SIEM Costs Are Bleeding Your Budget—Here’s How to Slash Log Ingestion Expenses Now

Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) systems are essential for cybersecurity, but they can also be a budgetary black hole. With log ingestion costs spiraling out of control, many companies find themselves paying far more than expected just to keep their security operations running.

But here’s the thing: not all logs need to go to your SIEM. The right log management strategy can cut your costs dramatically without sacrificing visibility or security. This article breaks down exactly why SIEM costs are skyrocketing and how you can slash log ingestion expenses today—with a special focus on how syslog-ng can be a game-changer for your log management strategy.

Why SIEM Costs Keep Climbing—And Why It’s a Problem

Several factors contribute to increasing SIEM expenses:

• Volume-Based Pricing Models: Many SIEM vendors charge based on the amount of data ingested, measured in gigabytes per day or events per second. As organisations grow and generate more data, these costs can escalate rapidly.
• Data Retention Requirements: Compliance mandates often require extended data retention periods, leading to higher storage costs within SIEM platforms.
• Infrastructure and Maintenance: Managing large volumes of log data necessitates significant infrastructure investments and ongoing maintenance, further driving up costs.
• Performance Lag: High log volumes slow down SIEM performance, requiring costly infrastructure upgrades.
• Wasted Data: A huge percentage of logs offer little to no security value—yet they’re still being ingested and stored at premium SIEM rates.

The good news? You can fight back.

How to Cut SIEM Log Ingestion Costs Without Compromising Security

To take control of your SIEM budget, you need to be smart about what logs you send—and where you send them. The following strategies can significantly cut costs while keeping your security operations effective.

1. Filter Out the Noise Before It Reaches Your SIEM

Not every log is useful. A huge chunk of data that companies send to SIEMs is irrelevant for security analysis—think application debug logs, system health checks, and redundant events.

• Solution: Use syslog-ng to filter logs at the source. Syslog-ng lets you define precise filtering rules, so only high-value logs (such as security alerts, critical system events, and authentication attempts) get forwarded to the SIEM.
• Additional Benefits: Filtering and normalising logs at the client level reduces the SIEM’s workload, allowing it to focus on essential security data.
• Cost Savings: Up to 50% reduction in SIEM ingestion volume.
• Example: A security data pipeline approach can significantly reduce SIEM costs by decreasing the size and volume of logs (SRA.io).

2. Route Non-Critical Logs to Cheaper Storage

Instead of dumping everything into your SIEM, redirect non-essential logs to cost-effective storage such as:

• Amazon S3 or Azure Blob Storage (for long-term, low-cost retention)
• Data lakes (for analytics without SIEM pricing)
• On-premises archives (for compliance needs)
• Solution: Syslog-ng enables multi-destination routing. It allows you to send logs to multiple locations at the same time—so you can store low-priority logs cheaply while keeping security-critical logs in your SIEM.
• Additional Benefits: Reduces SIEM storage and processing load, allowing security teams to focus on high-risk events.
• Cost Savings: Up to 40% reduction in SIEM storage fees.
• Example: Security data pipelines help reduce log size and volume, leading to significant savings (SRA.io).

3. Ensure Reliable and Secure Log Transfers

Many SIEM platforms suffer from message loss, delays, and inconsistencies due to unreliable log transfer mechanisms.

Solution: Syslog-ng’s Reliable Log Transfer Protocol (RLTP™) ensures zero message loss by:

Using TCP transport for stable log transmission

Implementing client-side disk buffering for network disruptions

Supporting client-side failover mechanisms to handle outages without losing logs

Additional Benefits: Reliable log transfers reduce troubleshooting efforts, ensure faster incident response, and enhance forensic integrity.

Cost Savings: Eliminates hidden costs of lost security data, reducing the need for expensive incident investigations.

4. Aggregate, Deduplicate, and Compress Logs Before Sending Them

Duplicate and redundant logs bloat your SIEM costs fast. If your infrastructure is generating the same event across multiple sources, why pay to store them all?

• Solution: Syslog-ng can aggregate, deduplicate, and compress logs before forwarding them. This reduces redundant data and significantly lowers storage and processing costs.
• Additional Benefits: Improves SIEM search performance, making security teams more efficient.
• Cost Savings: 20-30% reduction in log volume.
• Example: Data aggregation techniques can reduce network log volume by 50-80%, significantly lowering SIEM ingestion costs (Corelight).

5. Optimise Log Retention Policies

SIEM vendors love to charge a premium for long-term storage—but you don’t have to play by their rules.

Instead of keeping everything in expensive hot storage, use tiered retention:

• Keep security-relevant logs in your SIEM for immediate analysis
• Move older logs to cold storage for compliance
• Archive rarely accessed logs in a data lake or offline storage
• Solution: Syslog-ng helps automate retention policies by forwarding logs to different locations based on their importance.
• Additional Benefits: Supports sustainable data lifecycle management and compliance with data minimisation principles, ensuring logs are only retained where and when they add value.
• Cost Savings: Up to 60% lower long-term storage expenses.
• Example: A major hospital system reduced its Azure Sentinel costs by over 50% by optimising log retention and leveraging external storage solutions (Observo.ai).

6. Secure Log Storage for Compliance & Forensic Analysis

Regulatory frameworks require organisations to store logs securely for legal and compliance reasons.

Solution: Syslog-ng encrypts, timestamps, and compresses logs before storage. This ensures that log data remains tamper-proof and admissible as evidence.

Additional Benefits: Secure storage enhances compliance reporting and legal defensibility of security data.

Cost Savings: Reduces the risk of regulatory fines and costly legal disputes by maintaining verifiable, high-integrity audit trails.

Example: Organisations that implement secure log storage strategies experience faster and more accurate forensic investigations (syslog-ng).

Real-World Case Studies: How Companies Are Slashing SIEM Costs

University of Victoria

• Challenge: High SIEM licensing costs due to excessive log ingestion.
• Solution: Used syslog-ng to centralise log collection and apply filtering rules.
• Result: Reduced log ingestion by 30%, saving on SIEM costs (syslog-ng).

Tecnocom (Leading Spanish IT Firm)

• Challenge: Struggled to manage large-scale log ingestion without breaking the budget.
• Solution: Implemented syslog-ng’s log routing to separate high-priority logs from non-essential ones.
• Result: 25% reduction in SIEM costs while maintaining security visibility (syslog-ng).

Final Thoughts: Take Back Control of Your SIEM Budget

By implementing syslog-ng and optimising log filtering, routing, pre-processing, and storage strategies, organisations can:

Reduce SIEM ingestion volumes by 50%

Improve SIEM efficiency and performance

Lower long-term storage costs by up to 60%

Enhance security visibility without inflating costs

Secure logs for compliance and forensic integrity

The bottom line? Log smarter, not harder.

Ready to start saving? Optimise your SIEM strategy with syslog-ng today.

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