Unified XDR and SIEM: Cutting costs not corners in your cyber security

Our clients rarely need convincing about the importance of a robust cyber security solution.

CISOs and IT leaders know their jobs. They’re acutely aware of the dire consequences caused by a breach or compliance failure.

But achieving the right solution often means overcoming some significant challenges.

Such as:

1. How to keep pace with relentless, increasingly sophisticated threats when IT and SecOps teams are already stretched to capacity.
2. How to fund this essential security when under pressure to lower costs.

If you’ve had these dilemmas in your organisation, you’re not alone.

A recent survey by Microsoft revealed that 82% of the CISOs questioned felt under pressure to lower costs.^[1]

You see, security solutions and cost control are often pitted against each other. Creating a perception that one needs to be compromised for the other.

But this is old thinking.

Modern cyber security, like Microsoft’s unified XDR and SIEM solutions, provide a platform where security, savings, and efficiency converge.

Meaning you can stop thinking about security as just another cost centre. And start seeing it as an investment opportunity.

Say farewell to inefficient and insecure point solution strategies

As your digital estate expands, so too does the attack surface. And, with every new app, endpoint, or location comes a new potential risk that needs to be addressed.

Sound familiar?

Faced with these incessant threats, it’s understandable that your security investment could become fragmented in approach.

Different point solutions brought into the fold for every new threat on the landscape.

The result?

• An ever-escalating number of vendors and licences
• Increasing costs
• Opportunities for bad actors to exploit ‘gaps’ and overlaps
• Additional management complexity

No surprise to learn, then, that Gartner report 97% of organisations are to consolidate their vendors over the next 3 years^[2].

But the cost factor is more than just escalating licence fees.

You’re creating infrastructures packed with disparate endpoint, email, identity, and other security tools. Solutions working in silos. Where communication and information sharing requires manual intervention.

Leading to poorer visibility and the creation of gaps for attackers to exploit. Weakening your security posture and adding to the workload and stress of your team.

It’s the unwanted mix of escalating costs, inefficiency, and an increasing vulnerability of breach and compliance failures.

And we all know where that can lead:

• Crippling financial costs
• Loss of sales
• Reputational ruin

Where your security solution can help you save

We’re not just talking about cutting your spending on security tools, or even buying cheaper products.

We’re talking about smarter investment.

Reducing unnecessary spending on redundant or duplicated tools that work in isolation from the rest of your estate.

And investing in a technology suite working as one, to deliver a solution that unlocks cost and efficiency benefits across the business.

Unified XDR and SIEM: A driving force for security, cost-efficiency and compliance

Integrating XDR with a SIEM solution, like that offered by Microsoft 365 Defender and Sentinel, provides an innovative and scalable alternative to the point solution approach.

• A cloud-based, always up-to-date solution delivering rapid detection, protection, and response against modern cyber threats.
• A solution that offers complete visibility, threat intelligence, and joined-up security across the entire estate.
• A platform designed to reduce risks, improve cost-efficiency, and maximise your return on investment.

Here’s the whistlestop tour of how. But if you want to get into more detail, then download the full guide below.

Eliminate redundant and duplicate tools

Before adding yet another vendor to your increasingly bloated budget, have you explored the tools you may already have in your existing Microsoft licence?

We see it time and again. Organisations investing unnecessarily in software when they already have a solution available to them.

Unified XDR and SIEM solutions, like Microsoft 365 Defender and Sentinel, provide comprehensive protection across multiple threat vectors within a single platform.

This eliminates the need for separate tools for each vector by reducing the licencing and operational costs associated with managing and maintaining multiple tools.

Reducing incident investigation and response times

Did you know that you could save as much as $1 million by containing a breach within 30 days of detection?

Yet the average detection time for a breach is 197 days!^[3]

The need for speed has never been more pressing than when dealing with a cyber breach.

So how does the combined efforts of Microsoft 365 Defender and Sentinel deliver?

• It calls upon 43 trillion daily signals to provide comprehensive, rapid threat intelligence and response.⁴
• Advanced AI threat detection reduces the threat of a material breach by 60%⁵
• Automation can reduce threat response times by 88%⁶

Reducing downtime and operational costs

The average cost of downtime on an enterprise is estimated to be around £7,000 per minute. So, £35,000 every five minutes; £420,000 every hour.^[7]

If you suffer a security breach that brings your operations to even the smallest of halts, the costs can escalate quickly.

Every second counts.

You need a solution to guard against crippling costs that can ruin both your budget and your reputation.

A solution that offers the most comprehensive intelligence and functionality to rapidly detect and respond against cyber threats across your entire estate.

When you start to see cyber security as an investment in the business, it no longer becomes about what it costs, but about what it saves.

Compliance and regulatory savings

Compliance management is notoriously heavy on workloads. And the heavier the workload, the higher the risk of error.

And we all know the costs attached to a compliance failure.

Investing in a unified security solution lets you demonstrate diligence in your cyber defence strategy.

A platform that offers comprehensive protection across endpoints, access, identities, and applications. A solution that monitors activity. Offering insight, audits, and reports in a centralised environment.

Increasing visibility, while reducing risk, workload and error.

Scalable, predictable cost-management

If your security strategy is more reactive than proactive, where your investments are in response to the latest threat, then you risk costs running away from you.

A unified security solution puts you on the front foot when it comes to cost-management.

• Predictability in licence costs.
• Improved efficiency through automation.
• Better visibility and intelligence for smarter investment decisions.
• Reduced management time and integration costs.
• Scalability, so investments align with growth.

Overall, it helps create a mindset where you stop seeing security in terms of costs, but in terms of cost-benefits.

Prevention of insider threats, data loss and IP theft

Data loss prevention (DLP) is vital for any organisation, as I’m sure you’re already aware.

After all, personal data loss or theft can cost you tens of thousands of pounds, damage your reputation, and potentially put you in trouble with the law.

And the ramifications from loss of intellectual property (IP) can be devastating.

But are you doing enough to protect against the threat from within?

For instance, investing in Microsoft’s unified solution enables a robust approach to identify and prohibiting unusual behaviour and unauthorised data access or transfers. Providing the tools to monitor suspicious activity, to detect anomalies, and respond rapidly to potential breaches.

Reducing the risk and impact of a breach, protecting your data and IPs, and helping you meet your compliance obligations around data protection.

Turn your cyber security from a cost centre to a cost-benefit

We know that for most CISOs and IT leaders, reducing costs goes hand in hand with reducing threats.

Which is why we need to view security not as an expense, but as an investment opportunity.

Move away from the old ways of spiraling point solutions and escalating vendor costs. Of disparate tools working in isolation, creating workloads and vulnerability.

Start seeing the fruits of a unified security solution. An integrated SIEM and XDR set-up that offers holistic protection across cloud environments, endpoints, identities, and apps.

Unlocking new efficiencies, reducing costs, and reaping the commercial rewards that come with superior protection against modern cyber threats.

Key takeaways

Next Steps

Sources:

1: Microsoft Pandemic CISO Survey, 2020 | 2: Gartner, “Invest Implications” Emerging Tech: Innovation and New Buyer Preferences Are Driving Security Market Consolidation,” October 26, 2022 | 3: IBM | 4: Microsoft Digital Defence Report 2022 | 5 & 6: The Total Economic Impact™ Of Microsoft SIEM and XDR, August 2022| 7: Pingdom