You're convinced agentic security is the right direction. Your team is drowning in alerts. Your detection engineering backlog grows faster than your capacity to address it. You've seen the demos and understand the architectural difference between copilots and agents.
Now you need to convince everyone else.
The CFO wants payback period calculations. The CIO wants to understand infrastructure implications. The board wants risk reduction they can measure. Your peers in IT want to know this won't create more integration work for their teams.
This post provides the framework for those conversations. Not marketing claims—a methodology for quantifying your current state costs, projecting agentic benefits, and building a business case that survives financial scrutiny.
## **The Total Cost of Current State**
Most security ROI calculations undercount current state costs by focusing only on licensing. The real cost of your security operations includes:
### **Direct Costs**
**Platform licensing**: What you pay for SIEM, SOAR, EDR, email security, and adjacent tools. Include all platforms involved in detection and response, not just the primary SIEM.
**Infrastructure**: Storage costs for log retention. Compute costs for query and correlation. Cloud egress fees. On-prem hardware amortization if applicable.
**Personnel**: Fully-loaded cost of SOC analysts, detection engineers, security architects, and the portion of IT ops time spent supporting security infrastructure.
### **Hidden Costs**
**Coverage tradeoffs**: What log sources are you *not* ingesting because of cost? The value of that missing coverage is hard to quantify, but it's not zero. Every excluded source is a potential blind spot.
**Investigation time**: How many hours per incident do analysts spend on Tier 1 triage? On Tier 2 investigation? On escalation documentation? These hours have a cost—and more importantly, an opportunity cost.
**Alert discard rate**: What percentage of alerts go uninvestigated? Industry data suggests 62% on average. Each discarded alert represents potential risk that's simply accepted because capacity doesn't exist to address it.
**Detection engineering backlog**: How many detection rules are waiting to be written? How long does each rule take from concept to production? The backlog represents threats you know about but can't yet detect.
**Tool sprawl overhead**: How much time does your team spend context-switching between tools? Maintaining integrations? Reconciling data formats? Managing multiple vendor relationships?
### **Quantification Exercise**
Build a simple spreadsheet with these categories:
| Cost Category | Annual Cost | Notes |
| ----- | ----- | ----- |
| SIEM licensing | $ | Include overage charges |
| Adjacent tool licensing | $ | SOAR, EDR, etc. |
| Storage/infrastructure | $ | Cloud \+ on-prem |
| SOC personnel (fully loaded) | $ | Salaries \+ benefits \+ overhead |
| Detection engineering personnel | $ | Portion of time on rule creation |
| IT Ops support time | $ | Infrastructure maintenance |
| **Total Direct Costs** | **$** | |
Then estimate hidden costs:
| Hidden Cost | Estimated Impact |
| ----- | ----- |
| Uninvestigated alerts (% of total) | X% |
| Hours per incident (Tier 1 triage) | X hours |
| Detection rule backlog | X rules waiting |
| Mean time to investigate | X hours |
| Annual incidents with coverage gaps | X incidents |
These hidden costs are harder to monetize, but they're essential context for the business case. They represent capacity constraints that licensing costs alone don't capture.
## **Projecting Agentic Benefits**
Strike48's quantified outcomes provide starting points for projection. Adjust based on your environment and risk tolerance.
### **Investigation Efficiency**
**Claim**: 90% faster investigations. Alerts triaged in under 8 minutes. Patient zero identified in minutes, not hours.
**Your calculation**: Take your current mean time to investigate. Multiply by investigation volume. Apply a conservative efficiency gain (50% if you're skeptical, 80% if you trust the benchmarks). Convert time savings to analyst capacity.
Example:
* Current MTTI: 4 hours
* Annual investigations: 2,000
* 70% efficiency gain: 2.8 hours saved per investigation
* Annual hours saved: 5,600 hours
* Analyst FTE equivalent (2,000 hours/year): 2.8 FTEs
This doesn't mean you cut headcount by 2.8 people. It means you reclaim 2.8 FTEs worth of capacity for work that currently isn't getting done.
### **Coverage Expansion**
**Claim**: 60-80% cost reduction through parse-at-query architecture. Ingest 100% of logs for the price others charge for 60%.
**Your calculation**: Identify log sources you're currently excluding for cost reasons. Estimate the volume. Price that volume in your current platform versus Strike48's bundled model.
Example:
* Current daily ingestion: 500 GB
* Excluded sources: 300 GB (cloud infrastructure, network flow, endpoint telemetry)
* Current platform cost for 800 GB: $X/year
* Strike48 cost for 800 GB: $Y/year
* Annual savings: $X \- $Y
* Coverage gain: 60% more data available for investigation
The coverage gain is harder to monetize directly, but ask: what's the cost of a breach that originated in an unmonitored log source? That's the risk you're currently accepting.
