“Our old model was ‘log everything and sort it out later.’ That worked until storage costs and performance caught up to us. We needed a smarter, simpler way to move data.”
A top 20 global law firm faced mounting complexity and rising costs as its legacy IBM QRadar SIEM struggled under the weight of unrestricted log ingestion. Every device, endpoint, and application fed data to the SIEM (often in debug mode!) creating a flood of events that slowed investigations and made it nearly impossible to separate signal from noise.
When the firm decided to migrate to Microsoft Sentinel, the security team saw an opportunity to modernize its data strategy. But three competing priorities made that transition difficult:
The firm’s lean operations team needed a more efficient way to manage data ingestion, one that reduced cost and complexity without requiring a full-time engineer to maintain. Ease of use, speed of deployment, and flexibility were key.
The firm selected Abstract as its centralized data pipeline and enrichment layer to decouple ingestion from analysis, creating a faster, simpler path to Sentinel migration while dramatically reducing storage and licensing costs.
During evaluation, the team explored another popular pipeline solution but quickly found it required extensive scripting, constant tuning, and at least one full-time engineer to manage it.
With a small staff, they needed something that was powerful but easy to own, where configuration changes could happen quickly and maintenance didn’t dominate the team’s time.
Abstract stood out for its low-code interface, intuitive data routing controls, and stable, hands-off operation once deployed. The platform allowed the team to ingest, filter, and enrich data without dedicated DevOps resources, something that had previously seemed out of reach.
“Other platforms looked powerful, but they needed someone babysitting them full-time. With Abstract, one person can run it, and we can change things anytime without writing code.”
A single engineer serves as the pipeline owner, jumping in when the team wants to test new filters or data paths. The rest of the time, Abstract operates autonomously, providing the stability of “set-and-forget” with the flexibility to adapt on demand.
“We wanted something that wouldn’t be cumbersome or constantly break. Abstract gave us that. One person manages most of it, and when we need to experiment or make a change, we can do it ourselves.”
Abstract’s automated filtering and enrichment dramatically reduced the volume of data flowing into Sentinel, optimizing storage and analytics costs without sacrificing visibility. By maintaining a single, unified control layer for all pipelines, the team now operates efficiently with minimal oversight, avoiding the need for dedicated staff and reducing overall management effort. These efficiencies laid the groundwork for measurable cost savings and faster time to value.
Abstract transformed the firm’s operational rhythm. Instead of reacting to maintenance issues or broken scripts, the team focuses on advancing detection coverage and response strategies. The weekly sync meeting is about refining detection logic rather than fixing ingestion. Abstract delivers the ease of ownership the team wanted while keeping enough flexibility to support ongoing experimentation.
“It’s not something we have to babysit. We adjust when we want to try something new, but it doesn’t require constant attention.”
The firm completed its migration from QRadar to Microsoft Sentinel in just 90 days, an ambitious timeline for replacing both its SIEM and ingestion architecture. By routing all data through Abstract, the security team simplified ingestion and gained tighter control over what data moved, where, and when.
Before adopting Abstract, the firm estimated that sending all telemetry directly to Sentinel would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars per month in Log Analytics fees. With Abstract filtering and compressing data in-stream, they kept critical telemetry accessible while pushing less urgent logs to cheaper storage. The ability to replay archived data into Sentinel later gave the team the confidence to retain visibility without paying to keep everything “hot.”
Abstract also helped the firm streamline operations. One engineer now manages most of the pipelines with others contributing occasionally. The team meets weekly to review detections and coverage, using Abstract to adjust data flows and test new ideas without disrupting production.
When new use cases arise, they can duplicate a pipeline, run it for a few hours, and fine-tune filters before going live. The platform is stable enough that iteration has replaced maintenance as the team’s main focus.
“It hit the need we had at exactly the right time. The team’s fast to respond, and the platform keeps up with whatever we throw at it.”
