In the past few years we’ve all learned that cybersecurity needs to be a priority for every organization, but it’s not always accessible or affordable for everyone. Unfortunately, the cybersecurity market is inundated with products with high barriers to entry in the form of complex onboarding, lengthy sales processes, exorbitant costs, or all of the above.
We want to change that.
We’re proud to launch Blumira’s Free edition, a security information and event management (SIEM) platform that secures Microsoft 365 environments for unlimited data and users.
Blumira’s Free edition is the first of its kind: a self-service, fully-supported SIEM with threat detection and response that’s easy for anyone to deploy, manage and use.
At Blumira, our ultimate goal is to make security accessible and affordable for all organizations — and our free SIEM is a big step in that direction. I wanted to share some of the reasons that we decided to launch a free SIEM with threat detection and response.
For a long time, SIEMs have only been accessible to cybersecurity experts. Notorious for long and complicated deployments, traditional SIEMs require weeks or months of fine-tuning, configuration, and parsing to get fully up and running. And to run a report, users need to know complex query languages.
For small and mid-market businesses (SMBs), these are all major barriers to successfully adopting a SIEM. Most SMBs don’t have a dedicated cybersecurity expert, let alone a full staff. Oftentimes an IT admin, engineer, or perhaps a line-of-business employee takes on cybersecurity as one of many responsibilities. And as the labor shortage continues, that’s unlikely to change anytime soon.
People of all experience and knowledge levels need access to good cybersecurity. That includes a CFO responsible for securing Microsoft 365 due to cybersecurity insurance requirements, or an IT admin that’s learning about cybersecurity as they go. Blumira’s free edition helps with that — not just by being free but by being simple and easy to use.
Setting up Blumira’s free SIEM takes a matter of minutes and doesn’t require any additional resources, including a sensor. Once you’re set up, Blumira pulls in all of your Microsoft 365 data and automatically deploys detections fine-tuned to reduce noisy alerts. When you receive a critical finding, security playbooks walk you through how to respond and remediate a threat.
Plenty of SaaS vendors offer free trials or editions, but we find that many of these vendors want to provide the smallest amount of value while incurring the least amount of cost. Rather, the free edition serves as an opportunity for sales and marketing to gather hot leads.
While that makes a lot of sense from a vendor’s perspective, it puts users into situations where they need to work around a lot of limitations to prove that the product has value — or they end up dodging countless emails and phone calls from a sales rep after signing up.
Other vendors may offer trials with a few features, or the ability to look at an individual piece of data, but we find it doesn’t let you get deep enough into the product to actually leverage the security value that you need from it.
A product that places limits on the amount of users, data ingested, or core features is inherently difficult to work with and derive value from, which is why we designed Blumira Free without any of those barriers.
Any organization that uses Microsoft 365 is going to get immense value out of Blumira Free. Our free edition includes:
We’ve also made it easy to sign up for Blumira Free by not requiring a credit card or sales conversation.
We’re glad that we’re not alone in this approach; other leading cybersecurity vendors are changing the industry by offering free products without the friction.
Learn about other free editions that provide value in our webinar >
With over 250 million monthly users, Microsoft 365 is one of the most popular cloud software, especially as remote work forces companies to move away from on-premises Exchange environments. But the popularity of Microsoft 365 makes it an appealing target for cybercrime. In fact, adversaries attack Microsoft 365 more than any other software environment (Statista).
This is especially problematic because Microsoft 365 is such a central part of an organization’s identity infrastructure. Users log in through it. Employees use it to receive and send email. Because of that reliance, Microsoft 365 becomes an extremely important piece of technology to monitor.
Here’s the other kicker: 85% of companies that use Microsoft 365 are small to medium businesses. And as we’ve mentioned previously, SMBs have fewer cybersecurity resources. That’s why access to affordable cybersecurity for Microsoft 365 is so important.
Using Blumira Free, organizations can quickly understand their level of risk and gain deeper visibility into their Microsoft 365 environments. The free version of Blumira doesn’t limit detections, so users can quickly get into the product to view suspicious activity such as:
Learn what you get with Blumira Free>
Helping our customers develop security maturity is one of our most important goals here at Blumira. Blumira Free enables us to help not just our customers but whoever uses our free product, too. Our free product lets users experience what it’s like to identify risk in their environments and go through the process of investigating and responding to an incident, helping them take the first step in their security maturity journey.
One of the myths around security maturity is that it requires a massive budget, a team of experts, and a lot of expensive security tools. Nope; security maturity starts with a change in mindset, from “How do I make this problem go away” to “How can I become more secure in the long term?” From there, organizations can start on their security maturity journey with plenty of low-cost or free tools, Blumira Free being just one of them.
Security maturity also doesn’t involve blindly throwing more tools at the problem as a way to automatically “fix” a cybersecurity program. That approach will result in more alerts and subsequently more headaches. Instead organizations should methodically evaluate each product to see if it’s the right fit, and to determine if that product improves security and usability across the board. If a product introduces more friction, too much data, or requires a lot of time to manage, it can prevent teams from doing the work that generates real ROI.
It’s difficult to gain context for something until you actually use it. Blumira Free is a key part of the evaluation process because it helps users to learn the value of the product on their own schedules, no pressure. If it’s not a good fit, that’s okay. And if it is, we make it easy to upgrade in-app to a paid version for more security coverage, longer data retention and support from our security operations team.
Since Blumira was founded in 2018, our ultimate goal has been to provide all organizations with accessible and affordable cybersecurity. We’re proud to make this vision a reality with Blumira Free.
Whether you’re just starting out on your security journey or you’ve got a SIEM or threat detection and response in place already, trying Blumira Free only requires a few minutes — so what do you have to lose?
Create your free account here: