Why is the single-destination SIEM architecture outdated?

The short answer: it was built for a smaller, simpler world.

Until recently, buying a SIEM meant deploying its agents, pouring all your data into it, and going on your merry way. You were almost 100% confined to that one framework. Want UEBA? Your vendor or one of their partners provided it. Want to run analytics somewhere else or bring in a third-party tool? Good luck. Operating outside your SIEM was limited by design.

That design still shapes a lot of security operations today. According to the SANS 2025 SOC Survey, 42% of SOCs dump all incoming data into a SIEM without a retrieval or management plan. The result is more noise, more cost, and less room to bring in the tools your team actually wants.

How do observability pipelines change SIEM architecture?

Observability pipelines put a vendor-neutral data plane between your sources and your tools, so you decide where every event goes.

When the observability pipeline concept emerged, it gave organizations a way to funnel security and observability data through one consistent layer. For the first time, controlling where your data gets stored became a real design decision instead of a vendor default. Vendor-neutral architecture started gaining ground fast.

Admins can now make copies of events for their SIEM, a data lake, a UEBA solution, or someone else's data lake. One event becomes four events, each powering a different part of the security stack. Move operational data into a data lake instead of the SIEM, and you can analyze it and build dashboards for operations teams without bloating ingest. Your team gets more choice and control over data than ever before, which means you can design infrastructure around your needs rather than a vendor's roadmap.

What are the benefits of a security data lake?

A security data lake alongside your SIEM delivers lower costs, more complete data, shared access across teams, and cleaner compliance.

During our discussion, John made a point that stuck with me. For his clients at CyberOne Security, this flexibility is no longer a wish-list item. It's a necessity. As organizations move to cloud infrastructure and cloud computing, they need vendor-neutral data to match their scalability. Here are the benefits John and I see most often when teams modernize their SIEM architecture.

Reduced license costs

Routing data that isn't needed for security to object storage is one of the most effective ways to reduce SIEM license costs. Ingest drops immediately. You also sidestep the premium most SIEM vendors charge for their own archive tier, because you're keeping that data on object storage you control. Store it in a vendor-neutral format and you gain flexibility you simply can't get inside a proprietary platform.

We recently worked with a developer team drowning in debug logs. Instead of paying SIEM rates for data nobody searched day to day, we created a rule in Cribl Stream to route those logs to a lower-cost S3 bucket. Now they're available to restore whenever an investigation calls for them. This is one example of many where teams get both availability and lower cost, with no trade-off required.

More security, less engineering toil

When SIEM license costs drop, you stop having to choose which data sources you can afford to collect. That constraint quietly weakens security programs everywhere. Engineers lose access to raw data when they need it most, and they spend their days moving data around instead of securing the business.

With a modern SIEM architecture, nobody has to log into a server, zip up logs by hand, and haul them into the SIEM. The result is better detections, better analytics, and a security team that gets to focus on security.

Shared data across the organization

Every team has a different use case for the data your organization collects. Having separate pipelines to transform and send data to different destinations is invaluable. Dumping firewall, threat, traffic, and systems logs into one destination is a great way to bloat your ingest, and not every log from a given source is security relevant anyway.

Route some of that data into a storage account or data lake and you save on ingestion costs while cutting noise for the security team. You also open the door for your infrastructure, network, and firewall teams to access the logs they care about. Send threat logs straight into the SIEM. Send traffic and other operational logs straight into the data lake for the network team. Everyone gets what they need, and nobody pays SIEM prices for data that never needed to be there.

Compliance with retention requirements

Keeping raw copies of data also keeps you on the right side of retention requirements. If you transform events before they enter your SIEM, you may not be meeting standards that expect unmodified records. PCI DSS requires at least a year of security log retention, and HIPAA and SOX stretch that to six and seven years respectively. Holding all of that in SIEM hot storage is a budget nobody wants to defend.

The better pattern is to transform events to get exactly what you need for detection in your SIEM, and keep untouched raw copies in your data lake. Your incident response team or legal counsel controls the forensic copies, and your SIEM bill stays sane.

Meeting cyber insurance and audit requirements

Insurance companies are getting sharper. They're hiring engineers as auditors, and those auditors dig deeper into your architecture than before. They'll confirm you have a SIEM, but they'll also check whether you're putting the right data in and using it appropriately. Government auditors want to see all your data sources and detections, and they'll write findings if you aren't following best practices.

Bad data and overwhelming volumes of data cause real problems here. Detection quality suffers, and costs keep climbing year after year. Telemetry volumes are growing roughly 29% annually [citation needed], which means your daily volume doubles about every 18 months. That growth is simply not sustainable inside a single SIEM.

Watch the full livestream to hear John and me talk through alternative options for your SIEM platform so you can re-architect your data strategy with confidence. SIEM platform challenges can be overcome with the right strategy.

Your SIEM is a destination, not the whole map

Everything John and I discussed comes back to one idea: your SIEM should be one destination among several, not the center of gravity for your entire security program. That shift is exactly what Cribl, the AI Platform for Telemetry, was built to enable. Cribl is a vendor-neutral hub between your sources and your tools, and it routes telemetry to different destinations without vendor lock-in or data loss.

Cribl Stream sits in the middle of your data flows, collecting from any source and routing, reducing, and enriching events in real time. Send detection-relevant events to your SIEM in the format it expects, clone full-fidelity copies to Cribl Lake or your own object storage for retention, and share operational logs with infrastructure teams without installing extra agents. Cribl Edge extends that same control to endpoints, servers, and Kubernetes, so collection stays vendor-neutral from the very first hop.

When an investigation or audit sends you back in time, you don't have to rehydrate everything into your SIEM. Replay in Cribl Stream pulls precisely the data you need from object storage and delivers it to any destination, while Cribl Search lets analysts query data where it already lives across Cribl Lake, S3, and other stores. The outcome is a SIEM architecture that costs less, sees more, and adapts as your tools change.

Modernizing your SIEM architecture doesn't require ripping anything out. It requires putting a data engine you control between your sources and your tools. To see how it works, try a Cribl Sandbox or schedule a demo and start routing data.

Modernize Your SIEM Architecture