Illustrative solution brief · Proposed selections
Follow the proposed approach for a 25-person controlled-data organization: confirm obligations and data flows, evaluate eligible services, connect technical work to Phantom assurance and maintain the operating checks.
The challenge
Connect everyday IT support, required safeguards and regular reviews, with clear responsibilities and fewer overlapping tools.
Illustrative 25-user defense supplier with CDI/CUI and potential ITAR obligations. Contract, data classification and personnel eligibility have not been determined.
Connect everyday IT support, required safeguards and regular reviews, with clear responsibilities and fewer overlapping tools.
Governance, evidence coordination and a representative logging pilot. The complete controlled-data platform and assessment are separate decisions.
Every count, product selection, implementation and financial input below is illustrative. Actual customer results and realized ROI/profit have not been supplied.
Start with the work people need to do, the information they handle and the systems they already use. Check security, compatibility, support and recovery needs before comparing costs.
For candidates that pass the gates, score functional fit 30%, operational maintainability 25%, integration and data portability 20%, three-year total cost 15%, and supplier/support resilience 10%. These are proposed weights, not completed vendor test results.
Run a representative pilot, negative tests and recovery exercise. Price hosting, retention, patching, engineering, support, training and exit. A lower license bill wins only when the complete solution meets the requirement.
Use the customer’s approved directory, endpoint protection and data boundary. Confirm the actual contract and platform eligibility first.
Alternative and decision trigger: A commercial regulated platform may be the best fit when personnel, cryptographic, hosting or contractual requirements rule out an ordinary deployment.
Reuse built-in Windows event collection; evaluate open-source analysis for the approved event subset. Preserve source identity and test ingestion end to end.
Alternative and decision trigger: Compare the existing commercial SIEM or managed offering against retention, investigation, support and eligibility needs. WEC is a Windows capability, not open-source software; Windows licenses remain.
Assign control owners, evidence links, remediation status and review dates. Keep sensitive content in the approved customer boundary.
Alternative and decision trigger: A commercial GRC platform is preferred when workflow, assurance integrations or scale justify it. An index alone does not implement or validate controls.
The sponsor approves clauses, framework revision, data paths, people, suppliers and support locations.
Approved systems provide scoped events and control evidence; the program tracks accountable owners and unresolved gaps.
Phantom reviews your current safeguards and supporting records, then helps you plan and budget for improvements. Formal assessment or certification is a separate step.
Interview the sponsor and data owners; map obligations and actual systems. Stop if the support or hosting boundary is not eligible.
Choose one representative workflow and logging source. Define retention, access, incident reporting and safe test data.
Deploy approved changes within maintenance windows; retain configuration and collector rollback. Do not route restricted data into a general support queue.
Rehearse an access change, evidence retrieval, collector outage and reporting tabletop. Assign monthly checks and corrective actions.
These are required pilot checks, not tests already completed for a customer.
Governance/evidence/logging component only; this is not the $7,625 partial managed-IT-plus-governance budget or a full compliance quote.
USD, 36 months, no discounting or inflation. The commercial assembly is hypothetical, not a vendor quote. Open-source license assumptions apply only to the selected community component; paid platforms, support and hosting remain explicit.
| Input or result | Hypothetical commercial assembly | Proposed L8DT assembly |
|---|---|---|
| One-time setup | $18,000 | $15,000 |
| Monthly licenses | $900 | $300 |
| Monthly infrastructure/storage | $300 | $450 |
| Monthly operating service | $3,000 | $2,500 |
| Customer operator effort / month | 8 hours | 12 hours |
| Monthly cash outlay | $4,200 | $3,250 |
| 36-month cash TCO | $169,200 | $132,000 |
| 36-month economic TCO incl. valued effort | $187,920 | $160,080 |
$37,200 over 36 months; 21.99% of the commercial cash TCO.
28.18%. Formula: (commercial cash TCO − proposed cash TCO) ÷ proposed cash TCO. This compares hypothetical avoided expenditure with the proposed component investment.
0 months. Formula: round up positive additional setup ÷ positive recurring monthly cash difference. No interest or time value included.
$14,400 in year one; $11,400 per subsequent year. Assumes the modeled costs are recognized as operating expenses, equal revenue and unchanged other costs. Capitalization, depreciation and taxes may change accounting profit.
4 additional customer hours/month at $65/hour. Valued effort is not a payroll saving. Economic benefit including effort: $27,840. Add 30% to proposed operating-service cost: 36-month cash advantage becomes $10,200.
Actual implementation, measured ROI and realized profit: NOT PROVIDED. No revenue uplift, avoided breach, uptime improvement or staffing reduction is assumed.
Ordinary managed IT, eligible CUI storage/cloud, restricted 24/7 staffing, remediation, assessor fees, legal/export review, taxes and hardware are excluded equally from this component model. No compliance score or certification is predicted.
A signed scope and current supplier quotes replace these assumptions before any service commitment.
The intended result
Confirm the applicable contract, authorized people and supplier eligibility before implementation. The illustrative design and financial model do not establish compliance, certification or an approved customer platform.
Define the actual assets, permissions, coverage, costs and acceptance with a Service Champion.