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How the MOD can reduce costs while increasing protection with data mesh

By

Crossley McEwen

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Many defence organisations operate in an environment where dozens of disjointed security tools create financial and operational inefficiency. Much of the organisation’s spending is dedicated to simply managing this complexity. There’s also considerable complexity in ensuring compliance across MOD and NATO standards. Managing multitenant cybersecurity contracts adds an additional administrative burden, while legacy infrastructure demands increased operation and maintenance costs. Meanwhile, defence contractors face mounting threats from malicious cyber attacks and sophisticated ransomware.

Fragmentation like this creates non-interoperable, siloed systems, forcing manual correlation across platforms. Worse, it can slow threat response and create security blind spots. When incidents occur, costs multiply as analysts navigate multiple interfaces to form a complete picture of the threat.

AI-driven SIEM transforms defence cybersecurity economics

Elastic Security’s unified security information and event management (SIEM) is a single platform that automatically finds and responds to threats across your endpoints, networks, and cloud, replacing many separate tools and making security management simpler and more cost-effective.

It reduces hard costs and increases efficiency. Threat detection with Elastic Security is eight times faster, with 75% fewer false positives thanks to AI-powered analytics. Prebuilt ML models and ES|QL enable cross-domain investigations without manual correlation. This automation cuts incident response times by up to 70%, minimising false positives and allowing teams to focus on genuine risks.

These combined benefits and tool consolidation lead to a 42%–56% reduction in total cost of ownership (TCO). Reducing the costs of owning and managing security systems over time — from licensing to maintenance and support — translates into an important cost-saving opportunity for the MOD.

Breaking silos and reducing defence costs through a data mesh approach

The MOD faces unique challenges with data silos across classification levels and operational domains. Elastic’s data mesh approach addresses siloed data issues by enabling secure queries across multiple data repositories without moving it, copying it, or compromising security boundaries. This approach aligns with the MOD's Defence Data Strategy1 by breaking down contractual and technical silos while maintaining appropriate access controls.

Elastic’s Search AI Platform eliminates data silos by giving all your data a common language, making it easier to search, understand, analyse, and act on information from different sources. The result is interoperability between data formats and classified and unclassified networks, which is critical for defence operations that must maintain separation while enabling appropriate information sharing.

How data mesh capabilities address cost-saving and operational challenges in defence

  • Eliminating blind spots between security domains. Cross-cluster search allows security teams to conduct investigations across classified and unclassified networks — a critical step for identifying sophisticated threats that traverse security domains. 
  • Storing data affordably and at scale. Elasticsearch logsdb index mode is designed to reduce data storage costs by up to 65% by efficiently storing and searching essential log data.
  • Accessing historical data without delays. Elastic’s tiered storage helps cut costs while maintaining full visibility across all your data, whether it’s days or years old. It also empowers strategic decisions and faster responses by ensuring teams have access to the right data at the right time. 
  • Integrating multiple cloud environments securely and efficiently. Elastic supports MOD’s cloud integration strategy, which aims to use hybrid and multi-cloud environments to enhance operational flexibility, improve data-sharing capabilities, and optimise costs while maintaining strict security standards across classified and unclassified networks.

Together, these technologies create a data mesh “speed layer” for real-time analytics on multi-classification data without requiring data duplication. You can quickly analyse different kinds of data as it comes in, without needing to reorganise it first. For the MOD, it also avoids multi-vendor transition costs while enhancing analytical capabilities.

AI dramatically reduces security administration

Elastic offers thousands of threat detection rules to identify and alert on a wide range of threats, while the AI Assistant supports compliance with security best practices. The platform's role-based access controls and audit trails provide the governance foundation required for cross-domain systems. Automation eliminates the labour-intensive process of manually gathering compliance evidence, producing documentation, and validating controls. For defence agencies managing systems across Official, Secret, and Above Secret classifications, this means significantly reduced administrative overhead and directly supports the Digital MOD.UK Secure by Design’s mission to unify security standards across classifications.2

Measuring clear ROI from unified defence cybersecurity investments

Elastic enables concrete measurements by linking operational metrics to financial outcomes. Rather than abstract security posture assessments, TCO calculators can quantify specific savings across multiple dimensions. For example, immediate metrics track tool consolidation benefits, measuring licensing cost reduction and operational overhead savings. A report by Enterprise Strategy Group for Elastic found that private and public sector organizations reduced total cost of ownership by up to 56% through security tool consolidation and infrastructure optimization. These insights highlight how defence agencies could unlock similar — or even greater — operational savings.

Other measurements include incident investigation and response efficiency, where Elastic Security helped reduce mean time to investigate (MTTI) from 300 to 90 minutes and mean time to remediate (MTTR) from 180 to 6 minutes, showing how unified security improves overall speed and effectiveness.

When security tools and costs multiply but efficiency doesn’t, the solution isn’t adding more layers — it’s unifying them into a coherent, cost-effective whole.

Join us for Mission advantage: Strategic conversations with defence leaders, a four-part online series where defence, government, and industry voices share their vision for the future. Learn how to balance innovation and cost-efficiency in mission-critical operations.

Explore additional resources:

Sources:

1. Gov.uk, “Policy paper - Data Strategy for Defence,” 2021.

2. Gov.uk, “Secure by Design: User-centred guidance on Digital MOD.UK,” 2025.

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