### **Detection Engineering Acceleration**
**Claim**: Detection rules written in minutes vs. days. Rules automatically validated via attack simulation.
**Your calculation**: Take your current detection rule backlog. Estimate time per rule in the current workflow. Apply an acceleration factor.
Example:
* Current backlog: 150 rules
* Time per rule (research, write, test, deploy): 8 hours
* Hours to clear backlog: 1,200 hours
* With agentic detection engineering (80% faster): 240 hours
* Hours saved: 960 hours
* Additional benefit: rules validated via simulation (currently never done)
### **Headcount Efficiency**
**Claim**: 98% of L1 analyst work automated.
**Your calculation**: Audit your L1 analysts' current task distribution. Identify which tasks are automatable. Calculate the FTE equivalent that could shift to higher-value work.
Example:
* L1 analyst headcount: 6 FTEs
* Task distribution: 70% routine triage, 30% escalation prep
* Automatable work: 70% × 6 \= 4.2 FTE equivalents
* Reclaimed capacity: 4.2 FTEs available for Tier 2 work, detection engineering, or threat hunting
## **Building the Business Case**
Combine your findings into a three-year model:
### **Year 1: Foundation**
* Platform deployment and integration
* Initial use case activation (alert triage, investigation)
* Expected benefits: 50% of projected efficiency gains as team ramps
* Costs: Licensing \+ implementation services
### **Year 2: Expansion**
* Additional use cases (detection engineering, forensics)
* Full efficiency gains realized
* Potential consolidation of legacy tools
* Costs: Licensing (flat or reduced if consolidating)
### **Year 3: Optimization**
* Advanced use cases (proactive threat hunting, compliance automation)
* Legacy platform contract non-renewal
* Full ROI realization
* Costs: Licensing only
### **Financial Summary**
| Metric | Year 1 | Year 2 | Year 3 |
| ----- | ----- | ----- | ----- |
| Strike48 investment | $ | $ | $ |
| Efficiency savings | $ | $ | $ |
| Coverage improvement value | $ | $ | $ |
| Legacy tool reduction | $ | $ | $ |
| **Net benefit** | **$** | **$** | **$** |
| **Cumulative benefit** | **$** | **$** | **$** |
### **Risk Reduction Framing**
Financial metrics matter, but security investments ultimately justify on risk reduction. Frame the non-quantifiable benefits:
**Coverage risk**: Currently operating with X% blind spots. Strike48 enables 100% log coverage. Reduced probability of undetected breach.
**Speed risk**: Current MTTI of X hours means threats dwell longer. Sub-8-minute triage reduces dwell time and blast radius.
**Capacity risk**: Current alert discard rate of X% means threats may be ignored entirely. Agentic triage ensures all alerts receive investigation.
**Talent risk**: Analyst burnout and turnover cost $X per departure. Automating routine work improves retention.
## **Handling Objections**
Anticipate the questions your business case will face:
**"Why not wait for our current vendor to add these capabilities?"** Your SIEM vendor's AI roadmap is their priority, not yours. Splunk, Microsoft, and others will add agentic features eventually—but on their timeline, built on their architecture. The question is whether you can wait 2-3 years for features that exist today.
**"What about our existing SIEM contract?"** Strike48's architecture doesn't require replacing your SIEM. Deploy as an overlay, query data in place, realize agentic benefits while your current contract runs. Evaluate consolidation at renewal.
**"How do we know the efficiency claims are real?"** Request a proof-of-concept against your actual environment. Measure investigation time before and after. The claims are based on customer results—validate them with your data.
**"What's the implementation risk?"** Strike48's overlay architecture minimizes implementation complexity. No data migration required for initial deployment. Start with a focused use case, expand as confidence builds.
**"Why Strike48 versus other agentic security startups?"** Strike48 is built on Devo's proven petabyte-scale platform—10+ years of production hardening, Fortune 500 customers, enterprise-grade reliability. The agentic capabilities are new. The infrastructure is battle-tested.
## **The Conversation Framework**
When presenting to leadership, structure the conversation:
1. **Current state pain** (2 minutes): Alert volume we can't address. Coverage gaps we've accepted. Detection backlog that grows monthly.
2. **Market context** (2 minutes): AI agents can now do real security work. This isn't speculative—it's deployed at scale. Our competitors are evaluating the same shift.
3. **Capability overview** (3 minutes): What Strike48 does differently. Investigation autonomy. Flexible data architecture. Human oversight where it matters.
4. **Financial model** (5 minutes): Current state costs. Projected benefits. Three-year ROI.
5. **Risk reduction** (3 minutes): Coverage improvement. Speed improvement. Capacity improvement.
6. **Ask** (1 minute): Approve proof-of-concept. Validate claims against our environment. Decision point in 60 days.
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**Get help building your business case.** [Request an ROI analysis workshop](#) with Strike48. We'll help you quantify current state costs, model projected benefits, and build a business case tailored to your environment.