Faced with exponentially growing log and machine data, CISOs often have no choice but to cap the volume of log data that their SIEM is processing and analysing. The problem is that this approach introduces security risk that the enterprise cannot afford.

Data is your window into the inner workings of the IT environment; excluding data from the SIEM creates a blind spot. Furthermore, there’s no “right” system to exclude. It’s difficult to make that choice ahead of time because you don’t know which data is most important until you need it. The log data you choose to exclude from the SIEM could contain the only clue that there’s been a security breach. Effective threat investigation requires that you capture and analyse all data.

Bottom line: organisations can’t afford to treat medium-to-low value assets as if they aren’t high priority. A SIEM solution analyses current data in relation to historical data. So, the choices you make today about which data sets to exclude will impact your ability to detect threats in the future.

SIEM Needs a New Pricing Model

Historically, vendors have charged based on capacity. Their customers pay a certain amount per message, gigabyte, or event per second, for example. It’s easy to see how an organisation can exceed its SIEM budget considering business growth under this pricing model.

Recently, some vendors have adopted a user-based pricing model. Under this model, customers pay a certain amount of money per user, per year. It doesn’t matter how much data each user generates; the organisation must still pay per user. However, user-based pricing doesn’t promise any more stability than capacity-based pricing because employee headcounts are likely to increase with any business growth.

Neither of these subscription-based pricing models are conducive to business growth. Security organisations face the hard decision of what data goes unprotected and at what price. Not only are they increasing the enterprise’s security risk by excluding data from the SIEM solution, but they’re also reducing the return on investment (ROI) they realise from the tool. If they don’t process all the data, they’re not seeing the full the value of their SIEM.

Fortunately, there is another, better option for enterprises undergoing rapid growth.

Unlimited Data Delivers Better Security

A new SIEM pricing model stands to disrupt the industry and transform how growing enterprises manage their SIEM budget: unlimited data processing.

A SIEM license for unlimited data processing is an insurance policy against unpredictable or rapid and unknown growth. It removes data ingestion restrictions, giving security teams the freedom to ingest all data to fully protect their enterprise no matter what kind of growth the future brings. It doesn’t matter how much data the SIEM processes or whether the data originates from the cloud or on-premises. It’s all included in one predictable price.

It is ideal for organisations that have variability in the volume of their log data and/or the size of their user base and whose executives value a predictable budget. The unlimited data processing plan allows these organisations to purchase a SIEM with a predictable pricing model independent of the other fluctuating costs resulting from business growth.

At last, CISOs have flexible and predictable licensing arrangements that allow them to focus on protecting their organisation and celebrate new growth milestones with the rest of the business.

Ultimately, if your business is experiencing rapid growth, whether as a result of increased headcount, growing IT infrastructure, or IT modernisation, then you need a modern SIEM with unlimited capacity and a fixed price.