ISG Research is happy to share insights gleaned from our latest Buyers Guide, an assessment of how well software providers’ offerings meet buyers’ requirements. The SIEM: ISG Research Buyers Guide is the distillation of a year of market and product research by ISG Research.
Chief Information Officers (CIOs), Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs) and
ISG defines Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) as the backbone of an enterprise's security operations (SecOps), delivering a comprehensive approach for collecting, aggregating and analyzing security data from multiple sources. By continuously aggregating logs and security events from various network devices, servers, endpoints and applications, SIEM platforms provide real-time visibility into security incidents and anomalies. This capability is critical for identifying potential threats and breaches across the IT estate, allowing enterprises to respond swiftly and effectively.
SIEM software employs sophisticated analytics, including correlation rules, machine learning (ML) and threat intelligence feeds, enabling security teams to detect patterns of malicious behavior. The platform’s centralized nature facilitates detailed reporting, dashboard visualization and alerts, empowering security personnel with actionable insights. SIEM is not only vital for threat detection but also helps in forensic investigations, providing a historical view of security events for understanding and remediating incidents.
Moreover, SIEM plays a crucial role in maintaining compliance with regulations such as GDPR and HIPAA by providing necessary audit trails and security controls. As enterprises face increasingly complex security challenges, an effective SIEM implementation enhances their ability to manage risks proactively. By encompassing incident detection, response and compliance reporting, SIEM platforms are essential for any enterprise looking to strengthen its cybersecurity framework and mitigate the impacts of security incidents.
ISG asserts that through 2027, 7 in 10 enterprises will address increasingly sophisticated cyber threats, improve security posture and reduce threat response times using SIEM software to gain real-time visibility across the entire IT infrastructure.
Security strategies incorporating SIEM play a crucial role in bolstering an enterprise's security posture by providing comprehensive visibility into security events across the IT environment. By aggregating and analyzing data logs from diverse sources, SIEM enables enterprises to identify potential threats in real time, allowing for immediate response and mitigation. This proactive threat detection is essential for minimizing vulnerabilities and enhancing the overall security framework of the enterprise.
SIEM not only facilitates incident detection and response but also supports regulatory compliance by delivering compliance-reporting capabilities. Enterprises can demonstrate adherence to industry standards by leveraging the audit trails and reports generated by SIEM systems. Moreover, the centralized nature of SIEM improves collaboration among security teams, as they can access real-time data and insights for informed decision-making. This degree of awareness also enables security personnel to focus on high-priority threats rather than being overwhelmed by false alarms.
In aligning security practices with business objectives, SIEM fosters resilience against cyber threats and enhances the enterprise’s reputation. By reducing response times and improving incident management efficiency, enterprises can continue their operations with minimal disruption, ensuring business continuity. Ultimately, SIEM serves as a foundational element for a robust cybersecurity strategy, helping enterprises safeguard their assets while supporting their long-term business goals.
Generative AI (GenAI) is transforming enterprise cybersecurity software by automating complex processes and enhancing decision-making. By leveraging GenAI, enterprises can streamline threat detection, optimize resource allocation and proactively identify vulnerabilities, leading to improved operational performance. Additionally, GenAI enables teams to extract valuable insights from extensive data, fostering informed strategic planning and collaboration. As enterprises navigate digital transformation, integrating cybersecurity software with GenAI capabilities becomes crucial for maintaining a competitive edge and enhancing organizational resilience.
GenAI can significantly boost the capabilities of security personnel by offering enhanced threat detection, automated incident response and anomaly identification using SIEM systems. AI algorithms can process vast amounts of security data to identify patterns and correlations that may signify a cyber threat, effectively reducing alert fatigue for security teams. By utilizing natural language processing (NLP), GenAI can automate the investigation of security alerts, generating detailed narratives and remediation recommendations for potential incidents. Furthermore, ML models can continuously learn from historical incidents, improving detection accuracy over time. By empowering security personnel with actionable insights and streamlining incident response workflows, GenAI can enhance overall efficiency and effectiveness in managing SecOps.
