Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) is a cybersecurity tool that collects logs from across your endpoints, cloud, and network. This includes all your types of endpoint devices and cloud apps. It then puts these logs into a single platform, providing you with full visibility of any incidents or threats. No more jumping between 10 different screens to monitor your infrastructure.

Security teams use SIEM solutions for three main reasons:

• Finding hidden patterns: SIEM tools use correlation to hunt for threats. Tracking patterns in how your team usually uses your network makes incidents like a weird login right before a data breach stand out.

• Staying compliant: Many businesses need to keep logs to follow the law. For example, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) requires medical professionals to record and examine activity in systems that contain protected medical data. By recording and storing all these logs centrally, SIEM tools make it easy to prove you're staying safe if you're ever audited.

• Checking the history: When you're hit by an attack, figuring out where it came from can help you shore up your defenses so it never happens again. SIEM log history supports forensic investigations and root cause analysis after an incident. 

• Looking for backdoors: Ongoing patterns of unusual activity tell security teams someone still has a way into the system. With SIEM logs, IT teams can track down compromised systems and devices. 

Extended detection and response (XDR) tools collect security data from across your network, including user devices, cloud workloads, and emails. It's a much more thorough version of endpoint detection and response (EDR) tools, which only focus on endpoints—another word for entry points into your network, like laptops, mobile devices, and servers. 

XDR platforms provide visibility of your entire security environment, while also automating threat investigations and response. For example, blocking suspicious email attachments or immediately isolating compromised devices from your network. 

It's worth noting that, unlike other cybersecurity strategies, XDR is typically a vendor-driven approach. You'll likely need to buy an XDR solution from the same place you purchased your EDR tools. 

Here's why IT teams use XDR tools:

• Everything works together: Instead of looking at just endpoints, XDR tools ingest data across endpoints, network, cloud, and identity. That lets them see, for example, whether a weird email links to a suspicious process on a laptop and a rogue login to your cloud environment, all as one incident instead of separate alerts. 

• Faster response times: The "R" in XDR stands for response for a reason. Because the tool sees so much, it can rapidly deploy its automated counterattacks without you having to provide more data.

• Less noise for your team: By combining alerts on one dashboard, XDR platforms help your team identify and solve problems faster. XDR helps reduce fatigue and speeds up investigations. 

Security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR) is the glue that holds your cybersecurity tools together. SOAR platforms take the alerts from your SIEM or XDR and use automation to handle the boring repetitive work that burns out your security team. It helps them act faster and avoid having to manually click through every single alert.

This might sound like a magic fix, but SOAR tools need a lot of work and a big team to run them effectively. 

Here are some of these platforms' main capabilities:

• Doing the busy work for you: SOAR tools automate repetitive tasks that your security teams would usually need to sink time into. This includes suspending suspicious accounts, responding to potential phishing threats, and data enrichment.

• Helping your tools work together: A SIEM tool might tell you something is wrong, but SOAR actually does something about it. By combining these two approaches, threat detection and incident response become lightning fast.

• Following a set plan: SOAR platforms work by following a predefined "playbook." A standardized set of rules allows it to analyze and sort through issues quickly, while catching things your team might miss on a busy day at the SOC.

We appreciate that, with all the different acronyms, comparing these tools is a bit of an alphabet soup. It can make it easy to get security operations tools mixed up, especially when they're all promising to be the best tool for keeping your data safe. 

In reality, they all play a different role in your security operations. Here's their key differences at a glance.

Large enterprises often use the triple threat stack. They have XDR to watch their network and endpoint devices, SIEM for logs, and SOAR for automation. This works great if you have a massive budget and a dedicated SOC team to run everything.

But you only need all three if you have:

• 24/7 security team: Requires dozens of experts sitting in a room watching screens around the clock

• Deep pockets for staffing: Means hiring people to manage each tool, such as XDR analysts, specialized SIEM engineers, and SOAR architects

• High maturity level: Takes years of work to get these three separate tools to talk to each other correctly

For most businesses, trying to run all three is a nightmare. It creates tool sprawl and leaves you with a fragmented view of your security posture. Smaller teams just can't keep up with the constant maintenance and technical complexity across different platforms. 

That's why more organizations are looking for a simpler option. They want the same detection and incident response outcomes without the burden of running a massive tech stack themselves.

Trying to run XDR, SIEM, and SOAR all at once might sound like a secure plan, but for most businesses, the triple threat setup is also a triple burden. Here are a few hidden costs that come with managing all three systems.

Staffing

Each platform requires different expertise to keep it running, and none of these pros are cheap. SIEM engineers alone make over $100,000 a year on average, according to ZipRecruiter. Staffing a full team of experts just isn't in the budget for a lot of organizations.

Integrations

These security platforms don't talk to each other right out of the box. You'll need to spend a lot of time connecting tools and configuring them to share data. This creates an ongoing maintenance burden because every update to one tool can break the connection to another.

Scattered data

Using multiple tools can lead to fragmented visibility, which makes it easier for threats to slip through the cracks. Your team ends up wasting time correlating alerts across different screens instead of stopping real attacks. When you're jumping between tabs, it's easy to miss the one threat that actually matters.

Subscriptions

Paying for three separate enterprise licenses adds up, potentially costing thousands each month. For most lean teams, it's not ideal for operational efficiency.

Building a security stack with SIEM, SOAR, and XDR is a massive project. Huntress Managed SIEM gives you top results without the headache. It's one solution that handles the heavy lifting for you—here's how.

Integrated detection & response

Managed SIEM teams collect data and act on it. You get full visibility across your network with built-in workflows to stop attacks. And if your SIEM service already includes strong detection and response, you don't need separate XDR tools, cutting subscription and staffing costs.

Human-led, AI-centric automation

At Huntress, AI-centric tools filter out false positives and low-priority alerts. Then, our 24/7 SOC analysts handle the triage and incident response processes for each high-priority threat. It's the power of automation like a SOAR but driven by expert humans instead of fallible code.

Single platform, full coverage

Huntress monitors your endpoint devices, identities, and logs from one spot. You get total coverage across your cybersecurity setup without managing complex, expensive tool sprawl. 

Predictable cost and effort

Huntress Managed SIEM services eliminate the need for you to staff your own SOC. We offer fixed pricing with no hidden fees so that you can skip the hiring spree and prioritize other aspects of business growth.

Running XDR, SIEM, and SOAR together is a massive chore to handle in-house. Managed SIEM gives you the same protection of a well-run triple threat system through one platform backed by 24/7 experts. It's an easier and more affordable way to stay safe without the tool sprawl.

See how Huntress Managed SIEM delivers SIEM visibility, XDR-style response, and SOAR-like automation in a single platform.