SIEM as a Service: Benefits and Considerations for Businesses

Key Takeaways:

  • SIEM as a Service offers scalability, lower upfront costs, and automatic updates, but can lack the hands-on expertise growing businesses need.

  • Huntress Managed SIEM gives expert oversight and stronger support for compliance and threat response.

  • Choosing between on-prem, cloud-based, or managed SIEM depends on your infrastructure, risk tolerance, and internal security resources.

Do you know what SIEM as a Service is? If you're in charge of securing your organization's data, it's a term you’ve probably heard before, but understanding what it offers (and what it doesn’t) is key.

Here we’ll break down what SIEM as a Service really means, how it’s different from a managed SIEM solution, and why knowing this difference matters. We'll also talk about the benefits, the trade-offs, and help you decide which SIEM model is right for your business. Let’s get right in. 



SIEM as a Service: Benefits and Considerations for Businesses

Key Takeaways:

  • SIEM as a Service offers scalability, lower upfront costs, and automatic updates, but can lack the hands-on expertise growing businesses need.

  • Huntress Managed SIEM gives expert oversight and stronger support for compliance and threat response.

  • Choosing between on-prem, cloud-based, or managed SIEM depends on your infrastructure, risk tolerance, and internal security resources.

Do you know what SIEM as a Service is? If you're in charge of securing your organization's data, it's a term you’ve probably heard before, but understanding what it offers (and what it doesn’t) is key.

Here we’ll break down what SIEM as a Service really means, how it’s different from a managed SIEM solution, and why knowing this difference matters. We'll also talk about the benefits, the trade-offs, and help you decide which SIEM model is right for your business. Let’s get right in. 



What is a managed SIEM solution?

In a managed SIEM solution, a team of digital security experts monitors and manages your SIEM functions from their own facility. Organizations of all sizes benefit from this approach,  gaining access to a fully equipped, highly trained security team while only paying for the amount of work they actually need. The Huntress Managed SIEM is one example.



What is SIEM as a Service?

SIEM as a Service differs little from other cloud-based SaaS solutions: your entire SIEM architecture exists on a remote server, which you can access through a dashboard. This makes it highly scalable. However, it doesn’t include oversight of a human security team. Sometimes this is all a smaller business needs, but as organizations grow, they may need more hands-on expertise 


Benefits of SIEM as a Service

  • Elastic scaling and automatic updates: Cloud-hosted SIEM platforms update and scale on demand.

  • Lower upfront costs: You don’t need to purchase or maintain hardware.

  • Automatic maintenance: System updates and patches are handled by the provider.

Trade-offs with SIEM as a Service

  • Data residency and compliance implications: With multi-region storage, many countries restrict certain data from being transferred or handled in another country, or even off-premises. The more important your data is, the more you’ll run into these types of restrictions. 

  • API-driven integrations vs. on-prem log sources and bridge strategies: Traditional data logging techniques work best in-house. SIEM as a Service demands API-based logging, as the server processing your SIEM work is remote. If you already operate in a multi-cloud environment, this should be no problem, but if you maintain exclusively in-house servers, you'll have to adapt your approach.

Shared responsibility model: Cloud providers manage the host OS, virtualization layer, and physical infrastructure. You’re responsible for the guest OS, application layer, firewall configurations, and other in-house controls. Unfortunately, this can create responsibility gaps if not managed properly.


What are the three types of SIEM?

Managed SIEM

With managed SIEM, a remote team oversees your SIEM operations. This is a good option for organizations that need expert support without hiring a full internal security team.

Cloud-based SIEM

This is literally SIEM as a Service, which is scalable, has low upfront costs, and gives easy access. The trade-offs include compliance, integrations, and hands-on support.  

On-premise SIEM

This is the traditional SIEM solution, which exists only on your premises. It’s simple and secure, but training and deploying a security team in-house can be expensive.



What’s an example of a SIEM?

Let's imagine a bank. This bank creates, moves, modifies, and deletes a mountain of data every day. Eliminating data theft and ensuring file integrity has become a problem for them.

To help with these issues, they adopt a managed SIEM solution rather than a SIEM as a Service model. They do this because of the importance of the financial data they handle, and because the volume of data justifies a full data security team, but not a dedicated team. There may be no better example of a managed SIEM solution than Huntress Managed SIEM.




SIEM as a Service, the smarter way

Huntress delivers SIEM as a fully managed service, giving your business exactly what it needs: Fast ROI without compliance surprises. Our Managed SIEM solution removes many tasks from your internal security team, letting them focus on broader business responsibilities. 

At the same time, you get the benefits of SIEM as a Service, including scalability, low upfront cost, and automatic maintenance, without the drawbacks like compliance issues, limited integrations, or security gaps in a shared responsibility model. 

Learn how Huntress Managed SIEM can strengthen your organization’s monitoring, threat detection, and response. Book a demo today and get to know all the benefits of our SIEM.





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