Buying a SIEM is easy. Making it detect anything useful is the hard part. Northern Star delivers managed SIEM services for UK businesses that own the platform but do not have the analysts to run it.
We onboard your log sources, tune the rules, watch the alerts around the clock and escalate real incidents with context.
You keep ownership of the platform and the data.
Most organisations reach the same point. The licence is paid, logs are flowing, and nobody has time to tune correlation rules.
Two thousand alerts sit in a queue nobody reads. The platform becomes an audit tick rather than a detection engine.
We fix that. Where you need full security operations rather than platform management, our managed SOC service is the wider option.
We connect identity, endpoints, firewalls, DNS, email, cloud platforms and critical applications. Parsing, field mapping, time synchronisation and normalisation are handled properly, so events are actually comparable across systems. Every source gets an owner, a collection method and a health check.
Out of the box rules generate noise. We build use cases around your actual risks and map coverage to MITRE ATT&CK. Thresholds, time windows and suppression are tuned as feedback arrives. Every change is documented, so noise falls without quietly removing detection.
Analysts review events continuously and decide what is genuine. You receive prioritised incidents with context and a recommended action, not raw alerts forwarded by email.
When something real appears, we establish scope, affected systems and likely impact, then set out containment options. Findings feed back into the rules. We can pair the service with vulnerability management so the gap an attacker used gets closed rather than logged.
Ingestion latency, failed parsers, broken connectors and rule execution are monitored continuously. A silent log source is worse than no log source, because it creates false confidence. We also review data volume against detection value, so you are not paying to ingest logs nothing is looking at.
Retention tiers, role based access and audit trails are configured against your obligations rather than a default setting. Reports are written to satisfy ISO 27001, Cyber Essentials, PCI DSS and UK GDPR evidence requests.
You do not need to rip anything out. We operate Microsoft Sentinel, Splunk, Elastic and similar platforms.
Where a migration genuinely makes sense, we handle it, including Microsoft Azure log ingestion and workspace design.
If you have no SIEM yet, we help you choose one sized for your data volume rather than the largest deal on offer.
Our client satisfaction score sits at 95.4 across recent reviews, from sixty five responses in ninety days.
Escalations arrive with a recommendation rather than a question. Account managers know the estate rather than the ticket.
Fixed monthly pricing separates platform consumption from service effort, so the bill is predictable as you grow.
Discovery first, covering priority threats, critical assets, existing sources and retention needs.
Then integration, baselining and a tuning period while we learn what normal looks like in your environment. Most deployments reach steady state within four to eight weeks.
Staff awareness training usually runs alongside, because the alerts you least want to see start with a person clicking something.
The two are related, but the accountability is different.
Managed SIEM services centre on the platform and its data pipeline: connectors, parsing, correlation rules, tuning, retention and platform health.
A managed SOC centres on people and process, monitoring multiple security tools, triaging alerts, hunting for threats, coordinating incident response and often containing on your behalf.
A SOC will usually use a SIEM, but a SIEM on its own is not a SOC.
Choose managed SIEM services when you have tooling and internal capability but nobody with time to operate the platform properly. Choose a managed SOC when you need an operational security team rather than platform expertise.
In practice, most organisations with an internal IT team but no security specialists start with managed SIEM, then add SOC coverage as the estate grows. Northern Star can scope either, or run them together.
Pricing has two components, and they should always be quoted separately.
The first is platform consumption, driven by data ingestion volume or events per second, plus retention tier and licensing.
The second is managed service effort, driven by the number and complexity of log sources, detection engineering scope, service hours and reporting requirements.
As a rough guide, UK small and mid sized organisations typically pay between one thousand five hundred and five thousand pounds per month. Heavy ingestion or full round the clock analyst coverage pushes that higher.
Building the same capability internally rarely comes in under two hundred thousand pounds a year once licensing, infrastructure and a genuine analyst rota are counted.
Ask any provider how growth in data volume will affect your bill before you sign.
Yes. Northern Star is platform agnostic and will operate the SIEM you already own, including Microsoft Sentinel, Splunk and Elastic Security.
There is rarely a good reason to replace a platform because a provider prefers something else. Doing so usually loses historical data and detection work you have already paid for.
Discovery confirms platform compatibility, who holds the licensing, what access we need, data residency requirements and retention scope before onboarding begins.
Where a migration genuinely does make sense, typically because the platform is priced badly for your data volume or lacks connectors you need, we will say so and handle the move. Both platforms run in parallel until the new detections are proven.
We also document what we inherit, so if you ever move again the detection content and configuration go with you.
Start with the sources that answer the questions you would actually ask during an incident, not with everything that produces a log.
Identity and authentication comes first. Compromised credentials are the most common entry point, and almost every investigation begins with who logged in and from where.
Cloud control plane activity follows, since that is where privilege escalation shows up. Then endpoint detection data, firewall and network logs, DNS, email security and your critical business applications.
Collecting everything is the classic mistake. Ingestion costs rise, noise increases and detection quality falls.
Good managed SIEM services prioritise by risk, asset criticality and investigative value, then add sources over time as use cases demand it. Each source should have a named owner and a health check, so silent failures are noticed rather than discovered during an incident.
Most frameworks require active monitoring, log retention and documented incident response. That is exactly what a SIEM produces when it is run properly.
ISO 27001, PCI DSS, UK GDPR and Cyber Essentials all expect evidence that security events are collected, reviewed and acted upon.
Managed SIEM services generate that evidence as a by product of normal operation: continuous monitoring records, tamper resistant audit trails, retention aligned to your legal obligations, and formal investigation notes for every escalation.
Northern Star writes reports for auditors rather than engineers, showing controls in operation, threats detected and actions taken.
That removes the annual scramble to reconstruct twelve months of activity from raw logs, which is where most organisations lose time during an audit.
Basic detections go live quickly, but an honest answer separates deployment from maturity.
Log onboarding and initial rule deployment typically take two to four weeks, depending on how many sources are in scope and how cooperative the systems are.
From that point the platform catches obvious things almost immediately, such as known malware, brute force attempts and impossible travel.
What takes longer is baselining. The platform has to learn what normal looks like before subtle activity such as lateral movement or slow data exfiltration becomes visible.
Four to eight weeks is realistic for steady state, and detection quality keeps improving for several months as tuning feedback accumulates.
Anyone promising full maturity from day one is describing a product, not a service.
Tell us what your SIEM is currently missing. We will tell you honestly whether the problem is the platform, the rules or the coverage.
Book a call with an experienced analyst, not a sales script.
Tell us what is slowing your organisation down. An experienced specialist will help you understand the most practical next step.
6 global locations. One local point of contact. London-based support.
Dependable IT support and cyber security for ambitious organisations in London and around the world.
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