3 key takeaways:
- Most companies are sitting on powerful analytics platforms like SIEMs—but rarely use them beyond cyber.
- There’s untapped potential to apply these tools to fraud, insider threat, IP protection, and compliance monitoring.
- With the right strategy, businesses can reduce compliance costs, improve visibility, and make better investment decisions.
Why this matters
Today’s risk environment demands more from businesses than ever before. Whether you’re protecting sensitive R&D, complying with complex regulations, or trying to prevent fraud, the traditional playbook is falling short. Organisations invest millions in security analytics. Frequently though, use of these tools happens in a silo, begging the question “can’t they do more?”. That’s a missed opportunity.
Many organisations already own high-powered Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) and observability platforms to give rich, real-time operational insights. In most businesses, there is no use of these tools outside of cybersecurity. That’s where this story begins.
The landscape: SIEMs, observability tools, and everything in between
The tooling landscape in most medium-to-large enterprises is complex, but it’s also full of hidden potential. From security teams running SIEMs to engineers monitoring application performance, there are multiple systems collecting, storing, and analysing valuable data. The challenge is most businesses don’t fully understand how these platforms differ—or how they complement one another.
Let’s unpack the main types of platforms:
- Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) – These platforms are the backbone of many security operations centres. SIEMs like Splunk, Sentinel, and Elastic collect and correlate security events to find and respond to threats in real time. They’re also critical for compliance reporting, audit trails, and forensic investigations.
- Observability platforms – Tools like Datadog, New Relic, and OpenTelemetry provide deep insights into how systems are operating. Used by DevOps and Site Reliability Engineers, they collect metrics and logs to monitor system health, performance, and prevent outages.
- Data lakes and warehouses – These centralised platforms are great for long-term storage and complex data queries. However, they often lack the speed or alerting capability needed for real-time risk response.
- BI dashboards and analytics tools – Platforms like Power BI and Tableau provide strong visualisation for decision-making. They focus on historical data, not real-time detection.
- Log management platforms – Tools like ELK store data for troubleshooting, but don’t get integrated into business processes.
- Application Performance Monitoring (APM) tools – Focus on user experience and technical metrics but often miss the business context needed for enterprise insights.
- Custom threat intelligence platforms – Powerful in capable hands, but often resource-intensive to maintain and inaccessible to non-technical teams.
Understanding how these tools work—and where they overlap—opens up new opportunities for extending their use into fraud, compliance, and continuous monitoring.
Non-cyber use cases hiding in plain sight
What became clear through my research is that many businesses are unknowingly sitting on a goldmine of data. This data can improve resilience, situational awareness and decision quality, resulting in reduced losses. Many tools already have access to the underlying telemetry. The gap is that organisations don’t translate their use cases into language or workflows these systems can use to solve business or compliance problems.
Here are a few real-world examples of how some organisations are using their existing telemetry platforms to solve non-security problems:
- Fraud detection – One financial services firm used their SIEM to detect behavioural anomalies in user logins and transaction data. This helped identify fraudulent activity faster and reduce false positives in fraud alerts.
- IP protection – A biotech set up observability pipeline alerts to detect unusual access patterns to protected research environments. This gave them a chance to intervene before valuable data walked out the door.
- Insider threat monitoring – A large enterprise integrated HR systems with SIEM logs to flag when high-risk employees (e.g. those about to exit the company) accessed sensitive files, enabling pre-emptive action.
- Physical security integration – A logistics company ingested building access logs into their SIEM to monitor for suspicious after-hours activity. This provided near real-time visibilty of threats in zones containing high-value or regulated assets.
- Regulatory compliance – A US health services provider configured automated alerts to detect improper access to patient records. This streamlining HIPAA compliance and reporting, easing the burden on their audit teams.
These examples aren’t outliers. They represent what’s possible when organisations look beyond the traditional cyber perimeter and align technology with broader business risks.
