In today’s cybersecurity landscape the sheer volume, velocity, and variety of data are overwhelming traditional Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) systems. The old model of storing everything inside these centralized tools is breaking down: data volumes keep growing, budgets remain tight, and service levels suffer.
The traditional approach is riddled with friction:
Data Gravity: SIEMs, optimized for log analytics, are good at detection but retaining massive amounts of data in them makes it difficult to use that same data for machine learning, bulk analytics, or sharing across the enterprise. SIEMs simply weren’t built for easy export or reuse.
Operational Overhead and Costs: As SIEM deployments grow - often driven more by compliance mandates than daily operations - the costs of hardware, licensing, and management balloon. Resources get consumed by retention rather than actual security value.
This is where the VAST AI Operating System comes in. By enabling a modern cyber lakehouse, VAST provides a scalable and cost-effective blueprint for balancing SIEMs strengths with the need for affordable, long-term cyber data management.
A Cost-Sensible Cyber Lakehouse Strategy
The traditional approach to security data management has created a crisis of cost and scale. Legacy SIEM solutions, with their per-ingested-gigabyte pricing models, force security teams to make difficult trade-offs: either pay exorbitant fees to retain all their data or delete valuable historical context. This leaves organizations unable to perform long-term threat hunting, compliance audits, or historical trend analysis.
It’s not only an efficiency problem, but a compliance requirement. Regulations like M-21-31 require federal agencies to retain logs for at least 18 months, and similar mandates are emerging across industries. Meeting these requirements with a SIEM alone is often economically impossible.
The VAST AI OS serves as a modern cyber lakehouse, providing a sensible strategy for managing large-scale cyber and observability data. Rather than replacing your SIEM, it complements it by becoming the central repository for all your data, from real-time streams to multi-year archives. This approach allows you to use your existing SIEM for immediate, high-priority alerts on "hot" data, while offloading the vast majority of your security data to a platform where it can be stored and analyzed at a fraction of the cost.
VAST DataEngine: Analytics Where Your Data Resides
The VAST DataEngine is the compute layer that turns the cyber lakehouse into an active platform for analysis. Instead of moving data into separate pipelines, it brings compute directly to where your data lives, eliminating the cost and complexity of ETL.
Query at Scale: Run ad-hoc SQL queries over petabytes of historical security data with managed engines like Trino and Spark. What used to take hours can now take minutes.
Automated Workflows: Lightweight, serverless functions enrich logs, parse data, and streamline triage automatically—reducing analyst overhead.
Efficient Ingest: A Kafka-compatible event broker captures streaming data and writes it directly into VAST DataBase tables, simplifying ingestion and preparing data for analysis instantly.
With DataEngine, your security team gains the ability to ask bigger questions of all your data without adding infrastructure or moving workloads between systems.
A Hybrid Approach to Cyber Data Management
The VAST cyber lakehouse approach disrupts conventional SIEM deployments by offering a cost-effective, two-tier strategy for security data management.
SIEM for "Hot" Data: You can continue to use your SIEM for what it does best: real-time alerting on critical, high-volume data streams. By using tools like Cribl to filter and index only the most essential data in your SIEM, you can drastically reduce your licensing costs.
VAST for "Warm" and "Cold" Data: All other data, including raw logs and multi-year archives, is stored on the VAST AI OS. VAST provides all-flash performance with the economics of an archive tier, making it feasible to keep 100% of your security data for as long as you need. This enables comprehensive historical threat hunting and compliance audits without operational overhead or data deletion.
This approach cuts costs while enabling deep searches across vast historical datasets, strengthening the foundation for security analytics.
A Unified SOC for Scale and Compliance
The VAST AI OS, with its DataStore, DataBase, and DataEngine components, creates a unified data platform that eliminates the friction between storage, pipelines, and compute. It's a pragmatic and scalable foundation that transforms your security operations, making long-term data retention and extensive searches not only possible but practical. By adopting a cyber lakehouse strategy, you can build a more resilient, cost-effective, and AI-ready security program.
Get Started
Stop letting SIEM costs dictate your security posture. The VAST AI OS provides a single, scalable cyber lakehouse that helps you solve the SIEM cost crisis and eliminates the need to delete valuable data. By consolidating your archives and analytics on a single, high-performance platform, you can take control of your security economics.
You can learn more in our cyber lakehouse whitepaper and VAST’s implementation of the data pillar within the Zero Trust Architecture framework. You also can schedule a demo today.
