Thinking of a SIEM Migration?

Thinking of a SIEM Migration? How Data Pipelines Can Help 

As organisations grow and security landscapes evolve, many teams find themselves considering a migration from their current Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) system to a more modern solution. I am going to leave the rationale to why you would want to migrate away from this blog, but Francis does a great job of some reasoning.  We will also leave aside the functionality and deeper dive on data pipelines as we’ve written about that here.   

While a SIEM migration can improve your security posture and streamline operations, it’s no small feat. Challenges like data variety, veracity, and volume—often referred to as the “Triple V”—can make this process daunting. This is where data pipelines come into play; providing flexibility, cost savings, and the ability to test and fine-tune operations before fully committing to the transition. 

What Is a SIEM Migration? 

A SIEM migration involves moving from one SIEM platform to another, often to take advantage of new features, better scalability, or cost benefits. However, the process is rarely straightforward. Migrating to a new SIEM requires handling vast amounts of security data, ensuring compatibility between old and new systems and minimising downtime or disruptions. Key challenges include: 

• Testing difficulties: It’s hard to run the old and new SIEMs in parallel or validate data mappings without introducing errors or additional costs. 

• Data overload: Modern organisations generate immense amounts of security data, much of which may not need to live in a SIEM. 

• Vendor lock-in: Many traditional SIEMs tie organisations to proprietary connectors and storage, limiting flexibility. 

• High costs: Data ingestion and storage fees in traditional SIEMs can quickly balloon, making it costly to migrate. 

Why Is Testing a SIEM Migration So Hard? 

Testing is critical in any SIEM migration, but it’s also a pain point for most organisations. Without the right tools, teams struggle to validate data pipelines, ensure compatibility and maintain real-time visibility. Replay testing, which involves rerunning historical data through a pipeline to identify gaps or errors, is especially challenging without a robust solution. 

On top of this, teams need to run both the legacy and new SIEM systems in parallel to minimise risk, which doubles costs and increases complexity. All these factors highlight the need for a streamlined, flexible approach to migration. 

How Data Pipelines Simplify SIEM Migrations 

Enter data pipelines: a transformative solution designed to handle the complexities of managing security data. Data pipelines serve as intermediaries between data sources and SIEMs, decoupling data acquisition from downstream processing. This separation allows teams to route, shape and enrich data as needed while controlling costs and improving flexibility. 

Here’s how data pipelines can make your SIEM migration faster, more efficient and less risky: 

1. Decoupling Data from SIEMs

Traditionally, security data flows directly from sources to a SIEM, leading to vendor lock-in and higher costs. A data pipeline breaks this direct connection, acting as a central hub where you can decide which data goes to the SIEM and which can be stored in low-cost alternatives, like a data lake. This approach reduces ingestion costs while giving your team more control over your data. 

2. Replay and Testing

Modern data pipelines offer replay functionality, allowing you to retrieve historical data stored in cost-effective environments and run it through the pipeline. This is invaluable during a SIEM migration, as it enables teams to:  

• Validate data mappings. 
• Identify and fix gaps. 
• Test configurations in dev, test, and production environments without affecting live systems. 

3. Data Reduction and Enrichment

Not all security data is created equal. Pipelines allow you to filter out low-value or redundant data before it reaches the SIEM, reducing ingestion volumes by 20–30% in most cases. At the same time, you can enrich and normalise critical data to make it more actionable and compatible with your new SIEM. 

4. Flexible Data Routing

Gone are the days of rigid one-to-one relationships between data sources and SIEMs. Pipelines enable multi-source, multi-destination routing, allowing you to send enriched data to the SIEM, raw data to a data lake, and anonymised data to business intelligence platforms. This flexibility is crucial in a dual-platform migration setup, where the legacy and new SIEM run in parallel. 

5. Vendor Independence

By using pipelines, you avoid proprietary storage formats and connectors, freeing your organisation from vendor lock-in. Data is stored in open, low-cost formats, ensuring you retain full ownership and control. 

6. Data Strategy

Using pipelines allows choice of how to use what data where, for whom and what purpose.  Long term archive in a lake, selected data for a ML or analytics in Snowflake, Security in my SIEM, telemetry in my Datadog; oh and some BI anyone.  Not a strategy but offers your data architects working in your organisation to work with different departments to derive one. 

The Business Benefits of Using Data Pipelines 

The impact of data pipelines goes beyond simplifying migrations. They also provide long-term benefits for your organisation’s data strategy, such as: 

• Cost optimisation: Reduce SIEM ingestion and storage costs by routing less critical data to cheaper storage options. 

• Enhanced flexibility: Decouple data acquisition from specific applications, enabling broader use across security, business intelligence and data science teams. 

• Improved insights: Gain deeper visibility into your data flows and make more informed decisions. 

• Faster migrations: Prebuilt integrations and replay functionality ensure your team can migrate faster with fewer risks. 

Cribl: A Leader in Data Pipeline Solutions 

When it comes to data pipelines, Cribl stands out as a leader. Its tools like Cribl Stream and Cribl Edge, are specifically designed to address the challenges of modern data management and SIEM migrations. Key features include: 

• Replay capabilities for testing and validation. 

• Prebuilt packs for easy data mapping to common SIEM formats like Splunk CIM and Microsoft Sentinel ASIM. 

• Intuitive interfaces that make data shaping, enrichment and routing accessible even to new users. 

• Scalability to handle the growing demands of modern security data. 

Conclusion: A Smarter Way to Migrate 

SIEM migrations no longer have to be a costly, high-risk endeavor. By leveraging data pipelines, organisations can simplify the process, reduce costs and unlock new opportunities for innovation. Tools like Cribl enable teams to move beyond vendor constraints, ensuring their data strategy is as agile and effective as possible. 

Thinking about a SIEM migration? Start exploring how data pipelines can redefine your approach and transform your security data management strategy.