Splunk is powerful, and for regulated industries it is often deeply entrenched. It is also expensive, and its licensing model plus its data-handling assumptions can put it at odds with strict data-residency and compliance requirements. If you are evaluating a Splunk alternative for regulated industries, the two questions that matter most are: can I lower the cost of ingesting and retaining security and operational logs, and can I keep that data fully under my control? This post looks at both.
Why Splunk gets expensive
Splunk’s cost has historically scaled with the volume of data you index (and more recently with workload-based pricing). Either way, security and observability data is high-volume and grows continuously, so the bill grows with it. Regulated industries feel this most acutely because they cannot simply drop data: audit trails, security logs, and compliance records often have mandated retention. You end up paying to index and retain enormous volumes precisely because you are not allowed to throw them away.
The common cost-control advice, filtering and summarizing data before it lands, runs straight into the compliance wall: the data you are tempted to drop is often the data you are required to keep.
What regulated industries actually need from an alternative
- Complete retention at a bearable cost. Keep every log for the full mandated window without the storage line dominating the budget.
- Data that stays in your control. For data residency and sovereignty, telemetry should remain in your own cloud or data center, not a vendor’s.
- Real security analytics. Detections, correlation, and investigation across all of it, not a sampled subset.
- Familiar query languages. Teams that know SPL should not have to relearn everything.
The Sasquatch approach: keep everything, in your cloud, for less
Sasquatch Labs is built for exactly this problem. It reduces observability and SIEM cost with lossless compression, so you keep 100% of your logs and pay dramatically less to retain them. Three things make it a fit for regulated environments:
- Bring your own cloud. Everything runs in your environment. Telemetry never leaves, which satisfies data-residency and sovereignty requirements by construction and removes egress cost. See BYOC observability.
- Lossless, high-ratio compression. Long compliance retention stops being a budget problem when the cost per byte drops by an order of magnitude. See log retention costs.
- SPL and more, natively. The Snowman query engine speaks SPL, LogQL, TraceQL, PromQL, and KQL, and the Yeti SIEM layer runs detections and correlation in place, so your SOC keeps working the way it does today.
For regulated industries the winning move is not to keep less security data. It is to keep all of it, in your own cloud, at a cost you can actually sustain.
Evaluating a Splunk alternative
When you compare options, score them on the axes that matter for compliance-heavy environments: total cost to retain the full mandated window, whether data leaves your control, whether security analytics run on complete data, and how much your team has to relearn. A platform that keeps every byte in your cloud, compresses it losslessly, and speaks your existing query languages changes the economics without asking you to compromise on completeness or control.
Related reading: SIEM cost reduction and telemetry security and compliance risk. See the platform at sasquatchlabs.io.