SIEM isn't dead, its place in the SOC is just evolving
Despite the predictions that SIEM is going away, its role is actually evolving. Learn why SIEM tools remain essential to enterprise security operations.
Predictions about the death of SIEM platforms have swirled for years, fueled by reports of alert fatigue, sky-high data costs and the shiny promises of extended detection and response (XDR), security data lakes and, now, agentic AI. Yet, two decades after they first emerged, SIEM technologies remain essential parts of security operations at many organizations.
CMI Consulting predicted that the SIEM market will grow from just over $7 billion in 2024 to nearly $18 billion in revenue by 2033, driven by increasing demand for threat detection and hunting capabilities and expanding regulatory requirements. Instead of going the way of the dinosaur, SIEM is undergoing a pivotal evolution, experts say. The question isn't whether the concept is obsolete, but whether the implementation is mired in another era.
"SIEMs have been the security tool that people love to hate," said Andrew Braunberg, an analyst with Omdia, a division of Informa TechTarget. "And while it is true that they can be complex and costly to operate, Omdia continues to forecast steady growth for the market."
The evolution of SIEM
A technology that once offered little more than centralized log collection and rule correlation has dramatically transformed in response to both critics and the evolving threat landscape. Early SIEM deployments earned a reputation for generating overwhelming volumes of false positives, requiring armies of analysts to sift through alerts and imposing crushing costs on enterprises.
Those issues with SIEM -- real and perceived -- have driven substantial maturation. "Today's [next-generation] SIEMs include advanced analytics such as user and entity behavior analytics, better integration with threat intelligence, and SOAR [security orchestration, automation and response] capabilities delivered on cloud-native architectures," Braunberg said.
Jason Soroko, a senior fellow at Sectigo, shared Braunberg's outlook on SIEM. The technology has had its share of problems, a lot of which have colored people's take on its future, he said. Initially, SIEMs were built as log-centric compliance tools that relied on static correlation rules and monolithic architectures, leaving them ill-equipped to analyze massive cloud data volumes, detect sophisticated real-time attacks or automate threat response.
In addition, many platforms charged based on data volume and used rigid data formats that struggled to handle the detailed information needed to detect modern attacks, such as user behavior patterns, cloud application activity and workload data. Organizations often faced the impossible choice of either feeding their SIEM platforms the rich security data they needed, then watching costs skyrocket, or restricting the data flow and missing critical threats.
"Some of this is inherent to the original design, which optimized for centralized log storage, compliance and basic reporting rather than real-time cross-domain analytics," Soroko said. "Some [of it] is an implementation problem where organizations underinvest in content engineering, use-case design and automation."
Why organizations won't abandon SIEM
Newer platforms, such as XDR and AI-driven detection, focus on high-quality telemetry, built-in detections mapped to frameworks like Mitre ATT&CK, behavioral and anomaly analytics, and native automated response. These platforms are better than SIEM in many ways, especially when it comes to endpoint and identity-centric attacks, lateral movement and rapid containment.
Yet, SIEM remains the system of record for security telemetry in many enterprises and provides core capabilities that are difficult to replace, Soroko said. For example, traditional SIEM systems excel at long-term retention for compliance and forensics, cross-domain querying across heterogeneous data sources, configurable correlation for niche organizational risks, and mandated security reporting to regulators and auditors.
"The [SIEM] deployments that succeed are usually those that narrow scope to clearly defined use cases," Soroko explained. "[These deployments] treat data onboarding as an engineering discipline, continuously tune detections and integrate the SIEM deeply with SOAR, ticketing, case management and threat intelligence so alerts become structured investigations and playbooks rather than raw events."
Where SIEM falls short is high-fidelity real-time detection for cloud-native and SaaS-heavy environments and in automated, closed-loop response -- situations where XDR suites, security data lakes and AI-optimized platforms deliver richer telemetry, more scalable analytics and cheaper storage, he said.
Experts, including Soroko, said organizations shouldn't scrap their SIEMs, but instead transform them. In a modern setup, the SIEM should become a cloud-native control and correlation layer that sits on top of a security data lake, pulling in high-quality alerts from tools such as XDR, network detection and response and identity analytics. A SOAR system then handles the response side, while tight two-way integration with threat intelligence updates detections, hunting queries and automated playbooks with the latest indicators and attacker behaviors.
Persistent value proposition
According to Daniel Kennedy, analyst at S&P Global Market Intelligence, SIEM remains the single most frequently cited "important" tool in a security operation center (SOC). The fundamental problem it was invented to solve -- too many alerts, not enough people -- hasn't gone away, he said. A recent study by S&P Global showed 45% of alerts received still go unreviewed largely due to headcount shortages.
He said he separates the philosophical concept of SIEM from vendor implementations. "When people shout 'SIEM is dead,' they usually mean bad, old implementations or specific vendors that fell behind, not the core idea of a central place to collect, correlate and act on security data," Kennedy explained. "The fact that the SIEM vendor leaderboard has changed completely over the past 10 to 15 years is a sign of how the market has evolved more than an indication of its imminent demise. New approaches, better searching, more intuitive interfaces, more cost-effective offerings and even better marketing have long made SIEM a dynamic marketplace in terms of which vendors are achieving market leader positions."
When people shout 'SIEM is dead,' they usually mean bad, old implementations or specific vendors that fell behind, not the core idea of a central place to collect, correlate and act on security data.
Daniel Kennedy, analyst, S&P Global Market Intelligence
The agentic AI wild card
Braunberg said he perceives emerging agentic AI tools as the greatest potential threat to SIEM. Agentic startups promise a way for organizations to break out of the scalability trap that has plagued SOCs, and particularly SIEMS, for a decade or more, he said.
"While SIEM vendors might well ride the agentic wave through aggressive adoption of the technology, we already see examples of agentic SOC startups building multi-agent solutions that bypass the SIEM and go directly to the telemetry source when performing alert analysis, such as alert triage."
At the end of the day, the debate over SIEM's future often misses a fundamental point about why organizations adopted the technology in the first place and what they're actually using it for today. SIEM has always had two distinct value propositions, and understanding that split is key to understanding why the technology persists despite repeated predictions of its demise, explained John Pescatore, director of emerging security trends at the SANS Institute.
For organizations obligated to comply with log monitoring regulations, SIEM has long offered a relatively cost-effective way of checking that box. The second proposition -- and the one that organizations have had a much harder time with -- is reducing time to detect, respond to and recover from threats.
Some 40% of organizations using SIEM, Pescatore estimated, do so for required reporting compliance, and another 40% for basic event correlation using vendor signatures or patterns to detect and prioritize recognized events. The remaining 20% use it to detect complex, new attacks.
"I think SIEM at lower prices still makes sense for most organizations," Pescatore said, adding that "SOAR and XDR type tools added on make sense for the high-end, lean-forward security teams."
Jaikumar Vijayan is a freelance technology journalist with more than 20 years of award-winning experience in IT trade journalism, specializing in information security, data privacy and cybersecurity topics.
