Security tool sprawl - build a data-driven business case for change

If your team feels like it is constantly juggling logins, consoles, and alert queues, you are not alone. Across the industry, organisations are running dozens of overlapping tools from a long list of vendors yet still struggling to keep pace with threats. Businesses now juggle, on average, up to 70 security tools sourced from nearly 30 vendors. The outcome is predictably poor: duplicated features, higher costs, and blind spots created by weak integration.

At the same time, breach patterns keep reminding us that people and process fail under complexity. The human element remains a factor in the majority of breaches in complex environments, those human factors are amplified by misconfiguration and “swivel-chair” operations.

Complexity is a sign you are over-distributed. The business case for change hinges on showing how complexity translates into higher costs and increased risks in terms that resonate with non-technical leaders.

1. Security risk you can measure

Fragmentation extends dwell time and invites errors. When teams pivot between many dashboards, correlating signals gets slower and noisier. Multiple studies and industry analyses tie fragmented stacks to slower detection and containment and higher incident rates. While specific delays vary by organisation, the directional signal is clear: more tools typically mean slower, not faster, response.

Human error thrives in complexity. The human element still sits behind a large share of breaches. In practice this shows up as misconfigurations, missed patches, and credential hygiene issues made worse by overlapping tools and inconsistent policies. Simplification reduces the pathways to error.

Correlation to incident volume.  Multiple industry studies, including research from Gartner and IBM, have shown that organisations running large numbers of disconnected security tools tend to detect and contain incidents more slowly. The operational overhead and integration gaps that come with tool sprawl often increase human error, dwell time, and overall breach impact.

How to quantify it locally:

• List your last 12 months of priority incidents.
• Tag each with root cause factors: misconfiguration, delayed detection, credential misuse, coverage gap.
• Estimate avoidable cost per incident if policies, inspection, and telemetry lived in one platform with one policy model. Even a conservative 10 to 20 percent reduction in incident impact usually outweighs annual licence deltas.

2. Wasted financial resources hiding in plain sight

Redundant capability overlap. Most stacks contain multiple products that scan, filter, or inspect the same flows.  That tells your CFO two things: duplication is common, and consolidation is a recognised efficiency lever.

Licence, support, and training overhead. Every extra vendor adds contracts, renewals, variation in support quality, and training obligations. Gartner’s peer community commentary notes that consolidation increases commercial leverage and simplifies procurement and invoicing processes that otherwise drain time and budget.

Network transport and legacy architecture tax. Where traffic is still backhauled to a central site for inspection, you pay a hidden latency and bandwidth tax that shows up in both experience and cost lines. Moving inspection closer to users and apps reduces that backhaul dependency and spend profile.

How to quantify it locally:

• Catalogue overlapping categories across SWG, CASB, ZTNA/VPN, FWaaS, endpoint web controls, and traffic inspection.
• For each category, identify the incumbent you would keep if you had to choose one.
• Attach line-item annual costs to the rest: licences, support, and any managed service fees.
• Add people time: 0.2 to 0.5 FTE per additional console is a pragmatic placeholder if you do not have timesheets, then price that time at fully burdened cost.
  
  

3. Productivity loss and burnout

Time spent maintaining tools instead of defending. In businesses with a superfluous number of platforms, teams spend a significant share of their week maintaining tools and workflows. That is time not spent on threat hunting, tabletop exercises, or tuning high-value detection logic.

Context switching kills focus. External analyses and community studies consistently report that tool bloat fuels “alert fatigue” and slows investigations. The downstream effect is burnout from frontline teams who must be across so many dashboards.

How to quantify it locally:

• Take a two-week snapshot of SOC or network ops time allocation.
• Categorise hours: maintain, investigate, improve.
• Aim to reallocate at least 20 percent of “maintain” into “improve” within three quarters. Price that time shift as a benefit.

A simple calculator your CFO will respect

Use three buckets that add up to an annualised view of today’s cost of complexity.

Bucket A - Duplicated tools and services

Collate the costs of all licences, support, and managed services for overlapping categories. Identify 10 to 30 percent of that spend as realistically eliminable in year one through consolidation.

Bucket B - People time

Calculate hours spent per month on dashboard care and feeding, upgrades, ticket handoffs, and contract admin. Convert to dollars at fully burdened rates. Target a 15 to 25 percent reduction within 12 months by moving to one policy model and one management plane.

Bucket C - Incident impact

Average the direct and indirect cost of your last year of high-priority incidents. Set a conservative improvement factor for simplified policy and unified inspection. Even a 10 percent reduction often eclipses the licence delta of a consolidated approach.

Add A + B + C. That gives you a baseline annual “complexity tax”. In many environments, that number easily justifies a phased consolidation programme that shifts spend from duplication into outcomes.

What the evidence says about consolidation

Consolidation correlates with better operational outcomes. Independent reporting highlights that organisations consolidating onto integrated platforms report improved resilience, faster time to identify a threat and deliver substantial operational efficiency gains. That is the posture you want in front of leadership: spend the same or less but make it simpler and safer.

Converged, cloud-delivered inspection helps remove the backhaul tax. Moving inspection closer to users and applications improves experience and removes an architectural cost driver that legacy hub -and-spoke designs cannot escape. This is a core principle behind modern, converged network-security architectures.

How to present this to leadership

1. Lead with the numbers. Put your complexity tax on one slide: today’s redundant spend, staff hours you can buy back, and incident cost you can avoid. Keep assumptions conservative.
2. Translate tech to risk. Tie missed SLAs, user experience issues, and audit findings to fragmentation and backhaul design. Then show how a single policy model and unified inspection reduces those risks.
3. Propose a phased path. Start with a high-impact, low-disruption slice such as replacing legacy VPN with identity-led access or consolidating web inspection. Show a 90-day proof objective and the metrics you will track.
4. Be vendor-neutral at this stage. You are not picking brands in the business case. You are choosing an operating model that reduces risk and waste, then shortlisting partners who can deliver it.

Next steps

In the next article of this series, we explore how to evaluate providers on an architectural vision, not a feature list. You will learn three pillars to anchor your shortlist and the questions that separate integrated platforms from stitched-together bundles.