Why Traditional SIEM Is Struggling Against Modern Threat Volumes

In the early days of digital security, a single tool was often enough to keep track of everything happening on a corporate network because most data came from just a few firewalls and servers in the same room. We used a system called SIEM to gather all those activity logs and compile them into a single list, so that if something went wrong, an analyst could look through the records and find the trail. This worked well for a long time, but the way we work has changed so much that these older systems are starting to buckle under the sheer weight of the information they are asked to carry. Today, a company might have thousands of employees working from home and using dozens of different cloud apps, meaning the amount of data created every second is hundreds of times greater than it used to be.

The Struggle With A Sudden Flood Of Data

The most obvious problem is that traditional systems were designed to handle a predictable, finite amount of traffic on a specific set of hardware. When you move your operations to the cloud, you are no longer just watching a couple of office doors; you are watching a thousand windows opening and closing at once. Every single login, file share and email creates a digital footprint that the SIEM has to ingest and sort through. This comes up more often than expected because a system that was fast last year might suddenly start to lag or even crash when it tries to keep up with the data from a new cloud platform or a sudden spike in remote connections.

When a system gets overwhelmed, it can delay the delivery of an alert to a human, which is the last thing you want during a security incident. If a bad actor enters your network, you need to know about it in seconds, not wait for the system to finish processing a massive backlog of unimportant logs from the day before. Tata Communications provides a way to view these data flows more broadly, so a business can figure out which information is actually worth keeping and which can be filtered out before it clogs up the works. It is a bit like trying to find a specific needle in a haystack that is growing larger every minute, and eventually you realise that you need a better way to sort the hay rather than just buying a bigger barn.

The High Cost Of Keeping Every Single Record

Another hurdle many companies face is that older cybersecurity provider tools from legacy providers are often prohibitively expensive to scale because they require more hardware as data volumes grow. You have to pay for the servers and the cooling and the electricity to run the databases that hold all those logs, even if you only need to look at a tiny fraction of them. There is also the matter of “noise,” which occurs when a system sends hundreds of false alarms every day because it cannot distinguish between a regular software update and a real attack. This leads to alert fatigue, where the security team starts to ignore warnings because they are so tired of chasing down false alarms.

Modern systems are trying to solve this by using smarter ways to analyse behaviour rather than just following rigid rules written years ago. Instead of just flagging every failed login, a smart system might check whether the user is trying to log in from a new country or at an unusual hour before deciding to wake an analyst. This helps keep the focus on real threats and allows the team to spend their time on actual defence instead of manual data entry. Moving away from the traditional way of doing things is not just about buying a new piece of software but about changing the strategy to fit a world where the borders of the office have completely disappeared.

Finding the right balance between visibility and noise is a constant challenge for any IT department today. It is a very practical challenge that requires a bit of trial and error to get right, because every company has a different network pattern. As the volume of digital threats continues to rise, the systems we use to monitor them will have to become much more flexible and efficient to stay ahead.