Topic starter
08/07/2026 6:53 pm
TL;DR: Security teams are being pushed to trim SIEM and data lake costs as data volumes rise, with Gurucul arguing that source-side filtering, enrichment, and routing can preserve visibility while cutting false positives by up to 70% and pipeline maintenance by 85%. The governance issue is no longer data hoarding, but deciding which telemetry must remain searchable, retained, and independent.
Editorial analysis by NHI Mgmt Group, based on content published by Gurucul: “Rethinking Security Data: How to Cut SIEM Costs Without Sacrificing Visibility”.
By the numbers:
- Modern data pipeline management can cut false positives by up to 70% after filtering, enriching, and normalizing data at the source.
- Organizations can reduce pipeline maintenance by up to 85% with automation, pre-optimized parsers, and low-code workflows.
- Cost savings can start at 40% out of the box and reach up to 87% with fine-tuning when teams route enriched data to SIEMs and full-fidelity logs to low-cost storage.
Key questions
Q: What breaks when security teams cut SIEM costs by dropping telemetry sources?
A: The first failure is usually visibility, not storage.
Q: Why do ignored telemetry sources create governance risk for security operations?
A: Because governance depends on knowing which events were seen, retained, and searchable.
Q: How should security teams design security data pipelines to support faster detection and search?
A: Security teams should normalize and enrich data as close to collection as possible, then route only the most useful signals to storage and analytics layers.
Practitioner guidance
- Define telemetry tiering by use case Classify security data into detection, investigation, compliance, and archive tiers before deciding where each stream should land.
- Move enrichment to the pipeline edge Apply parsing, normalization, and context enrichment before records hit the SIEM so analysts are not paying to store and query raw noise.
- Separate hot-path search from cold-path retention Keep enriched data in the SIEM for rapid triage while preserving full-fidelity logs in low-cost storage for replay and audit.
Bottom line: Security data cost control only works if teams preserve the visibility needed for detection, investigation, and compliance.
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08/07/2026 7:14 pm
Telemetry governance has become an identity governance problem. When access activity, service-account behaviour, and application events are spread across high-cost pipelines, the organisation starts deciding visibility by budget rather than risk. That is not a storage issue, it is a control-plane issue. Teams that cannot afford to ingest critical sources are already operating with a blind spot in their identity evidence chain.
A few things that frame the scale:
- Only 5.7% of organisations have full visibility into their service accounts, according to the Ultimate Guide to NHIs.
- 96% of security operations teams report critical blind spots, most commonly in cloud infrastructure (74%) and identity and access behaviour (67%).
A question worth separating out:
Q: What is the difference between SIEM ingestion and data pipeline management?
A: SIEM ingestion is about getting data into the analytics platform. Data pipeline management is about deciding what data arrives, how it is transformed, where it is routed, and how long it stays usable. The second is the broader control layer and usually the better place to manage cost, quality, and retention.
👉 Read our full editorial: SIEM cost reduction without losing visibility: what teams need