Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) systems have long been a cornerstone of enterprise cybersecurity. Designed to collect, correlate, and analyze security data from across an organization’s infrastructure, traditional SIEMs work well in on-premises environments. However, as organizations migrate to the cloud, many are realizing that their SIEMs are falling behind.
The Shift to the Cloud
Cloud adoption introduces a fundamental change in how infrastructure is built and managed. Resources are ephemeral, workloads are dynamic, and architecture is often distributed across multiple cloud providers and services. This complexity makes visibility and monitoring significantly harder and that’s where SIEMs begin to struggle.
Why SIEMs Fall Short in the Cloud
Limited Integration with Cloud-Native Services
Traditional SIEMs were not built with cloud-native architectures in mind. They often lack deep integration with services like AWS CloudTrail, Azure Monitor, or Google Cloud’s operations suite. As a result, critical events and logs may not be captured or understood in context.
Volume and Velocity of Cloud Logs
Cloud environments generate massive volumes of log data, especially in large-scale or multi-cloud setups. Ingesting, storing, and analyzing this data can overwhelm legacy SIEMs both technically and financially leading to blind spots or delayed threat detection.
Ephemeral Infrastructure
In the cloud, virtual machines, containers, and serverless functions can spin up and disappear in seconds. Traditional SIEMs often assume long-lived assets, which makes tracking threats across short-lived cloud resources incredibly difficult.
Lack of Contextual Awareness
Effective threat detection in the cloud requires understanding the context: identity and access roles, resource tags, cloud service configurations, etc. Most SIEMs lack the semantic understanding of these elements, leading to false positives or missed detections.
Cost and Scalability Challenges
Cloud-native organizations often face skyrocketing SIEM costs due to pricing models based on data volume. At the same time, trying to scale legacy SIEMs to handle cloud-scale workloads is inefficient and often unsustainable.
Toward Cloud Native Security Monitoring
The rise of cloud-native security tools like CSPM (Cloud Security Posture Management), CWPP (Cloud Workload Protection Platforms), and modern observability platforms offers a more tailored approach to monitoring cloud environments. These tools are built for scalability, automation, and integration with cloud APIs.
Some newer SIEMs are evolving, too, integrating more closely with cloud platforms and adopting modern architectures. But for many organizations, the future lies in hybrid security stacks that combine traditional SIEMs with cloud-native solutions for full-spectrum visibility.