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02/08/2026 11:50 am
TL;DR: Industry studies cited in the article say data teams spend 20 to 40% of their time on pipeline maintenance, while pre-ingestion enrichment and filtering can cut SIEM data volumes by 50 to 70% in production deployments, shifting value from storage to context according to DataBahn. The security question is no longer whether data can be collected, but whether routing and enrichment happen early enough to reduce cost, exposure, and analyst drag.
NHIMG editorial — based on content published by DataBahn: Why are Legacy SIEMs a problem?
By the numbers:
- Industry studies report that data teams spend 20 to 40% of their time on data management pipeline maintenance and rework.
- Filtering and enriching telemetry before it reaches the SIEM has reduced data volumes by 50 to 70% in production deployments.
Questions worth separating out
Q: How should security teams reduce SIEM costs without creating blind spots?
A: Security teams should move from ingest-everything thinking to governed data routing.
Q: Why does pre-ingestion enrichment matter for identity-linked logs?
A: Identity-linked logs often contain user IDs, IP addresses, and asset references that can expose people or systems if they are handled inconsistently.
Q: What breaks when organisations rely on point-to-point data pipelines?
A: Point-to-point pipelines break when every new destination adds another connector, script, or rule set.
Practitioner guidance
- Map every pipeline that duplicates telemetry Inventory each source-to-destination path for logs, identities, and security events, then remove duplicate connectors where a single governed stream can feed multiple consumers.
- Shift enrichment ahead of SIEM ingestion Move asset identity, identity resolution, geolocation, and threat-intel lookups into the stream so the routing layer can decide whether an event deserves full-fidelity retention or lower-cost storage before billing occurs.
- Apply masking rules before data leaves the pipeline Define which identity-linked fields must be masked, transformed, or redirected for each destination, then enforce those rules upstream so compliance is consistent across SIEM, data lake, and AI workflows.
What's in the full article
DataBahn's full article covers the operational detail this post intentionally leaves for the source:
- Step-by-step examples of how flexible routing reduces duplicate ingestion across SIEM, observability, and data lake destinations.
- Architecture detail on where enrichment happens in the pipeline, including edge collection, stream processing, and destination-specific delivery.
- Practical scenarios for masking identity-linked fields before data reaches downstream tools.
- The article's own framing of how routing choices affect cost, governance, and future AI pipelines.
👉 Read DataBahn's analysis of flexible data routing and pre-SIEM enrichment →
Pre-SIEM enrichment: is your SIEM still the right choke point?
Explore further
02/08/2026 12:59 pm
Flexible routing is becoming a governance control, not a plumbing choice. Once data has to feed SIEM, observability, compliance, and AI workloads at the same time, routing determines which systems receive sensitive fields and in what form. That means the control plane for telemetry now sits closer to the pipeline than to the consuming tools. For practitioners, the implication is that architecture decisions are governance decisions.
A question worth separating out:
Q: How do teams know if routing and enrichment are working well?
A: Look for fewer duplicate pipelines, lower SIEM ingestion volumes, reduced connector maintenance, and consistent masking across destinations. If analysts still need to reconstruct obvious context after ingest, enrichment is happening too late. A healthy design makes the event more usable before it becomes expensive.
👉 Read our full editorial: Why pre-SIEM enrichment is becoming a security control
