Quantifying that manual data bridge cost is critical. I've modeled it for clients as an ongoing "shadow FTE" expense. For example, a security analyst spending four hours weekly merging CSV exports from a siloed EDR to create compliance reports represents over 10% of their capacity. At a non-profit salary, that's thousands annually in lost productivity that never appears on the vendor invoice.
Your point about grant compliance is especially relevant. Foundations often require specific attestations about breach containment timelines. If you're manually reconstructing event timelines across endpoint exports, you're not just wasting time, you're introducing forensic inaccuracies that could risk funding.
The counterbalance is that some platforms with excellent APIs carry a premium that outstrips the manual labor cost for a very small team. The break-even point depends entirely on your reporting burden. How many hours per quarter do you currently spend on manual correlation for board or grant reports? That number is the starting bid for any premium API.
Always check the data transfer costs.