The Great Security Stack Consolidation: Why Your Legacy Infrastructure Needs a Reset

As someone who spent over a decade in the trenches of enterprise security operations, I've watched the cybersecurity landscape evolve into mind-bending complexity. During my time leading eCrime and Data Analytics at CaixaBank, I witnessed firsthand how legacy security tools started showing their age. Not gracefully, but painfully and expensively.

The security technology landscape is experiencing a profound transformation, one that's exposing critical gaps in how organizations build and maintain their security infrastructure. The uncomfortable truth is that the tech stack you're running today is probably already obsolete. And if you're still operating with the same security infrastructure from even just a few years ago, you're setting yourself and your organization up for failure.

Remember when security teams thought traditional SIEMs could handle all our security data needs? Complexity was already growing in multi-vendor environments and organizations built their security infrastructure by deploying a combination of legacy SIEM platforms alongside best-of-breed solutions from market leaders. Each tool served its specific function, and while threats could move quickly, our SIEMs were primarily focused on after-the-fact analysis and correlation of security events.

This model had inherent limitations from the start, but they became glaringly obvious as data volumes exploded. What began as a manageable flow of security logs transformed into a tsunami of telemetry from endpoints, cloud services, network devices, and applications. Traditional SIEMs, architected for a different era of data scale, started buckling under the pressure. Organizations found themselves in an impossible position: either accept partial visibility by limiting data ingestion or watch their security budgets spiral out of control trying to keep up with data volume.

The global shift to remote work didn't just accelerate digital transformation—it shattered fundamental assumptions about security architecture. According to Forrester’s Global Enterprise Breech Benchmarks, organizations saw a 300% increase in cyber attacks targeting remote work infrastructure between 2020 and 2022.

This new reality brought three critical challenges:

1. Expanded attack surfaces as employees accessed sensitive resources from home networks and personal devices

2. Exponential growth in data volumes from collaboration tools and cloud services

3. The painful revelation that our existing tools, designed for controlled, on-premises environments, couldn't provide adequate visibility or control across distributed networks

Since then, three fundamental shifts have transformed security technology, making traditional approaches increasingly problematic:

Major security vendors and tech giants are aggressively consolidating the market through acquisitions and native development, with the goal of comprehensive "single pane of glass" solutions. But the painful truth is that when you buy into these platforms, you're forced to accept excellence in some areas and mediocrity in others. The key is finding the right balance between consolidated platforms and specialized solutions that excel at emerging threats.

The window for effective security response has compressed beyond human scale. When CrowdStrike reports breach times of just over two minutes and ransomware groups operate on sub-24-hour timeframes, traditional security architectures become liabilities. When your SIEM's minute-based processing delay gives attackers enough time to exfiltrate sensitive customer data before your security team even knows it’s happening, that’s a big problem. 

Generative AI has changed the game. It offers powerful capabilities for threat detection and response, but it's also accelerating attack evolution beyond the adaptation capacity of traditional security tools. Leading organizations are already leveraging AI for real-time threat analysis, but this requires security infrastructure capable of processing and enriching data at machine speed.

Most security infrastructures are crumbling under these new pressures. IBM's 2024 research tells us that organizations take an average of 258 days to identify and contain a data breach. This isn't just a technical problem; it's a structural one.

This doesn't mean current tooling, like SIEMs are obsolete—they're just being asked to do things they were never designed for. The solution isn't replacing your SIEM—it's evolving your security architecture to operate at the speed of modern threats. Forward-thinking organizations are adding real-time intelligence capabilities that complement their existing security investments. Here's how:

1. Process and enrich data at the source, before it reaches your SIEM so you can optimize for the right data and get more context and insight quickly.

2. Enable real-time threat detection without sacrificing long-term analytics so you can take action in milliseconds, not minutes. 

3. Optimize data flows to reduce SIEM ingestion costs while improving visibility so you can avoid imploding your budget every time a critical event happens. 

The stakes have never been higher. Companies today face a clear choice: evolve their security infrastructure or accept growing vulnerability. With global security spending expected to reach more than $200 billion in 2025, the market is clearly ready for change.

Modern security infrastructure needs to embrace several critical characteristics:

1. Real-time Operation: Security tools must process and analyze data at wire speed, not batch intervals. When attacks happen in minutes, analysis that takes hours is essentially useless.

2. Efficient Resource Usage: With security budgets under pressure, organizations need to minimize maintenance overhead while maximizing value from their tools. The era of throwing more money at the problem is long over.

3. Future-proof Architecture: Security infrastructure must be open and flexible enough to integrate new capabilities, use cases, and tools without requiring complete overhauls. Proprietary, closed systems that can't evolve quickly enough become liabilities rather than assets, and unnecessary vendor lock-in that prevents a necessary SIEM migration is a nightmare. 

At Onum, we've purpose-built our platform specifically to address these evolving challenges, transforming how organizations handle security data while maximizing their existing SIEM investments. Instead of ripping and replacing, we add a real-time intelligence layer that processes and enriches data at the point of collection.

We know the problem isn't just about handling more data and adding more complexity to the tech stack, but about extracting value from that data in real-time. 

Our approach transforms how organizations handle security data at scale. Instead of collecting everything and analyzing it later, Onum helps optimize your SIEM operations by processing and enriching data at the point of ingestion. This shift from post-processing to real-time data intelligence means security teams can:

• Operate at the speed of business: Move from 30-minute alert delays to detection in milliseconds. Onum eliminates this gap through edge-based processing that occurs as close as possible to where data is generated. Our platform collects, processes, and delivers data in milliseconds while simultaneously creating alerts – all as a latency-free transmission.

• Unlock efficiencies: Reduce data management complexity while increasing analytical capabilities. The Onum platform takes an agnostic approach that simplifies how organizations collect, process, and distribute telemetry data from a wide variety of sources and destinations. This ensures it’s delivered in the right format at the right time in the right destinations for the right users and unlocks a new level of business value. 

• Keep costs manageable: Scale operations without proportionally increasing operational overhead or costs. Onum's efficient architecture delivers superior performance while using a fraction of the infrastructure investment. We're 122x more efficient than our closest competitor because we prioritize edge-based processing, intelligent data optimization, and cloud-native design. 

Perhaps most importantly, Onum helps organizations break free from the historical trade-off between comprehensive security coverage and operational efficiency. By processing data at the source and unlocking pure real-time intelligence, security teams can maintain broad visibility while focusing resources on what matters most.

Organizations need to fundamentally rethink their approach to data infrastructure. The focus should shift from collecting everything and analyzing later in your SIEM to identifying and acting on critical data in real-time. This means:

• Prioritizing tools that can process and enrich data in transit

• Building infrastructure that can scale without proportionally increasing operational overhead

• Focusing on solutions that reduce complexity and future-proof your security infrastructure

• Ensuring technology choices enable rather than inhibit rapid response to new threats

The security landscape will continue to evolve, and new gaps will emerge. The key is to purpose-build infrastructure that can adapt to these changes and work alongside your current tooling without requiring constant overhauls and massive investments.

Those who cling to legacy approaches will find themselves increasingly vulnerable, not just to current threats but to the rapid evolution of technology itself. The time to modernize isn't next year or next quarter – it's now.

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