Reducing the threat traffic that enters your network by 90% or more delivers network security cost reduction across infrastructure, cuts SIEM costs, and ends the alert fatigue that burns out security teams.
If you’re a security leader, IT director, or CISO watching security budgets climb every year, this one’s for you. Nearly every cybersecurity solution on the market today does essentially the same thing: it monitors, analyzes, and responds to traffic after it enters your network. Next-generation firewalls, intrusion detection systems, SIEM platforms, and advanced threat analytics all assume threat traffic will reach your infrastructure, and their job is to catch it once it does.
That assumption is expensive. Below, we’ll break down where the costs come from, how much you can save by stopping threats at the edge, and what it takes to cut threat traffic by 90% or more.
Traffic Volume Drives Every Downstream Security Cost
Here’s the fundamental problem that doesn’t get much discussion: the more traffic that enters your network, the more it costs to secure it. More infrastructure to handle the load. More firewall logs to store and analyze. More analysts to review alerts. More security tools to coordinate. More burnout from overwhelming workloads. The total cost of your security program scales directly with incoming threat volume.
So what if there was a different approach? What if, instead of building bigger systems to process more threats, you simply let less threat traffic into your network in the first place?
The Better Approach: Stop Threats Before They Enter Your Network
When organizations significantly reduce incoming threat traffic, everything downstream becomes cheaper, simpler, and more effective. Infrastructure savings, lower SIEM costs, and an end to security team burnout all come from one principle: reduce the unneeded traffic, and you reduce the challenges and costs of managing it.
Instead of accepting threat traffic and then working to detect it, you filter it out before it ever reaches your network infrastructure. This isn’t another monitoring layer. It’s about preventing traffic from entering in the first place.
The results are real. Centripetal reports that CleanINTERNET eliminates up to 90% of noisy event traffic, and in some environments the reduction is even bigger. One large healthcare system was logging about 60 million firewall events a day before deployment. After, it dropped to roughly 500,000 (case study). That’s not 60 million threats detected and blocked. It’s 59.5 million potential threats that never entered the network to begin with.
They never hit the firewall for inspection. They never needed to be logged. No false positives to review from traffic that was never let in, and no backing up and storing those logs. Less, less, less.
Edge Filtering vs. a Pipeline-First Approach
Many SIEM cost reduction strategies take a pipeline-first approach: they filter low value events and irrelevant events out of the log stream after they’re generated but before SIEM ingestion. Tactics like tiered storage, which moves older logs to cheaper storage, help too. Both lower your SIEM bill, but the threat traffic is still inside your network, still hitting your firewalls, and still generating data. Filtering at the network edge removes the source of that data volume entirely, so the savings show up everywhere, not just in the SIEM.
Infrastructure Cost Reduction from Lower Traffic Volume
When threat traffic decreases, every piece of security infrastructure downstream gets immediate relief. Equipment that was running at or near peak capacity suddenly has room to breathe, and costly upgrades can wait. The savings show up across several categories.
Firewall and Security Appliance Costs
Firewalls are sized based on expected traffic volume, connection rates, and add-on services. When less traffic reaches your firewalls, capacity requirements drop:
- Existing firewalls handle loads easily without upgrades, delaying or eliminating infrastructure investments that often run into six figures
- Reduced processing requirements mean lower-tier appliances can replace high-end models at refresh time
- Organizations can consolidate redundant security layers that were added just to handle volume
- Power, cooling, and data center costs decrease with smaller infrastructure needs
These are hard dollars saved.
How Less Traffic Helps Reduce SIEM Costs
Most SIEM pricing is based on data volume ingested, whether you run Splunk, Microsoft Sentinel, or Google SecOps. That creates a direct link between inbound traffic and cost: more traffic in means more logs generated, which means higher SIEM costs. When log volume drops significantly, the cost reduction for event logging can be dramatic and immediate, and you can renew your SIEM contract at a much lower tier when it comes due.
The healthcare system mentioned above that lowered its threat traffic by 90+%, additionally saw firewall log storage drop from about 5.7 GB per hour to 11.7 MB per hour. Its security architect said three weeks of logs after deployment equaled about one hour of SIEM recording before edge threat filtering was installed. (Centripetal case study).
