What is cybersecurity vendor consolidation?

Cybersecurity vendor consolidation is a way to reduce the number of vendors that an organization uses to boost its security posture. In today's ever-evolving cyber landscape, businesses have a multitude of security use cases that require specialized tools and services. From endpoint protection to centralized identity solutions, static code analyzers, cloud security managers and incident response suites, the list of essential security tools can seem never-ending.

However, relying on an excessive number of tools can lead to an unmanageable tool sprawl that hampers productivity and increases complexity. This is especially true if these tools aren't interoperable, which can make it difficult to gain a comprehensive view of an organization's security outlook, potentially creating exploitable security gaps.

This is where cybersecurity vendor consolidation comes in. By reducing an organization's reliance on multiple vendors, it allows them to build an integrated, cohesive security stack that offers better visibility and control over their security operations.

Gartner reports that 75% of organizations are considering vendor consolidation, which highlights a growing trend towards streamlining security operations. However, this process can be complex and requires careful planning to ensure that it’s done without compromising security.

Let’s look at some challenges that organizations typically face while consolidating cybersecurity vendors:

• Integration issues: Consolidating tools from multiple vendors can be challenging and may require you to write custom adapter modules
• Legacy application support: If you have any legacy applications in your stack, you may find it hard to integrate them with modern security solutions
• Migration complexity: Switching from one security stack to another can lead to problems, especially if there’s no straightforward way to migrate data
• Loss of functionality: A poorly implemented consolidation effort may lead to loss of crucial functionalities

To avoid the challenges mentioned above, follow these steps while consolidating your cybersecurity vendors:

1. Assess your current security stack and make an exhaustive list of the vendors and tools that you are using
2. Outline your security needs, taking into account both operational and regulatory requirements. Answer questions like: Are there any gaps in my existing setup? Which of the available tools are essential to my infrastructure? Do I need an open-source solution analyzer if my stack doesn’t include any open-source tools?
3. Evaluate potential vendors. Consider factors like reputation, security track record, product features and interoperability, cost and customer support
4. Select vendor(s) that best fit your criteria. Remember, the goal of this exercise is to optimize the number of vendors. Ideally, you should aim to select only one or a small number of vendors that enable you to build a cohesive, interoperable security platform
5. Develop a plan for consolidation, including a timeline, potential challenges and their solutions. Onboard all relevant stakeholders before you start the implementation
6. Integrate the new solutions in an iterative manner, migrate existing data and thoroughly test for any gaps, misconfigurations or bottlenecks
7. Regularly monitor the new security stack, looking for optimization avenues, so that it continues to meet your evolving security needs

Cybersecurity vendor consolidation promises several benefits for businesses:

1. Reduced complexity

Managing too many, heterogenous security tools can lead to complexities and misconfigurations. Vendor consolidation allows you to use a suite of pre-integrated and pre-validated solutions to manage your security affairs. For instance, you can use a consolidated identity platform to enforce access control over all your cloud, on-premise and legacy environments.

2. Improved visibility

Empower your security team by consolidating all critical security controls into a unified platform, providing them with improved visibility into the infrastructure. For example, integrating a consolidated identity solution with a privileged password management (PPM) tool allows you to store all privileged identity data inside the PPM tool.

3. Cost savings

Consolidating vendors can reduce cybersecurity costs by minimizing licensing fees and decreasing maintenance costs. Moreover, organizations can negotiate better terms with vendors when they purchase all or multiple solutions from the same provider.  

4. Simplified support

By reducing the contact points for support inquiries, organizations can avoid the “blame game”, where solutions that are expected to work together break at the integration point, with no vendor owning the issue. With working a single support organization, the single vendor owns the integration point between their products, clarifying responsibility. The single contact point also brings faster resolutions as it cuts the confirmation loops between vendors and the customer.

5. Increased efficiency

A consolidated security platform streamlines security operations by centralizing security controls and makes it easier to manage security risks. For instance, administrators can use an interoperable vulnerability analysis tool to check for vulnerabilities across the whole infrastructure.

6. Enhanced security

Supply chain attacks caused by third-party vendors have become increasingly common. In 2022, they led to more breaches than malware. Vendor consolidation can mitigate the threat of such attacks by decreasing your attack surface and minimizing the number of third-party providers.