New threats emerge every week, and many vendors respond with narrow, new reactive cybersecurity tool purchases to make sure a specific incident never happens again. The result? Tool sprawl. Some organizations now rely on anywhere from 45 to 83 separate cybersecurity tools.
This fragmented approach drives up costs, complicates workflows, and (believe it or not) actually increases risk and makes you less secure due to poor integration and limited visibility.
Business leaders are taking notice:
»What the data says on tool & consolidation trends
- 50% of CISOs want to consolidate their security tools
- 65% of orgs say they have too many security tools, and over half (53%) say their tools can’t be integrated.
- 75% of organizations aim to reduce their number of security vendors
- 65% say consolidation would improve their overall risk posture
The message is clear: It’s time to shift from being reactive to a more unified, strategic approach to cybersecurity.
»What is cybersecurity tool sprawl?
Cybersecurity tool sprawl is a situation where you have an unnecessary number of cybersecurity tools when fewer tools could still cover all of the organization's needs for cybersecurity tool features. Fewer tools means easier management and lower costs.
»What is cybersecurity vendor sprawl?
Same idea. Cybersecurity vendor sprawl is a situation where you have an unnecessary number of cybersecurity vendors when fewer vendors and tools could still cover all of the organization's needs for cybersecurity tool features. More tools from fewer vendors means easier relationship management with vendors and potentially lower costs due to bundling deals.
»What are the negative impacts of tool & vendor sprawl?
The negative effects of tool and vendor sprawl on costs, productivity, and risk profiles are well documented. But sometimes business leaders don’t understand the full breadth of their potential downsides:
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Overlapping functionality, unnecessary cost
Multiple tools that fulfill similar use cases are usually an unnecessary cost.
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Detection is harder
Vendor tools don’t share data well, often resulting in missed opportunities to detect and correlate signals.
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Too many tools, too many dashboards
Having to log into dozens of tools to analyze issues reduces productivity and increases the risk of missing vital alerts.
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Higher integration workload
More tools mean more integration work — that is, assuming the tools support integration into a centralized dashboard.
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Hard to debug and run audits (and run AI)
With more tools, it becomes harder to read and aggregate cybersecurity logs and other data into central locations for fast debugging and auditing, which means longer investigations and more lengthy, expensive audit cycles.
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Shadow IT creates more attack surfaces
Sometimes tool sprawl is the result of shadow IT. This can sometimes open up more attack surfaces because those tools are not being used with company policies in mind. In a 2020 report, Gartner estimated that nearly one-third of all successful cyberattacks come from shadow IT infrastructure. With significant tool sprawl, you've created a virtual shadow IT regardless of whether it was done intentionally or not, because it's extremely hard to have enterprise security visibility over so many tools.
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Alert fatigue
The more cybersecurity tools you have, the more alerts you’ll likely get. Many tools are hard to fine-tune so that they don’t produce a litany of false positives.
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Too many vendors to potentially contact for support
Vendor sprawl means there are a multitude of vendors to track down and collaborate with when your inevitable support needs arise.
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Worse sales deals
When you are buying lots of tools, budgeting and procurement becomes more complex and there are fewer opportunities for volume discounts.
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Lost synergy gains
A DIY, custom-integrated cybersecurity toolchain requires more maintenance, and organizations miss out on many of the synergy gains that come from using a suite of tools that work together as a platform out of the box.
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Slower incident response
As the number of cybersecurity tools, tests, and interfaces grows, it takes longer to update security policies, implement patches consistently across all environments, and complete threat analyses.
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More maintenance costs
Aside from integration maintenance, more tools also mean more maintenance in general.
»How to start your cybersecurity consolidation initiative
Tool sprawl is a growing problem, but it’s also a solvable one. With the right strategy, organizations can reduce risk, streamline operations, and unlock real cost savings.
Coming up in part two of this blog, we’ll map out how to get started with cybersecurity toolchain rationalization and vendor consolidation, from aligning key teams to auditing your tooling landscape and identifying high-impact changes. Stay tuned.
»Real world case studies on consolidation
Organizational leaders must push their cybersecurity, engineering, and infrastructure operations teams to reduce complexity by centralizing and consolidating on a handful of security platforms rather than a litany of smaller cybersecurity tools.
We’ve seen Roche and many other companies run successful cybersecurity product consolidation initiatives, and we’d love to share more insights. We’ve reduced risk for thousands of companies, including Vodafone, Deutsche Bank, Canva, and more.
Download Secure by design: How to reduce cloud risk and maintain compliance to learn how we can consolidate the number of Security Lifecycle Management tools you use.