The savings go beyond SIEM ingestion:
- Storage costs decrease proportionally, for both hot storage and long-term retention that supports compliance requirements
- Queries and searches run faster and cheaper with less security data to process
- Backup and disaster recovery costs drop with smaller data volumes
- The infrastructure that supports your SIEM (servers, storage arrays, network bandwidth) can be right-sized
For large enterprises with massive event streams, SIEM expenses can drop by six figures a year. The moment less traffic enters your network, your SIEM bill and everything tied to it starts shrinking, without sacrificing detection coverage or creating security gaps.
Threat Intelligence Feed Subscriptions
Many organizations subscribe to multiple threat intelligence feeds, hoping broader coverage will catch more threats. Each feed can cost $10,000 to $50,000 a year and requires integration, maintenance, and analyst time to use well. It’s common to maintain 5 to 10 different feeds.
When threat intelligence is applied at the network edge, before traffic enters your environment, many of those individual subscriptions become redundant. Instead of maintaining separate threat intel feeds that each cover a small slice of the threat landscape, you use aggregated intelligence from multiple sources applied upstream, all as part of the service. One Centripetal customer went from 1 threat feed to 82 (Centripetal). If your organization pays for security feeds directly or through an appliance on your network, many of them can be eliminated. Those are hard cost savings.
Network Bandwidth and Performance
Threat traffic, like all traffic, consumes bandwidth, degrades performance, and creates latency. Less unneeded traffic on the network means:
- More available bandwidth for legitimate business traffic
- Better network performance as security appliances process less
- Bandwidth upgrades delayed or avoided entirely
- Better quality of service for business-critical applications
These savings are harder to put an exact number on, but cheaper bandwidth and better performance add real value.
Human Savings: Ending Alert Fatigue and Security Team Burnout
Infrastructure savings are substantial, but the biggest impact of reduced traffic may be on security teams. Cybersecurity burnout doesn’t happen because analysts aren’t skilled or dedicated. It happens because they’re overwhelmed by impossible, constantly growing workloads.
Alert Volume and Analyst Workload
Every piece of threat traffic that enters your network can generate alerts. Analysts in security operations centers have to review those alerts, run incident response, separate genuine threats from false positives, and act. When you’re processing millions of events, that becomes unsustainable.
When the healthcare system went from 60 million events a day to 500,000, it didn’t just save on logging and firewall upgrades. It transformed its security team’s daily experience. Instead of drowning in alerts from 60 million events, the team deals with alerts from 500,000. That’s a huge drop in alerts to chase and investigate. Just as important, the events that do become alerts are much less likely to be false positives.
This shift removes the primary driver of security team burnout:
- Alert fatigue fades when alert volume becomes manageable
- Analysts can investigate thoroughly instead of making split-second triage decisions
- Genuine threats aren’t lost in the noise
- Teams can focus on strategic improvements instead of reactive firefighting
The Financial Impact of Reducing Security Team Burnout
Team retention
Burnout has measurable financial consequences. When analysts are overwhelmed, they leave. Organizations have to recruit replacements, endure months of reduced productivity during onboarding, and often lose institutional knowledge they can’t replace.
The financial impact of keeping your existing analysts:
- Avoided recruitment costs: $15,000 to $30,000 per position
- Avoided onboarding time: 3 to 6 months to full productivity
- Retained knowledge of your specific environment, threats, and systems
- Maintained team cohesion and collaboration
Team expansion
Even more significant: when the workload becomes manageable, the pressure to grow the team goes away. Organizations facing high alert volumes usually respond by hiring more analysts. At $120,000 to $180,000 per analyst per year, avoiding even one hire delivers substantial savings.
Conservative estimate: retaining one experienced analyst and avoiding one planned hire can save around $250,000. For organizations managing massive alert volumes, avoiding 2 to 3 analyst hires can mean $500,000+ in annual savings.
More Effective Security Teams
Beyond the financial savings, reducing traffic volume changes what security teams can accomplish. When analysts aren’t overwhelmed, they can:
- Proactively hunt for sophisticated threats instead of reacting to alerts
- Improve security architecture and fix structural vulnerabilities
- Build security awareness training and work with business units
- Plan for emerging threats and future security needs
- Meet compliance needs and risk management requirements thoroughly
This shift from reactive to strategic is hard to put a dollar figure on, but it’s where the highest security value comes from. Organizations don’t just save money. They get better security.
How to Actually Reduce Threat Traffic by 90%+
Doing this takes two critical components working together at wire speed.
