BUYER BRIEF  ·  VENDOR-NEUTRAL  ·  UPDATED 2026-04-27
ReferencesLast verified April 2026

Sources, citations, and methodology.

Every range and proportion on the site is sourced from public industry research. This page lists the sources and explains how we derive the aggregated ranges from them.

XDRCost.com deliberately does not publish named-vendor pricing. All ranges are aggregated from published research and presented as market ranges, not vendor-specific quotes. The sources below are the research referenced across the site.

Analyst reports

Total cost of ownership studies

Compliance retention standards

  • Twelve months audit-log retention minimum, ninety days immediately queryable. Used on the sizing and data-ingestion pages. See also pcicompliancecost.com.

  • Six-year retention for documentation of policies and procedures; implicit audit-log retention to support access accountability.

  • Log retention policy is defined by the organisation's own control language, typically twelve months minimum. See soc2compliancecost.com.

  • Risk-based retention; retention period is defined by the organisation's risk assessment. Twelve months is a common baseline. See iso27001auditcost.com.

  • No explicit log-retention mandate; incident-response obligations imply evidentiary retention for security logs, commonly interpreted as twelve to twenty-four months.

  • Seven-year retention for financial-system audit logs relevant to internal control over financial reporting.

Methodology notes

  • Market range derivation

    The per-endpoint and per-user ranges quoted across the site ($6-$18 and $5-$15 respectively) are the union of ranges reported in the Bellator, Forrester TEI, IDC, and IBM sources above, plus aggregated ranges from MSP-published TCO guides. They are not quotes and are not vendor-specific.

  • Consolidation breakeven

    The four-tool-rule-of-thumb for consolidation breakeven is an informal pattern from published TEI case studies. It is a rule of thumb, not a universal threshold; environments vary and the breakeven calculation on the TCO page is the method to verify for your own case.

  • Retention cost math

    Hot-vs-cold storage rates quoted at $0.12 and $0.03 per GB per month are illustrative mid-range values consistent with published vendor reference pricing. Actual rates vary by vendor and by contract; use the rates in your quote, not the illustrative rates, when calculating your own retention cost.

Last verified April 2026

Research cited above represents the analyst landscape and compliance standards effective at the time of publication. Analyst reports are refreshed annually; compliance standards are refreshed on the framework publishers’ own cadence. The aggregated ranges on the site will be updated as new editions publish.