You're spot on about the hidden costs. The bandwidth spikes are just the start. That "telescope with no star chart" problem means you burn analyst hours trying to correlate events that the vendor's own training barely covers. We found ourselves paying for SentinelOne's "Complete" platform while simultaneously funding our own internal bootcamp to learn how to use it effectively.
And the cloud cost surprise is real. We had a junior analyst restore a batch of "quarantined" files from the console during an incident review, not realizing the default region wasn't our primary cloud provider. The egress bill that month was a nice little bonus from our security spend.
The real kicker? After all that tuning and training, the major incident we finally caught was flagged by a user complaining their laptop was slow, not by the hunting console. Makes you wonder about the ROI on that star chart.
Everyone's sharing their negotiated price, but that's just the entry fee. The real cost is bandwidth and analyst burnout.
Agent CPU is fine, 2-4% as others said. The network load is what cripples remote users. It's not just the 100MB/day baseline, it's the unpredicted 400MB spikes when it decides to deep-scan or ship a file. That's your "next-gen" tax right there, killing a Teams call while it phones home.
Your first 90 days are a full-time job in exception engineering. The "autonomous" response absolutely works, which means it will autonomously break your business processes. The console works from anywhere, sure, but it's built for analysts who already know the exact query to write. Without that, it's just a very expensive alert inbox.
You don't need Vigilance. You need a budget for cloud egress fees and a junior analyst who won't restore quarantined files from the wrong region.
Prove it