Comprehensive Threat Intelligence at Scale
Effective traffic filtering requires comprehensive threat intelligence. Not one feed or a handful of sources, but billions of indicators aggregated from multiple sources worldwide. Centripetal’s platform processes over 10 billion indicators of compromise (Centripetal). That kind of scale delivers coverage no single organization could afford on its own and closes the gaps that come with fragmented intelligence sources.
AI-Accelerated Threat Detection at Wire Speed
Filtering traffic at the network edge only works if it doesn’t add latency or become a bottleneck. That requires AI and machine learning-accelerated processing that makes threat decisions in real time. Centripetal cites a decision rate of 10²¹ (one sextillion) and processing speeds of 100+ Gbps, so filtering happens transparently without slowing legitimate business traffic.
Organizations get reduced traffic without sacrificing network performance. The filtering happens invisibly, delivering savings without operational trade-offs.
Massive threat intelligence combined with a platform that can apply it to every packet in real time is the “secret sauce” behind any solution that claims to cut traffic by 90% or more.
Strategic Benefits Beyond Direct Cost Reduction
Infrastructure savings, lower SIEM costs, and less burnout are compelling on their own. But cutting threat traffic by 90%+ also delivers strategic advantages that compound over time.
Simplified operations: Security stacks built to handle massive traffic can be streamlined. Fewer tools to coordinate, fewer integration points to maintain, simpler troubleshooting, and lower expertise requirements.
Improved visibility: When 90%+ of the noise is gone, genuine threats stand out. Security teams can investigate thoroughly instead of triaging by volume, and sophisticated attacks aren’t lost in the alert stream.
Reduced breach risk and data loss: Every piece of threat traffic that enters your network is a potential breach. When 90%+ never arrives, the odds of successful breaches drop significantly. That matters: the average U.S. data breach cost hit $10.22 million in 2025, according to IBM’s Cost of a Data Breach Report (CyberScoop).
Frequently Asked Questions
What blocks unnecessary network traffic?
Firewalls block traffic based on rules, but they still have to inspect and log everything that reaches them. Edge-based threat filtering, like Centripetal’s CleanINTERNET, applies threat intelligence before traffic reaches your network, blocking known-bad traffic so your firewalls and SIEM never have to process it.
How much does a SIEM cost?
SIEM pricing depends on the vendor and model, but most charge by data volume ingested, events per second, users, or assets monitored. Managed SIEM for small businesses typically runs $3,000 to $15,000 a month, and large organizations can pay $7,000 to $18,000 a month (Cribl). High-volume enterprises paying per GB can spend millions a year on ingestion alone. Because cost tracks data volume, reducing what reaches your SIEM is one of the most direct ways to reduce SIEM costs.
How do you resolve alert fatigue?
Alert fatigue comes from too many alerts and too many false positives. You can tune detection rules and prioritize alerts by risk, but the most effective fix is reducing the volume of events that generate alerts in the first place. Less threat traffic means fewer alerts, and the ones that remain are more likely to be real.
What is threat intelligence?
Threat intelligence is information about known and emerging threats, such as malicious IP addresses, domains, and attack patterns, collected from multiple sources. Security teams use it to spot and block potential threats faster. Its value depends on coverage and speed: the more indicators you can apply in real time, the more threats you stop.
Conclusion: Rethinking Network Security from First Principles
The cybersecurity industry has trained organizations to accept that more threats require more infrastructure, more tools, and more people. But that assumes we have to let threat traffic into our networks and then work harder to detect malicious traffic. That assumption creates an expensive, unsustainable cycle of escalating costs and burnout.
The better approach starts with a simple question: What if we just let less threat traffic in? When organizations reduce incoming threat traffic, everything downstream becomes cheaper, simpler, and more effective.
Based on typical ranges, the financial impact is undeniable. Hard cost savings can include:
- Avoided or delayed infrastructure upgrades
- SIEM management, ingestion, and log management costs
- Cyber team burn out
But the real change goes beyond dollars. Security teams shift from reactive firefighting to manageable, strategic work. Infrastructure that was struggling to keep up now runs with headroom. Analysts who were burning out become engaged and effective. Organizations get better security outcomes while spending less.
This isn’t theoretical. It’s practical, measurable, and achievable. The question isn’t whether reducing incoming threat traffic delivers value. The question is why you’re still letting it into your network when you don’t have to.
Want to see what less traffic could save your organization?
Black Diamond Solutions can help you size the opportunity and get Centripetal CleanINTERNET in front of your network. Contact us to start the conversation.
Black Diamond Solutions
(312) 273-1830 | bds-info@blackdiamondsolutions.com
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