Don’t let software inflation ruin your security dreams

With tighter budgets, IT teams are being forced to shut down critical cybersecurity tools, leading to growing maze of overlapping tools while increasing complexity, inefficiency, and operational strain for security teams.

Rajnish Gupta, Country Manager for Tenable India

CISOs worldwide, including in India, are facing a software renewal crisis driven by unsustainable tool sprawl, pressure to do more with less and the need to keep up with AI. On average, enterprises use 83 cybersecurity tools from 29 vendors. In addition, security vendors are hiking renewal fees by 20-30%. While software inflation is not a new concern, the real problem is that there are way too many point solutions that tackle specific aspects of security. With reduced budgets, IT teams are being hamstrung to “sunset” critical cybersecurity tools just to keep the lights on for others. Instead of achieving the peace of mind these tools promised, security teams are dealing with more headaches and the operational inefficiencies of constantly jumping from one silo to the next and using multiple tools with redundant workflows.

Tool sprawl is a security nightmare; strong defence starts with a unified platform

For far too long, the enterprise response to new and emerging cyber risks has been to buy a new tool. Ransomware? Buy an endpoint detection tool. Cloud migration? Buy a different cloud security posture management tool. There are separate tools for vulnerability management for OT, IoT, container security - you name it. The result is a disjointed architecture that’s expensive and inefficient.

This “death by a thousand points” approach silos visibility into the threat landscape. When security teams operate with 83 different dashboards, they don’t get 83 times greater protection. They get 83 times the noise because critical data is trapped in departmental silos and spread across teams, making it nearly impossible to correlate threats across the entire attack surface.

Then there are AI tools and services that span applications, infrastructure, identities, agents, and data. Many security teams lack visibility into where AI is used, what data or processes it touches, who owns or can access it, and how users interact with it. The danger is this complexity, coupled with the “sunsetting” dilemma. With CISOs being asked to tackle software inflation by turning off the kill switch for some tools, security teams are stuck wondering which point solutions are more important than others, when in reality, security has already taken a back seat due to fragmentation. The real problem is that organisations are focusing on the wrong issue. It’s not about sunsetting some tools but adopting a unified platform that offers context, visibility and prioritises actual exposures.

Unified platforms are the future of preventive security

The shift from using numerous point solutions to a unified platform solves the core problem: exposure. It is the only way to ensure that software inflation doesn’t undermine effective security. Unified platforms, such as exposure management, offer a cohesive view of risk. The advantages are threefold.

#1 Contextual visibility over fragmented data: siloed tools can only tell you that a particular cloud server is vulnerable. A unified exposure management platform, on the other hand, tells you that a server is vulnerable, holds customer data, is connected to the internet, and is currently being targeted by an unknown exploit. Such context-rich visibility allows CISOs to stop worrying about the 90% vulnerabilities that matter less for now and start allocating resources towards the 10% of vulnerabilities that affect the business now.

#2 Removing the “integration tax”: When organisations use 29 different cybersecurity tool vendors, a significant portion of your team’s time and budget is spent on middleware, the manual effort of making these tools talk to each other. By moving to a unified platform, organisations can easily mitigate this cost. It’s a reminder to CISOs that they aren’t simply saving on renewal fees but reclaiming the hours lost to manual data correlation so teams can actually focus on securing the environment.

#3 Moving from reactive to proactive: With tool sprawl, organisations are reacting to incidents as and when they occur. With data spread across different systems, there’s no meaningful way to gauge risk relationships between users and assets. Essentially, teams are simply trying to maintain the status quo instead of stopping attacks from happening in the first place. A unified exposure management platform flips this script, turning reactive strategies into proactive ones. By identifying and closing pathways an attacker would take before they ever take them, organisations reduce the number of incidents that require expensive, reactive responses. Prevention is always more effective than incident response.

Surviving software inflation is easy. What’s really needed is a mindset shift to “less is more”. Instead of being collectors of tools, CISOs will benefit from finding technology that prevents attacks rather than tools that alert teams after the perimeter is breached.

The security dreams of CISOs, a state where organisations can innovate fearlessly because their foundations are secure and don’t have to die on the altar of software inflation. Achieving this dream calls for a radical departure from the status quo and adopting an exposure management strategy that can significantly reduce the vendor footprint and help organisations get ahead of threats.

Don’t let the pressure of sunsetting tools get the better of you. Instead, use this challenge as an opportunity to catalyse change towards a unified, preventive future. Only then can cybersecurity truly become a strategic business enabler rather than a mere platitude.