Choosing the right security solution has never been more complicated. The market is crowded with next-gen SIEMs and AI-enhanced platforms, and providers are rebranding their services constantly. For growing businesses, it can be difficult to know where to start.
One factor that quickly separates providers is pricing. Beyond upfront costs like implementation and tuning, many organizations underestimate how much their monthly spend can fluctuate due to data ingestion. Understanding a provider’s pricing model is essential when selecting a long-term security partner.
Most SIEM, MDR, and EDR price based on the amount of data you send them. This consumption or pay-as-you-go approach can create several challenges:
It’s Costly
Charging by data ingestion can really add up over time as your environment grows. Microsoft’s pricing calculator for 500GB/day amounts to $35,700 for 30 days or $428,400 a year (and that’s at a discounted rate).
Other providers may charge per endpoint EDR in addition to data ingestion fees for sending logs to a SIEM. An enterprise security platform can cost more than $100,000 a year for 500 endpoints, plus additional and unpredictable charges based on data ingestion. For example, Elastic’s SIEM calculator estimates $350,000 annually for 450 endpoints, roughly 500GB of data, and one year of data retention.
This often does not include long-term data retention, which is required by many compliance frameworks and by cyber insurance providers (see Azure pricing by log type, search capabilities, and retention).
Higher Total Cost of Ownership
The ongoing ingestion fees are only part of the expense. Many providers also charge for essential capabilities that IT teams often expect to be included. Need 24/7 security support, onboarding, configuration help, or custom detection rules? Looking for proactive threat hunting, managed detections tuned and maintained for you, additional integrations, or external threat scanning? Want ongoing security assessments, pre-built reports, or full access to your raw log data?
These features frequently come with additional costs, or they require you to build and maintain them in-house, which means hiring and training more security staff.
Unpredictable
It’s difficult to budget in advance because your data needs fluctuate month to month based on user activity, network traffic, application changes, and unforeseen shifts in your tech stack. These are all variables that can result in sudden data ingestion increases and cost surges that may push you over budget.
Limits Visibility
When you have to limit what data you collect or store due to cost, you lose visibility into your full environment. Missing parts of your dataset can hide early indicators of compromise, increasing the risk that an attack goes undetected until it causes real damage. That can include customer data loss, operational downtime, compliance violations, and more. Shorter retention terms also impact your ability to review historical context – threat actors often spread attack stages over weeks or months to avoid detection, so having that visibility can be critical during investigations.
Holes in Data Retention
To cut costs, some security providers limit, filter or “dehydrate” your logs, dropping fields or entire log types and storing only partial data in cold storage to meet basic compliance requirements. But compliance does not always equal security. This approach can leave significant gaps in your log history or delays in your ability to access it, making it difficult or impossible to fully “rehydrate” data later. When an incident occurs, these gaps create major challenges for forensic investigations and can prevent teams from understanding what actually happened.
Predictable Pricing for Growing Businesses
Blumira’s pricing model gives growing organizations predictable security costs with a simple flat monthly rate based on the number of seats in your environment. Seats are calculated by the number of employees using a corporate email address, which helps approximate how much data your environment generates. Additional agents are available for teams with more endpoints than seats.
This approach stands out in an industry where most providers still charge by data ingestion. As one Blumira partner put it:
“One of the strongest values Blumira provides is being able to have a SIEM where we’re encouraged to get as much data in there as possible, without having to be continually stressed about getting the invoice that month. Knowing a set dollar amount is immensely valuable.”
Monte Sonksen, IT Manager, City of Bettendorf
This predictable structure means there is no limit on the amount of data you can ingest into Blumira’s security operations platform. You never need to choose which logs to collect or worry about exceeding a data cap. You can connect every application, system, and integration you rely on and know you’ll get full analysis, detection, and response without additional ingestion costs.
For data retention, Blumira keeps a full year of your logs in hot storage for immediate access. We do not thin, dehydrate, or push logs into slow cold storage just to check a compliance box. You retain complete visibility for investigations, audits, and fast response when time matters most. Longer retention options are available as your team grows and your needs evolve.
What else included in with your Blumira partnership?
- Guided Onboarding and Configuration - A dedicated Solutions Architect helps you integrate your environment, optimize configuration, and apply best practices, with support that continues throughout your partnership. with Blumira.
- 24/7 Security Operations Support - Support from security experts for critical issues, with direct in-app access and response times averaging just 18 minutes for high-priority incidents.
- Proactive Threat Hunting and Managed Detections - Our incident detection engineering team continuously updates detections, hunts for emerging threats, and keeps your environment protected with weekly improvements to the platform.
- Reliable, Secure Cloud Infrastructure - A team of engineers maintains Blumira’s security operations platform behind the scenes to ensure high availability, strong reliability, and adherence to security standards like SOC 2.
Blumira’s value goes beyond predictable pricing. Growing organizations and IT teams gain an automated, easy-to-use security operations platform backed by real experts who can guide investigations, provide context during stressful moments, and extend your team’s capabilities when resources are limited. It’s like adding a skilled security teammate without the hiring burden.
