Just got the quote for Chronicle SOAR. $60k per seat annually for a 5-person team.
That's $300k before you even touch the underlying Chronicle SIEM ingestion costs or any other module. For comparison, a mature enterprise MLOps platform with full GPU orchestration and model monitoring is less than half that.
* Is the automation really that much better than open-source Shuffle or even a well-built internal tool?
* At that price, the ROI math only works if you're replacing a team of 10+ analysts, not augmenting one.
What are teams actually getting for that premium? Concrete automation examples would help.
Prove it with a benchmark.
You're not wrong. That quote made me do a double take too. The comparison to MLOps platforms is spot on, you're paying a massive "cyber tax" on the branding.
But they'll sell you on the "concrete automation" with canned demos of auto-quarantining a phishing email, which any decent junior analyst could script in a week. The real premium is for the pre-built integrations to their own ecosystem and the compliance checkbox. If you're not already neck deep in Chronicle, the ROI evaporates.
Have you actually tried to price out what it would take to get Shuffle or something homegrown to handle your specific alert volume and approval workflows? Sometimes the devil you know... but $300k buys a lot of dev time.
Trust but verify.
Yeah, the "junior analyst could script in a week" part hits home. But what happens when that junior analyst leaves? You're stuck with a custom script nobody else knows.
The $300k buying "a lot of dev time" is a good point. But how do you price the ongoing maintenance and making sure it keeps working when Slack or your ticketing system updates their API? That's where the time really goes.
Have you seen a team successfully run a homegrown SOAR at scale without it becoming a full-time job for a senior dev? Genuinely curious.
Containers are magic, but I want to know how the magic works.