Live Webinar: Reducing Complexity by Increasing Consolidation for SMEs

Complexity is the bane of effective cybersecurity. The need to
maintain an increasing array of cybersecurity tools to protect
organizations from an expanding set of cyber threats is leading to
runaway costs, staff inefficiencies, and suboptimal threat
response. Small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) with limited
budgets and staff are significantly impacted.

On average, SMEs manage more than a dozen different security
tools, making it very difficult for security teams to manage and
orchestrate. SMEs are, understandably, looking to consolidate their
security tools to make cybersecurity more manageable and
cost-effective.

The challenge for these companies is to figure out how to
consolidate cybersecurity tools without losing needed protections
safely. An upcoming webinar is set to help SMEs with this very
issue (sign up here^[1]).

The Cybersecurity Complexity Problem Cannot Be
Overemphasized

Over the past decade (at least), CISOs have continuously lobbied
for increased cybersecurity budgets to acquire more and more
“essential” tools.

With an unremitting barrage of cyber threats continuously
tweaked and reimagined to bypass existing defenses, adding new
technologies designed to thwart the new attack techniques seemed
warranted.

As they say, however, sometimes the cure is worse than the
disease. As a result of this tool sprawl caused by the cyber-arms
race, SMEs today are faced with:

• Too Many Cybersecurity Tools – Maintaining,
  updating, integrating, and ultimately utilizing a growing set of
  complex tools that are typically not designed to work with each
  other is challenging.

Properly integrating multiple tools, so security practitioners
aren’t forced to move between panes of glass constantly is
expensive and complex – think SIEM and SOAR tools, which are
typically out of reach for SMEs.

Not only is it expensive and complex to integrate the
cybersecurity stack into these tools, but they then have to be
continuously cared for and add additional tools to the mix, which
counteracts the desire for consolidation.

Another issue facing SMEs is that not every tool turns out to be
as useful or usable as expected. Or, some tools have simply reached
the end of life but are maintained because they do provide some
value. Perhaps reshuffling the “tool deck” could help weed out less
useful tools while adding fewer yet far more useful tools.

• Too Many Vendors – As if managing the tools
  weren’t enough, dealing with an expanding set of vendors adds
  another source of headaches for SME CISOs. Some vendors are
  overbearing, some are unreachable, and a few are actually helpful.
  And trying to get security technology companies to collaborate has
  never been any CISOs idea of a good time.

• Too Few Security Practitioners – More threat
  variations and more tools to manage means more headcount is
  required. However, headcount expansion concomitant with technology
  expansion is the exception vs. the rule so existing security staffs
  become overburdened with additional tools. The tools are supposed
  to make security practitioners’ lives easier and often do, but
  carry the burden of additional and separate tools to learn and care
  for.

• Too Small of an ROI – Perhaps the most
  egregious outcome of too sprawl is that many organizations are
  getting too little return on their sizable investments. Lots of
  under-integrated, specialized tools with too few security
  professionals to leverage the technology means improvements to the
  enterprise’s security posture are often incremental and not worth
  the price paid. The corollary is that retargeting the investment
  into the proper set of tools will result in more noticeable
  improvements.

Consolidating the Security Stack without Compromising
Protection

This is the question. Perhaps newer security technologies,
designed to solve multiple problems, can be used to supplant older,
siloed, specialized technologies. Some of these older technologies
were brought in as a stopgap for a specific threat, which may or
may not still exist and may or may not is addressed by broader
technology solutions. This is one of the suggestions to be provided
in the upcoming webinar. Register here^[2].