The hidden costs of 'tool sprawl': are your security defences creating your biggest risk?

The unprecedented pressure on New Zealand IT leaders

It's a challenging time to be a network or security manager leader in New Zealand. The idea of a secure perimeter has vanished, dissolved by the shift to hybrid work and the migration to cloud-first applications. You're now tasked with ensuring a seamless, productive user experience without inadvertently exposing the business to cyber risk. It’s a difficult balancing act.

If, like many of your peers, you're dealing with a growing list of chronic pains that seem impossible to resolve. Your team is struggling to respond to user complaints about slow applications, often caused by inefficiently backhauling traffic to a central data centre for security checks. Your best people are buried under a mountain of security alerts from dozens of different systems and exhausted by never ending patching cycles. Meanwhile, you're cost for a portfolio of security tools, often with significant functional overlap. Yet despite increased spend on security tools, confidence in defence capabilities continues to decline. 

The hidden reality behind your operational struggles

Your logical response over the years has been to add a new tool for every new threat. It was a diligent, responsible approach - but what if that strategy has unintentionally created yet another vulnerability?

In a 2024 report, Gartner reveals that the average enterprise is now juggling with up to 75 different security tools. This phenomenon, known as "tool sprawl," creates internal complexity that many IT leaders don't fully recognise as a root cause of their problems.

Consider the numbers: 74% of organisations now use multi-vendor security stacks, with over a third of cybersecurity professionals citing excessive complexity as their primary challenge. Meanwhile, 43% struggle with compatibility issues between their various tools. What started as a security strategy has evolved into an operational headache.

The real cost of fragmented security Architecture

Security gaps are multiplying, not shrinking

Paradoxically, more tools can create new blind spots, integration challenges and potential points of failure. Unless these systems talk to each other, critical threat intelligence remains trapped in silos, preventing your team from identifying sophisticated attacks. The fragmented nature of these tools means that 41% of IT professionals directly link poor integration to increased security risk. Multiple disconnected tools create inconsistent enforcement, fragmented alerting and opportunities for attackers to exploit the gaps between systems. 

The hidden financial drain

While tool licensing represents the visible cost, the hidden expenses are staggering. Teams managing complex tool environments spend 50-75% of their time on tool maintenance rather than strategic security work. This represents a massive opportunity cost - your skilled professionals are becoming system administrators instead of security strategists.

Security tool costs are expected to reach US$261 billion globally, but this figure only represents direct software expenses. The operational overhead - including staff time, training, integration complexity, and inevitable troubleshooting - often doubles or triples the true cost of ownership. 

The human toll on your security team

Perhaps most critically, tool sprawl is impacting your most valuable asset: experienced security professionals. 83% of IT security professionals admit they or someone in their department has made errors due to burnout or workload, leading to security breaches. Meanwhile, 77% report job stress, and an alarming 79% have seriously considered leaving their roles.

The cybersecurity skills shortage has reached crisis levels, with nearly 4.8 million unfilled roles globally. When your current team members are burning out due to tool complexity, you're not just losing productivity - you're contributing to a talent crisis that makes replacement nearly impossible. 

A different perspective on security strategy

The greatest risk facing your organisation today may not be the next zero-day threat or sophisticated attack. Instead, it might be the unmanageable, self-inflicted complexity of the very defences you've built to protect it.
This perspective shift is crucial. When 65% of organisations believe they have too many security tools, and over half say their tools can't be integrated, we're looking at an industry-wide architectural problem, not individual implementation challenges.

The path forward starts with recognition

Recognising complexity as your primary enemy is the first step towards building a more effective security architecture. The solution isn't about finding better individual tools - it's about finding a better way to architect your entire security ecosystem.

The more successful organisations are moving away from the "tool for every threat" mentality toward consolidated, unified platforms that reduce operational overhead while improving security effectiveness. This architectural shift is driving the rapid growth of the Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) market, which is projected to reach US$44.68 billion by 2030.

The question isn't whether you can afford to address tool sprawl; it's whether you can afford not to.

Next steps

Recognising complexity as the enemy is the first step. The next is to understand its true cost to your business and build a compelling case for architectural change. In our next article, we'll explore how to quantify the hidden costs of tool sprawl and transform your operational frustrations into a data-driven business case that leadership can't ignore.

Ready to discover the true financial impact of your current security architecture? Read our next article: "The hidden costs of 'Tool Sprawl'" to learn how to build a compelling business case for change.