Internal employee costs are averaged to be $80,000 per year per FTE. Based on calculating TCO of the two vendor proposals over a 5 year period, which of the following options is MOST accurate?

A Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) has requested that a SIEM solution be implemented. The CISO wants to know upfront what the projected TCO would be before looking further into this concern. Two vendor proposals have been received:

Vendor A: product-based solution which can be purchased by the pharmaceutical company.

Capital expenses to cover central log collectors, correlators, storage and management consoles expected to be $150,000. Operational expenses are expected to be a 0.5 full time employee (FTE) to manage the solution, and 1 full time employee to respond to incidents per year.

Vendor B: managed service-based solution which can be the outsourcer for the pharmaceutical company’s needs.

Bundled offering expected to be $100,000 per year.

Operational expenses for the pharmaceutical company to partner with the vendor are expected to be a 0.5 FTE per year.

Internal employee costs are averaged to be $80,000 per year per FTE. Based on calculating TCO of the two vendor proposals over a 5 year period, which of the following options is MOST accurate?
A . Based on cost alone, having an outsourced solution appears cheaper.
B . Based on cost alone, having an outsourced solution appears to be more expensive.
C . Based on cost alone, both outsourced an in-sourced solutions appear to be the same.
D . Based on cost alone, having a purchased product solution appears cheaper.

View Answer

Answer: A