SIEM is dead. Long live SIEM. The category has been declared dead a dozen times and yet the market has never been more crowded, more confusing, or more full of AI-washed vendor claims. Standalone SIEMs, cloud-native SIEMs, SIEM-plus-data-lake hybrids, XDR-LITE-SIEM, open-source pipelines, co-managed MDR, the deployment models multiply faster than it's possible to navigate and keep track of the ecosystem.  This session walks through seven Socratic questions that assist in cutting through vendor noise & hype, forcing clarity on your budget and team's depth, and then mapping to the architecture that genuinely fits. Let's walk through questions that put vendors on defense and give you a defensible answer to your board.