In the cybersecurity domain alone, a typical medium to large-sized company deploys as many as 50 tools from various vendors, but typically uses only about 10-20% of their capabilities. This tool sprawl occurs because organizations have historically prioritized best-in-breed, point solutions. Now, the tide is turning in favor of end-to-end, consolidated platforms.
However, according to the recent Resilience's mid-year 2024 cyber risk report, the growing trend towards business and security tool consolidation is creating new avenues for threat actors to exploit. Still, dealing with an unmanageable vendor count and juggling dozens of point solutions isn't a viable option either.
What’s Behind the Great Convergence Rush?
Organizations often accumulate too many tools with redundant functionalities, which results in increased management complexity, unnecessary expenses, operational inefficiencies, and ultimately, a disappointing return on investment (ROI). Increasingly, organizations are implementing the DRY (don’t repeat yourself) principle to curb IT and data sprawl and streamline monitoring and management. Their mantra is simple – fewer tools should do more.
For starters, it helps prevent overpaying and underutilizing. It also doesn't hurt that consolidated platforms integrate seamlessly compared to multi-vendor point solutions and can share data and context for richer insights, higher efficiency, and better accuracy. Compliance also becomes easier when you don’t need to track compliance and certifications across an overwhelming portfolio of suppliers.
The benefits are plenty, enough to get most CIOs and CTOs on board, but let's not forget the warning from Resilience regarding new cyber risks.
Key Considerations for Tech and Security Tool Consolidation
According to the report, tech consolidation creates single points of failure. When you put all your trust in a single vendor, the consequences can be catastrophic if that single vendor gets breached. From a business point of view, switching vendors when all your operations depend on them can be a lot harder than simply replacing a point solution. This gives undue leverage to big vendors as their customers become overly dependent and lose negotiating power. As such, the entire business case for tech and security consolidation hinges on selecting the right vendor—one with a long-term roadmap for continuous improvement, proven business viability, and cost stability in volatile markets.
It’s important to approach consolidation strategically and choose platforms that are built with consolidation in mind. Here are a few areas to focus on:
Functionality: The platform must deliver all the core features needed within the specific category, managing tasks comprehensively from end to end.
Usability: The platform must integrate seamlessly into the existing environment and offer a user-friendly experience for smooth adoption.
Scalability: The platform’s underlying infrastructure, architecture, and capabilities should be able to handle business growth and expansions.
Track Record: It’s important to select vendors who have proven their viability through notable partnerships, industry accolades, and endorsements from reputable advisors.
Compliance: Organizations must preemptively ensure their chosen vendor adheres to all relevant regulations and maintains up-to-date certifications to show for it.
Agility: The platform must be demonstrably agile, capable of embracing innovation, and adaptable to the evolving technology landscape and changing standards. This is especially true in information security, where new threats emerge and regulations change frequently.
Confidencial: Your Partner for Proactively Protecting Sensitive Data at Scale
Trusted by top organizations and backed by DARPA, Confidencial integrates data discovery, threat mitigation, and end-to-end document workflows into a unified, next-generation solution. Unlike traditional DSPM, our consolidated approach offers a single solution for discovering, protecting, sharing, and monitoring sensitive information in unstructured data across its lifecycle.
Our next-gen DSPM promises:
True Consolidation: Confidencial’s next-gen DSPM, Cloud Protector, not only identifies and classifies sensitive data but also provides actionable policy recommendations and cryptographic protection.
Integrated Capabilities: Tools such as Confidencial SDX and Sign enable secure sharing, collaboration, and e-signatures—all within a unified solution.
Secure Innovation: Confidencial’s advanced selective encryption technique makes it easier for businesses to safely deploy AI-driven solutions without compromising data security. This approach encrypts only the sensitive parts of data or documents, allowing the remaining information to be used freely for AI training or use.
Quantum-ready, Future-proof Protection: Confidencial is quantum-ready and offers a single-configuration path to post-quantum cryptography (PQC), per NIST’s standards. Our platform's readiness for quantum standards guarantees that your data remains secure today and well into the future.
Full Compliance: Our commitment to security is demonstrated through an extensive list of certifications, including ISO27001:2022, HIPAA, and SOC compliance. These credentials, coupled with Confidencial's DARPA-backed innovation, give organizations the confidence to rely on our platform for their most sensitive data protection needs.
By offering a consolidated, future-proof, and compliant data security platform, Confidencial helps organizations reduce vendor complexity, manage data sprawl, and improve their data security posture.
Embrace true consolidation in data security! Get in touch now to book a live demo and see Confidencial in action.
Comments