Looking ahead, the potential integration of agentic AI functionalities into SIEM software could further revolutionize cybersecurity management by enabling systems to not only analyze data but also autonomously take actions in response to threats. In this future scenario, agentic AI could dynamically adjust network security measures, implement automatic responses to detected vulnerabilities and even initiate investigations without human intervention. This would allow enterprises to proactively manage threats, shifting the role of security personnel from reactively addressing incidents to strategically overseeing intelligent systems, thereby enhancing organizational resilience against evolving cyber threats.
Our Cybersecurity Buyers Guide research is designed to provide a comprehensive view of a software provider’s capability to enhance the effectiveness, performance and governance of cybersecurity measures within an enterprise. Separate Buyers Guide research reports are available for IAM, EDR and Data Recovery software.
CIOs and security leaders should approach cybersecurity software incorporating GenAI, large language models (LLMs) and future agentic AI capabilities with enthusiasm and caution. While these technologies offer significant benefits, they also come with unique challenges and prerequisites. A holistic evaluation must include technical aspects and business, ethical and strategic considerations. Other areas of focus include risk awareness, critical infrastructure, organizational readiness, governance and compliance, and a long-term perspective on the sustainability and scalability of AI approaches.
ISG believes a methodical approach is essential to maximize competitiveness. It is critical to select the right software provider and product to improve the performance of your enterprise’s people, process, information and technology components.
The insights gained from understanding current cybersecurity software providers are invaluable for enterprise CIOs, CISOs and VPs of InfoSec who aim to align their technology investments with organizational goals, enhance security workflows and cultivate a culture of resilience. By investing in the right cybersecurity tools, these leaders can unlock new avenues for protection and transformation, positioning their enterprises to thrive.
The ISG Buyers Guide™ for SIEM evaluates products based on a variety of capabilities including compliance functionality, compliance reporting, dashboard visualization, data privacy, GenAI and ML, incident response, log management, observability, SIEM deployment models, SOAR support, threat detection, threat intelligence communities, user behavior analytics, and the opportunity to evolve use of the SIEM software over time as a managed service. To be included in this Buyers Guide, software providers must meet or exceed the inclusion criteria and have commercially available products.
This research evaluates the following software providers that offer products addressing key elements of SIEM: Devo Technology, Elastic, Exabeam, Fortinet, Fortra, Google Cloud, ManageEngine, Microsoft, NetWitness, OpenText, Rapid7, Securonix, SolarWinds, Splunk and Sumo Logic.
This research-based index evaluates the full business and information technology value of SIEM software offerings. We encourage you to learn more about our Buyers Guide and its effectiveness as a provider selection and RFI/RFP tool.
We urge organizations to do a thorough job of evaluating SIEM offerings in this Buyers Guide as both the results of our in-depth analysis of these software providers and as an evaluation methodology. The Buyers Guide can be used to evaluate existing suppliers, plus provides evaluation criteria for new projects. Using it can shorten the cycle time for an RFP and the definition of an RFI.
The Buyers Guide for SIEM in 2025 finds Microsoft first on the list, followed by Splunk and ManageEngine.
Software providers that rated in the top three of any category ﹘ including the product and customer experience dimensions ﹘ earn the designation of Leader.
The Leaders in Product Experience are:
The Leaders in Customer Experience are:
The Leaders across any of the seven categories are:
The overall performance chart provides a visual representation of how providers rate across product and customer experience. Software providers with products scoring higher in a weighted rating of the five product experience categories place farther to the right. The combination of ratings for the two customer experience categories determines their placement on the vertical axis. As a result, providers that place closer to the upper-right are “exemplary” and rated higher than those closer to the lower-left and identified as providers of “merit.” Software providers that excelled at customer experience over product experience have an “assurance” rating, and those excelling instead in product experience have an “innovative” rating.
Note that close provider scores should not be taken to imply that the packages evaluated are functionally identical or equally well-suited for use by every enterprise or process. Although there is a high degree of commonality in how organizations handle SIEM, there are many idiosyncrasies and differences that can make one provider’s offering a better fit than another.
ISG Research has made every effort to encompass in this Buyers Guide the overall product and customer experience from our SIEM blueprint, which we believe reflects what a well-crafted RFP should contain. Even so, there may be additional areas that affect which software provider and products best fit an enterprise’s particular requirements. Therefore, while this research is complete as it stands, utilizing it in your own organizational context is critical to ensure that products deliver the highest level of support for your projects.
You can find more details on our community as well as on our expertise in the research for this Buyers Guide.