10 Tenets to Building Excellent Security Operations on a Budget

Excellence in security operations doesn’t require an endless budget. It requires discipline, prioritization, and a new approach to modern SOC design.

By Kumar Saurabh

Security leaders today are being asked to do more with less. Budgets are constrained, hiring is competitive, and the threat landscape is evolving faster than most teams can respond. Amid this pressure, building a high-functioning Security Operations Center (SOC) can feel like climbing a mountain without the right gear.

But here’s the truth: Excellence in security operations doesn’t require an endless budget. It requires discipline, prioritization, and a new approach to modern SOC design. Over the past decade, I’ve worked with organizations large and small, and the most effective ones all share the same foundational principles.

These are the 10 tenets that help teams build world-class security operations—efficiently, affordably, and effectively.

1. Start With Data: Build on a Solid Foundation

CEverything in security operations begins and ends with data. If you’re not collecting the right data—or if the data you collect is low quality—your ability to detect, investigate, and respond to threats is compromised from the start.
To begin:

• Define the problem: What threats are you trying to detect? What gaps do you need to close?
• Identify sources: Data should be collected from logs, cloud platforms, endpoints, and network flows—but only if they are relevant.
• Assess quality: Incomplete, noisy, or unstructured data leads to false positives and wasted analyst time.
• Start small and scale smart: Begin with a manageable dataset that solves high-priority problems. Avoid trying to ingest everything out of the gate.

Too often, teams are overwhelmed by data sprawl. But data without a purpose is just cost. Make your data work for you.

2. Focus on What Matters: Risk-Based Prioritization

With thousands of potential signals and alerts, it’s tempting to chase everything. But this leads to burnout, alert fatigue, and missed true positives.

Instead, effective SOCs align their efforts to business risk:

• Identify your critical assets: What systems, data, and services matter most to the business?
• Prioritize based on impact and likelihood: Not all risks are equal. Focus on what could cause the most damage or disruption.
• Align with compliance: Regulatory frameworks often help clarify what must be protected.
• Allocate resources accordingly: Assign your time, tools, and talent where it matters most.

A risk-based approach ensures that security is enabling the business, not just reacting to noise.

3. Leverage Cost-Effective Storage: Rethink the Data Lifecycle

Data storage is one of the biggest hidden costs in any SOC. But it’s also an area where you can drive tremendous savings—without sacrificing effectiveness.

Modern SOCs use tiered storage:

• Hot storage (fast, expensive): For active investigations and threat hunting. Retain 1–3 years if needed.
• Cold storage (slower, cheaper): For compliance and historical lookbacks. Retention can extend to 7+ years.

By separating storage from analytics, leveraging cloud-native object storage, and implementing data compression, you can reduce costs dramatically—often by 50% or more.

4. Avoid Vendor Traps: Read the Fine Print

Many security tools promise the world, but few are optimized for your budget. Be wary of solutions that push unnecessary data ingestion or inflexible pricing models.

Key pitfalls to avoid:

• "All hot data" models: These are convenient for the vendor but costly for you.
• Lock-in pricing: Some vendors make it expensive to migrate or reduce volume over time.
• Opaque licensing: Always ask how pricing scales with ingestion, retention, and features.

Negotiate based on value, not vanity metrics. Every dollar saved on unnecessary tooling can be reinvested in what really matters: people, detection, and response.

5. Don’t Pay for Endpoint Data Twice

It’s a common—and costly—mistake: teams collect the same endpoint telemetry in both their EDR and SIEM tools. This duplication leads to bloated ingestion bills with minimal added value.

Here’s what to do instead:

• Use EDR for what it’s best at: Real-time detection and response on endpoints.
• Use SIEM selectively: Store only endpoint data needed for correlation or compliance.
• Eliminate redundancy: Streamline your pipelines to avoid paying twice for the same data.

This single change can reduce your SIEM costs by up to 80%, especially in large environments.

6. Right-Size Your Lookback Window

How much historical data do you really need at your fingertips? The answer depends on your use case:

• For real-time detection, a 30–90 day lookback may suffice.
• For threat hunting, you may need 6–12 months.
• For compliance, multiple years might be required—but not in hot storage.

Tailor your retention policies to your use cases. Storing everything “just in case” is a fast way to destroy your budget.

7. Build a Detection Catalog: Know What You’re Looking For

Detection isn’t magic. It’s logic. Every security team should have a detection catalog that answers:

• What threats are we detecting?
• Where do these rules live (SIEM, EDR, NDR, etc.)?
• How do they map to known frameworks (like MITRE ATT&CK)?
• Are they tested and up to date?

This approach brings structure and visibility to detection engineering. It’s easier to tune, optimize, and demonstrate value—especially during audits or board reviews.

8. Test Your Detections: Trust, but Verify

Building a detection is only half the battle. The other half is validation.

Your detections should be:

• Tested continuously: Use simulated attacks or real-world threat intel to validate effectiveness.
• Tuned for your environment: False positives are costly and demoralizing.
• Measured over time: Understand how well they’re performing and iterate.

This creates a feedback loop that leads to sharper detections and faster response times.

9. Measure and Document What Matters

Metrics matter. They allow you to benchmark progress, justify investments, and identify areas of improvement.
Here are the three key metrics every SOC should track:

By measuring the right things, you’ll turn operations into a data-driven engine for continuous improvement.

10. Prioritize Triage, Investigation, and Response

Ultimately, your SOC is judged by how quickly and accurately it can respond to real threats. This is where automation, playbooks, and AI can make a real difference.

• Accurate triage: Weed out false positives and escalate what matters.
• Smart investigation: Pull together context across tools and environments.
• Targeted response: Act quickly, confidently, and with minimal disruption.

The right tools can reduce investigation time from hours to minutes—but only if paired with the right process and people.

Final Thoughts: Operational Excellence Is a Mindset

You don’t need a massive team or budget to build excellent security operations. But you do need clarity, focus, and discipline. These ten tenets are designed to help you do just that.

Security operations excellence is within reach. Let’s build it—together.

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