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22/06/2026 9:56 am
TL;DR: Hybrid SIEM deployments still miss the identity context needed to make cloud, SaaS, and on-premises telemetry actionable, and Netwrix says 46% of respondents experienced account compromise in 2025 versus 16% in 2020. The practical issue is not log volume alone but whether identity change data is structured early enough to support detection and audit evidence.
NHIMG editorial — based on content published by Netwrix: Top SIEM Tools for Hybrid Environments in 2026
By the numbers:
- 46% of respondents experienced account compromise in 2025, compared to only 16% in 2020.
- 70% of organisations grant AI systems more access than they would give a human employee performing the exact same job.
- Only 5.7% of organisations have full visibility into their service accounts.
Questions worth separating out
Q: How should security teams decide what identity data belongs in a hybrid SIEM?
A: Start with the identity events that explain control changes, not every log source that exists.
Q: Why do hybrid SIEM deployments often miss account compromise patterns?
A: They often miss compromise because telemetry is fragmented across AD, cloud, and SaaS systems, so analysts cannot reconstruct the sequence of identity changes.
Q: What breaks when a SIEM cannot normalize identity-change events?
A: Without normalisation, the SIEM cannot reliably show who changed access, which account was affected, or whether the change was expected.
Practitioner guidance
- Map identity-critical event sources first Inventory on-premises AD, cloud control planes, SaaS admin logs, and privileged account activity before tuning detections.
- Require before-and-after identity records Validate that access changes, group membership edits, and policy updates are exported as structured records, not just raw logs.
- Join identity, endpoint, and network timelines Test whether a single investigation can trace a user or account across EDR, SIEM, and network telemetry without manual reconstruction.
What's in the full article
Netwrix's full guide covers the operational detail this post intentionally leaves for the source:
- Vendor-by-vendor feature comparisons for Microsoft Sentinel, Splunk, QRadar, Exabeam, Rapid7, Securonix, LogRhythm, Graylog, and Elastic
- Deployment fit notes for Microsoft-heavy, regulated, cloud-only, and air-gapped environments
- Product-specific strengths and constraints around parsing, retention, pricing, and operational overhead
- The SIEM-adjacent role Netwrix plays in converting raw Windows and AD events into audit-ready evidence
👉 Read Netwrix's top SIEM tools guide for hybrid environments in 2026 →
Hybrid SIEM coverage gaps: what IAM teams need to fix?
Explore further
22/06/2026 10:36 am
Identity visibility is the control plane most hybrid SIEM deployments underbuild. Teams often buy correlation before they solve identity telemetry quality, which leaves them with alerts but not governance-grade evidence. The practical consequence is that account compromise, privilege changes, and third-party access all become harder to prove or triage because the SIEM sees fragments instead of identity state. This is a NIST Cybersecurity Framework problem as much as a tooling problem, because detection depends on trustworthy input before response can work.
A few things that frame the scale:
- Only 5.7% of organisations have full visibility into their service accounts, according to Ultimate Guide to NHIs.
- 79% of organisations have experienced secrets leaks, and 77% of those incidents resulted in tangible damage.
A question worth separating out:
Q: How do teams know if a hybrid SIEM is delivering usable governance evidence?
A: Check whether the platform can produce a clean before-and-after record for account, group, and privilege changes without manual reformatting. If analysts or auditors still need to stitch together raw logs, the SIEM is collecting data but not delivering governable identity evidence.
👉 Read our full editorial: Top SIEM tools for hybrid environments leave identity gaps