Trade-offs and tricky bits
Of course, extending the use of SIEMs and observability platforms isn’t without its challenges. These are powerful tools, but were built with specific users and functions in mind. Repurposing them for broader use requires careful planning, stakeholder alignment, and a realistic view of limitations.
| Metric | Considerations |
| Cost vs return | SIEM platforms, in particular, can become prohibitively expensive as more data sources are added. Every additional log source or telemetry stream can drive up ingestion costs, licensing fees, and infrastructure requirements. Businesses need to balance the value of added insights against escalating costs. |
| Expertise and resourcing | Many of these platforms are complex and require specialist skills to configure and manage. Cyber teams are often already overstretched, they don’t have capacity. Asking them to support fraud, compliance, or operational use cases often requires cross-skilling or additional resources. |
| Data governance and privacy | Aggregating sensitive business data—such as HR records, payroll, or personnel movements—can raise privacy concerns. Any use needs to be aligned with data protection laws such as Australia’s Privacy Act, or the GDPR in Europe. |
| Tool mismatch and workflow gaps | Observability platforms are fast, lightweight, and built for performance. But they’re not designed for legal defensibility, long-term retention, or audit-ready compliance reporting. SIEMs, on the other hand, are great for that. But, they can lack the ease of use or responsiveness that observability tools provide. |
| Redundancy and duplication | Without coordination, multiple teams end up collecting and analysing the same data using different tools. This can lead to inefficiency and potential confusion around ownership and accountability. Worst case for regulatory compliance, you generate contradictory records which is a red flag to an inspector. |
Yes, there are challenges, but the opportunities are too great to ignore. Now’s the time for risk and compliance leaders seeking smarter, scalable approaches to assurance to speak to the CIO.
Real compliance benefits—if you play it right
Compliance is a growing cost centre for many organisations. Increasingly, fraud and protective security is becoming a regulated compliance program. Take Australia’s Privacy Act, Scams Protection Framework Act and Security of Critical Infrastructure Act as two examples. Teams are under pressure to meet complex compliance obligations, conduct audits, investigate incidents, and coordinate a response. Given most responses increasingly relate to compliance obligations, there’s a regulatory imperative to get this right. They’re often using manual processes and disconnected systems to do this, taking time, effort and higher chance of errors.
This is where SIEM and observability platforms can play a much bigger role. By automating key controls organisations can reduce the manual workload on compliance and audit teams. Examples include detecting access to sensitive data, validating privileged user activity, or monitoring export-controlled environments. The result? Improved productivity, cost control, and compliance. Dashboards and real-time alerts eliminate the need for manual reviews, reduce investigation time, and improve coordination across the business.
These platforms also provide strong evidence for legal and regulatory inquiries. For example, access logs and alert histories makes it easier to prove data segregation or show controls were in place. This supports compliance SOX, the Privacy Act, or Australia’s Security of Critical Infrastructure Act (SOCI).
These tools allow compliance teams to shift from reactive policing to proactive risk reduction. In turn, this makes them more efficient, more strategic, and more valuable to the business.
What business leaders need to do next
This isn’t just a technology issue—it’s a business opportunity. Executives should be asking how they can leverage their existing technology investments to solve new problems.
Here’s a five-step path to get started:
- Audit your existing tools – Inventory the telemetry and analytics platforms already in use. Identify whether you have a SIEM, an observability platform, or both. Are you using these to good effect?
- Map broader risks – Work with fraud, HR, IP, and compliance stakeholders to identify high-impact, high-cost business risks. Identify use cases that benefit from automation and real-time monitoring.
- Engage privacy and legal early – Involving these teams from the outset. This helps prevent delays later and ensures any solution aligns with data protection laws and internal governance frameworks.
- Pilot a use case – Choose one low-risk, high-impact use case (e.g. unusual access to critical systems) and configure alerts or dashboards using existing tools. Track the cost, value, and effort involved.
- Build the business case – Quantify what value these solution will save in hours, cost or loss reduction, or productivity. Present this in a way that links directly to business strategy and financial performance.
If you’re already paying for the Ferrari, why are you only using it for trips to the supermarket? With a little tuning and creativity, you can unlock value across new use cases without buying yet another tool.
Further Reading
- ACFE. “Occupational Fraud 2022: A Report to the Nations.” Median loss from internal fraud is USD $117,000 per case.
- Australian Government OAIC. “Notifiable Data Breaches Report: January–June 2023.” 70% of breaches caused by human error or malicious insiders.
- Curwell, P. (2025). Crafting Security Business Cases for Executive Buy-in
- Curwell, P. (2023). Developing an compliance obligation register for your business
- Curwell, P. (2022). Alert management and insider risk continuous monitoring systems
- Gartner. “SIEM Market Guide 2023.” SIEM tools cost between $100,000–$1M annually for mid-to-large enterprises.
- IBM. “Cost of a Data Breach Report 2023.” Average breach cost globally is USD $4.45 million.
- Ponemon Institute. “The True Cost of Compliance 2022.” Average compliance spend is $5.47 million per year; non-compliance costs $14.82 million.
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