Consolidation Conundrum

As Cybersecurity Continues To Be A Top Boardroom Agenda For Enterprises Across The World, Security Technology Players – Whether It Be Large Vendors Or Startups – Are Racing To Deliver The Best Solutions Into The Market. However, The Increasing Complexity In The Market Are Pushing Organisations To Look For Less Provider Diversity. Daniel Bardsley Speaks To Industry Experts To Discuss How Consolidation And Integration Is Impacting The Cybersecurity Landscape.

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As one industry observer put it earlier this year, in cybersecurity there are “too many companies offering too many solutions to too many problems”.

Ambitious start-ups are springing up by the dozen to offer solutions to fast-emerging threats, and companies are faced with a lengthy list of potential purchases as the list of hazards grows.

Customers pick the “best of breed” in each field of cybersecurity, “point tools” that do not communicate with each other because they were developed separately by different companies, making full situational awareness harder to achieve.

Cybersecurity staff are burdened by the need to knit these products together are inundated with alerts from them.

“Security professionals have acquired too much technology which is non-integrated with either other security tools or other IT systems and infrastructure management solutions used in customer environments,” says Paul McKay, a senior analyst with the research organisation Forrester.

“This is creating alert fatigue, where all of these solutions are pushing out hundreds and sometimes thousands of alerts per day, which is overwhelming security teams.”

As well as creating operational headaches, having a large number of cybersecurity tools increases the complexity of procurement.

It is perhaps no wonder, then, that a recent study by ESG Research indicated that two-thirds of organisations were in the process of cutting the number of cybersecurity vendors that they dealt with.

In this context, there has been much talk suggesting that a round of consolidation in the cybersecurity industry is likely.

Late last year, for example, a forecast was made that the number of cybersecurity companies would halve over the coming five to seven years.