Challenge

Before adopting DataBahn, the firm was facing increasing challenges across several domains:

Exponential Data Growth
Daily ingestion volumes of 1.15TB and an annual growth rate of 18% significantly increased SIEM and storage costs.

Before adopting DataBahn, the firm was facing increasing challenges across several domains:

Cost Overruns
Sentinel’s unpredictable licensing model resulted in frequent budget overages due to data spikes, especially as their on-prem collectors were used in tandem with their AMA agents on their PCI servers.

Ineffective Alternatives
A prior 4-month engagement with another observability tool failed to yield substantial log reduction.

Complex Log Collection
On-premise and cloud-to-cloud log ingestion was unreliable due to limitations with Sentinel forwarders and legacy syslog servers.

KQL Complexity
The SOC had to write complex KQL queries due to real-time field extraction from default tables like CommonSecurity and Syslog.

Infrastructure Burden
Manual setup of custom tables and DCRs (Data Collection Rules) often resulted in schema mismatches, increasing engineering effort.

SQL Logging Overages
MS SQL logs via AMA agents spiked during business reporting, mixing security and non-security events, breaching committed ingestion tiers.

Objectives

The firm needed to revamp its security data management to keep up with data growth, reduce SIEM licensing and data storage costs, and make it easier for its SOC to manage on-premise and cloud data collection.

The firm needed a robust, purpose-built solution to:

· Lower SIEM licensing and storage costs

· Improve log ingestion reliability

· Simplify data engineering costs

· Separate and optimize ingestion of relevant security data

“We needed a tool designed and built to better manage security data and logs, to send only security-relevant events to Sentinel, and route non-relevant data to blob storage while replacing legacy log collection.”

— Information Security Engineer

DataBahn Deployment & Results

Upon deploying DataBahn, the firm rapidly transformed its data management posture.

Rapid Value Realization
Within 2 weeks, DataBahn delivered a 60% reduction in ingested log volume using its out-of-the-box volume control library.

Cost Savings
The firm reduced SIEM costs from $1,800/day to $700/day—saving $350K annually in licensing and another $50K in storage and infrastructure.

Volume Optimization
Using DataBahn’s native volume control library with over 900 reduction rules, the team reduced Sentinel-bound data volume by 60%, suppressing noise such as heartbeats, repeated status codes, and verbose logs.

Improved Data Quality
Deduplication, metadata stripping, and attribute-based filtering reduced noise and enhanced data quality.

Operational Efficiency
Reduced engineering overhead by eliminating the need for manual DCR and custom table syncs.

SOC Schema Standardization
Enabled the creation of simplified, standardized table schemas, drastically reducing KQL query complexity.

DataBahn Solution

Security Data Fabric

· Manage data ingestion from different source environments

· Reduce SIEM licensing and storage costs with data tiering

· Provide a scalable and resilient data pipeline

Strategic Benefits

Predictable and Efficient Ingestion
Security events were aligned with compliance and analytics needs while avoiding surprise spikes in volume.

Legacy Infrastructure Replacement
Replaced unstable VM-based MS log collectors with a resilient DataBahn pipeline.

Expanded Detection Coverage
Reallocated budget to onboard new data sources into the security data ecosystem.

Real-time Optimization
Leveraged versioning and live tracking of rule changes for continuous improvement.

While DataBahn is a perfect use case for SIEM solutions like Sentinel, I believe its use case is even broader as the “Data Pump” for all enterprise data. This is why I am so excited about the product!”

— Michael Keithley, Fractional CIO/CTO, ex-UTA