Cybersecurity monitoring is not a luxury, but a necessary layer on top of classic tools. The traditional "fortress" of firewalls, WAF, and VPN has holes in practice that attackers exploit. SIEM and SOAR help you see what is happening on the network and shorten the time during which an attacker goes unnoticed.
When the fortress isn't enough: why we need monitoring
Common security products form an important wall, but reality is different from the brochures. These tools also have limits and weak spots, so defense alone is not enough. This is where monitoring comes into play – SIEM and SOAR solutions that connect signals from various systems and make sense of them.
A good metaphor is a house into which a thief sneaks through the gate and the door, day after day carrying off valuables and no one notices. The valuables are your data or information about customers, and the attacker does whatever they want in the “household.” Without monitoring, you might not know about it for months. With monitoring, you gain visibility, alerts, and the ability to act in time.
What the numbers say and why monitoring is an "insurance policy"
According to one of IBM's reports, an attacker remains in the network until discovery for an average of as much as 277 days. The same source also cites average incident costs of 4,88 million, a figure applicable here as well – mitigation, investigation, and fines are not cheap. The key problem is that without monitoring, companies have no idea what is happening in the network and respond too late.
Justifying a budget for something that "doesn't make money" is hard. The point of monitoring, however, lies in reducing damage – similar to car insurance, which doesn't earn money but saves costs in an accident. With early detection, the impacts of an incident are smaller and recovery is faster than when the problem grows covertly for many months.
How to justify and procure SIEM/SOAR
The best arguments are numbers and concrete questions for management: what is the value of your customers and what happens if you lose a major client? What fine will you pay and how much will external assistance, forensic investigation, and mitigation cost? How much will the purchase of missing technologies and the restoration of reputation after an incident set you back? Such calculations show that monitoring is an investment in risk reduction.
In tenders, the definition of requirements often stalls – the criteria are unrelated to SIEM and the whole process becomes complicated. A descriptive form of the brief or consultation with experts helps. After the purchase, the benefits add up: better visibility for monitoring teams and prioritization of further security investments; based on real-world experience, IBM QRadar, for example, can be up to 2,5 times cheaper than some competing solutions, while moving the company forward not only with features but also with added value for the entire IT.
