Slow detection and search
30–40 min
Average SIEM detection time
SIEM vs. SIEM-Less: Why Leading Enterprises Are Making the Switch
Security leaders are rethinking SIEM. Here is a look at the architecture replacing it, and the results behind it.
Escalation lifecycle
SIEM1h 10m 37s
GreyMatter SIEM-Less15m 40s
The Problem
Data Is Everywhere
Enterprise security data stopped living in one place long ago. It spans endpoint, email, network, cloud, identity, databases, and OT, and spreads further with every acquisition and new tool. It lives across employees, executives, partners, contractors, and customers worldwide, with some surfacing on the open, deep, and dark web. Securing all of it is the challenge.
For most teams, a traditional SIEM sits underneath that job and imposes one rigid requirement: data must be ingested, parsed, indexed, and stored before any detection can run against it.
That requirement carries three costs:
Investigations lag
20–25 min
Average SIEM investigation time, per alert
Visibility narrows
24%
Of cyber leaders name lack of visibility as the top barrier to SOC capability
Source: SANS Security Operations Report
The bottleneck is not your team. It is your architecture.
How It Works
A Better Approach
ReliaQuest created GreyMatter SIEM-Less to give defenders faster detection, greater visibility, control over their architecture, and the best ROI for the enterprise. By moving detection into the pipeline and investigation onto object storage, you get everything a SIEM does—detection, investigation, search, response, reporting—without centralizing a byte of data.
Collect and Normalize
Data flows through GreyMatter Transit, where it is normalized to OCSF at the field level across any connected log source, without manual mapping or centralization.
Detect Before Storing
Detection runs at the source or in transit before data is indexed or stored. The differentiator is multi-event detection in transit—GreyMatter correlates partial event sequences as data streams, producing real-time detection with no ingestion dependency.
Store and Index
Data lands in low-cost object storage owned by the customer, written as open OCSF Parquet. GreyMatter Index builds its indexes in place and never copies the data out.
Query and Respond
Analysts and Agentic Teammates query data in plain language for investigations, hunts, and reporting—and because response stays connected, a team can block an IP, ban a hash, and contain a threat from the same window.
GreyMatter SIEM-Less Gives You All the Benefits of the SIEM, Without the Tradeoffs.
When detection, investigation, and hunting are no longer dependent on the SIEM to ingest, parse, index, and store it, the whole operation moves with more speed, greater visibility, and lower cost.
Speed
<1min
Mean Time to Detect
<5min
Mean Time to Investigate
Cost
40%+
Minimum cost savings
Visibility
1:1
Data parity
Enterprise Results
A Global Hospitality Leader Went SIEM-Less and Here Are the Results
A global hospitality leader put these claims to the test. The organization operates a fleet of over 90 ships across multiple brands, welcomes more than 13.5 million guests a year, and relies on a team of more than 160,000 people drawn from approximately 150 countries. It runs a highly distributed environment—remote operations, global teams, cloud services, identity infrastructure, network controls, guest-facing platforms, and core business systems—all generating massive, distributed telemetry. Its security data ran through a traditional SIEM-dependent architecture, and at that scale the ingest-parse-index-store delay compounded:
- Query performance slowed
- Dashboards took longer to load
- Threat hunts were constrained by search speed
The team validated GreyMatter SIEM-Less against the enterprise’s incumbent SIEM directly. The performance gap was clear:
Average detection
Fastest detection
20sec
Fastest detection in 20 seconds
Threat hunting
To complete three hunts…
GreyMatter SIEM-Less took 51 minutes
Incumbent SIEM path took 14 hours
Analyst usability
48 secondsGreyMatter SIEM-Less
Seven-day firewall dashboard loaded in 48 seconds.
10:00 min+Incumbent SIEM
Same dashboard in the incumbent SIEM did not finish after 10 minutes.
Event-to-escalation
55min
Faster from event to escalation
GreyMatter SIEM-Less15 minutes, 40 seconds
Incumbent SIEM path1 hour, 10 minutes, 37 seconds
Validated across multiple detection areas:
- Network threats
- Identity anomalies
- File movement
- Domain activity
- Suspicious administrative behavior
The organization kept all its security data in the process and removed only one thing: the requirement that every workflow wait for centralized SIEM processing before action could begin.
It’s Time to Retire the SIEM
Centralization was a reasonable default when threats moved slowly and data lived in a handful of tools. That world is gone. GreyMatter SIEM-Less gives enterprises a faster, more flexible detection and hunting architecture that delivers the coverage of a SIEM at the speed the business actually runs.