Escaping Lock In Hell - How to Not Care If Your SIEM Vendor Doesn't Exist Next Year

The SIEM market has had a rough couple of years.

Cisco bought Splunk for $28B. 22% of Splunk customers are now described as “likely to switch,” and the new pricing model is still shaking out. Palo Alto acquired IBM QRadar SaaS for $500M, then promptly announced end-of-life for 2026. Exabeam and LogRhythm merged under Thoma Bravo, Forrester flagged an “innovation slowdown,” and LogRhythm Axon is being retired. CrowdStrike, Zscaler, and Databricks all made their own moves.

Three of five Gartner SIEM Leaders were in active M&A during the last evaluation cycle. The market is projected to hit $19B by 2030, but growth slowed from 20% to 4% as organizations absorb the disruption.

If your vendor is one of those five, you already know the anxiety. If it isn’t, you’re probably watching closely anyway.

Most teams that feel this pressure still end up staying. They evaluate the alternatives, build the business case, look at migration cost, and then stay anyway. Because switching feels harder than living with the current platform’s limitations. That’s understandable, but it’s not a strategy.

This post isn’t about switching SIEMs. We’ll get into that another time. This is about being able to switch.

So what gets in the way?

4 Levels of Lock-In Hell

Most security teams think about SIEM lock-in as a data problem: “Can I get my logs out?” That’s a reasonable place to start. It’s also only Level 1.

Level 1: Data Lock-In (Your Logs)

If your logs live in a proprietary format, they don’t leave cleanly. You can export them, technically, but whether the next platform can ingest them without significant re-normalization work is a separate question. This is the lock-in people talk about most, and in many ways it’s the least of your problems.

Level 2: Platform Lock-In (Query Languages)

Every SIEM speaks a different language. Splunk uses SPL. Microsoft uses KQL. IBM uses AQL. Google uses YARA-L. Your team spent years getting fluent in one of them, and that expertise doesn’t transfer. When your vendor gets acquired and the roadmap shifts, you’re not just migrating a platform. You’re retraining an entire team.

Level 3: Detection Lock-In (Your Content)

This is where migrations actually die. Detection logic migration consumes 40–60% of total project engineering effort. Budget overruns of 200–300% are common. Around 70% of SIEM modernization projects underdeliver or fail outright.

The detections your team spent years building, tuning, and hardening to your specific environment are written in your current vendor’s language and live in your current vendor’s platform. They won’t follow you to the next one.

Level 4: Provider Lock-In (Your MSSP)

If you’re running an outsourced SOC, the lock-in goes deeper. Ponemon found outsourced SOCs cost $4.44M per year versus $2.86M in-house — 55% more. 58% of organizations rate their MSSP as ineffective. 63% want out.

But your detection rules, baselines, and tuning all live in the MSSP’s tenant, not yours. So you’re not just changing vendors. You’re starting from scratch.

The trap is that by the time you feel the lock-in, you’re already stuck. The evaluation happens, the switching cost is real, and staying wins by default — not on merit.

A Different Way to Think About This: Undoable Architecture

Undoable architecture isn’t a product or a platform. It’s a design principle: every major vendor decision in your security stack should be reversible without losing data, detection capability, or operational continuity.

What that looks like in practice:

Portable Data

Logs in open formats any tool can read. One standard here is OCSF with support from over 200 organizations, backed by the Linux Foundation, and with AWS Security Lake natively OCSF-compatible. If your data is in OCSF, it’s pretty much routable anywhere.

Portable Detection

Rules in a vendor-neutral format, versioned as code. Sigma has over 3,000 rules and roughly 28 backend plugins, meaning a Sigma rule can compile to SPL, KQL, AQL, YARA-L, and more. Your detection investment follows you rather than staying behind.

Loose Coupling

Standard APIs and open collectors between every layer. Detection-as-Code means your rules live in Git, get CI/CD tested, auto-deploy, and can roll back. Your detection pipeline shouldn’t be load-bearing for any single vendor.

Incremental Migration

Build the SIEM of Theseus: replace piece by piece, never all at once. Route data to your old platform and your new one simultaneously, shift gradually, and cut over only when you’re ready. Migration becomes a cost decision, not a crisis.

None of this requires ripping anything out today. It’s about building so that when the moment comes — acquisition, EOL notice, pricing shock — you actually have options.

Three Things to Do Monday Morning

You don’t need a migration project to start building reversibility. You need three habits.

1. Audit your reversibility.

Ask these three questions about every security tool in your stack:

• Can I export my data in an open format — OCSF, CEF, Parquet?
• Can I export my detection rules in Sigma or another portable format?
• If this vendor disappeared tomorrow, how long until I’m operational again?

If the answer to that last question is “months,” you have a lock-in problem. Not a someday problem, a now problem, given what the market is doing.

2. Start writing detections as code.

You don’t need to migrate anything. Start storing new detection rules in Git using Sigma format. Build the habit now so your detection investment travels with you rather than with the vendor. According to Splunk, 63% of your peers want to do this. Fewer are actually doing it.

3. Make your next renewal a leverage point.

Your next SIEM renewal is the moment you have negotiating power, but only if you can credibly walk away. Before you sign, evaluate whether an abstraction layer can decouple your data sources from the destination. Even if you don’t switch, the ability to switch changes the conversation.

What We Built Around This Idea

At Abstract, we built our platform around the undoable architecture principle: collection, detection, retention, and AI-enabled SecOps as four independent, interoperable components. The point isn’t to replace your SIEM with us (though, we’re here for that, too), but to stop being stuck with anyone.

If you want to see what that looks like in practice, specifically how our pipelines and detections work, talk to us.