CISOs battle security platform fatigue

It starts with good intentions. A tool to stop phishing. Another to monitor endpoints. One more for cloud workloads. Soon, a well-meaning CISO finds themselves managing dozens of products across teams, each with its own dashboard, alerts, and licensing headaches.

Welcome to the age of security tool sprawl.

CISOs everywhere are facing platform fatigue. According to a 2023 survey by Syxsense, 68% of organizations use more than 11 tools for endpoint management and security, leading to operational challenges like lack of visibility and alert fatigue.

The hidden cost of “more tools”

Buying new tools often feels like progress. Each one promises better detection, faster response, or more granular control. But every addition creates new layers of integration, training, and management.

That leads to three common problems:

• Alert fatigue. Security analysts can’t keep up with alerts from overlapping platforms. Some teams ignore alerts and often miss real threats in the flood of noise.
• Tool duplication. Many tools offer similar functions. One endpoint tool might cover vulnerability scanning, but so does your cloud security platform. Redundancies waste time and money.
• Talent strain. Every new product requires expertise. Teams spend hours learning new UIs, managing licenses, or getting tools to talk to each other. That’s time they’re not spending on real risks.

“Adopting more security tools doesn’t guarantee better cybersecurity,” says Jonathan Gill, CEO at Panaseer. “These tools can only report on what they can see – but they don’t know what they’re missing.”

This fragmented visibility leaves security leaders making high-stakes decisions based on partial information. Without a verified, comprehensive system of record for all assets and security controls, many organizations are operating under what Gill calls an “illusion of visibility.”

“Without a true denominator,” he explains, “CISOs are unable to confidently assess coverage gaps or prove compliance with evolving regulatory demands.”

And those blind spots aren’t just theoretical. Every overlooked asset or misconfigured control becomes an open door for attackers — and they’re getting better at finding them. “Each of these coverage gaps represents risk,” Gill warns, “and they are increasingly easy for attackers to find and exploit.”

The lack of clear visibility also muddies accountability. “This creates dark corners that go overlooked – servers and applications are left without owners, making it hard to assign responsibility for fixing issues,” Gill says. Even when gaps are known, security teams often find themselves drowning in data from too many tools, struggling to separate signal from noise. “With conflicting data and without vital context to understand severity, security teams can become paralyzed.”

According to Gill, the solution lies in establishing a unified, trusted view of the security landscape. “Only by establishing a single source of truth can organizations measure, compare, and act with confidence,” he says.

Platform fatigue doesn’t just affect operations, it also affects morale. In a global CISO survey, 76% of CISOs reported being overwhelmed by the increasing volume of threats detected from a growing number of tools on an increasing number of assets.

The drive to consolidate

As budgets tighten and teams hit capacity, CISOs are rethinking what they need, and what they don’t.

Tool consolidation is gaining traction. The idea: reduce complexity by streamlining security products under fewer platforms. But consolidation doesn’t mean handing everything to a single vendor. It means choosing tools that integrate well, reduce handoffs, and match your team’s capabilities.

In a recent Gigamon survey, it was highlighted that 6 in 10 CISOs listed tool consolidation and optimization as their number one priority for remediating blind spots.

“Consolidating the number of vendors decreases resource and soft costs associated with annual auditing and assessing vendor risk,” comments Chris Goettl, VP of Product Management, Ivanti. “Further, consolidating multiple tools under a single vendor and platform often results in lower cost of ownership, both in license or subscription costs and in the consolidation of the tools used by IT and security teams into a smaller footprint.”

CISOs face the challenging task of streamlining security tools amidst an environment where cyber threats continually increase. Goettl emphasizes this point, stating: “Cyber threats are increasing, and the range of tools required to secure environments, reduce exposures and protect user identities is expanding.”

Notably, Goettl highlights several areas where successful consolidation has already occurred, citing Endpoint Protection and Endpoint Detection and Response solutions as prime examples that have integrated into unified, single-agent platforms. He also points to the emergence of exposure management platforms as indicative of the next evolution in security consolidation. “Exposure management platforms represent the next evolution in the vulnerability management market,” Goettl adds, “helping security teams consolidate the sprawl of security tools while addressing exposures more effectively than point solutions.”

Across these examples, consolidations consistently help organizations reduce tool sprawl, eliminate data silos, and typically achieve meaningful reductions in operational and licensing costs, Goettl concludes.

Where to start

“When CISOs want to tame tool sprawl, they should start by focusing on integration and consolidation, rather than adding more tools. The first step is to evaluate the current security stack and identify redundant or ineffective tools. Instead of expanding the toolset, CISOs should prioritize ensuring that the existing tools work together seamlessly, creating a unified security ecosystem. Implementing a security data mesh can be a game changer, as it connects disparate tools and data sources, enabling better coordination and context around alerts. This approach not only reduces alert fatigue but also improves threat detection and response by correlating data across systems, enhancing efficiency without the need for additional tools. By consolidating and integrating existing solutions, CISOs can streamline operations, reduce complexity, and create a more resilient defense system that works cohesively,” explains Piyush Sharma, CEO of Tuskira.

If you’re looking to tame tool sprawl in your own organization, start with a simple framework:

1. Take inventory. List every tool in use. Identify overlaps and abandoned products. Many organizations find they’re paying for tools they don’t even use.

2. Measure actual use. Talk to your team. Which tools do they trust? Which ones do they ignore? Usage data often reveals where you’re not getting value.

3. Prioritize integration. Look for platforms that pull data from others, centralize alerts, or support shared workflows. APIs are your friends.

4. Don’t chase features. Choose tools that solve your biggest risks—not ones with the longest feature list. Avoid buying “just in case” tools.

5. Invest in training, not just tech. Sometimes better outcomes come from helping your team use one platform more effectively, not adding a second one.

As security budgets come under pressure, the cost of unused tools will draw more scrutiny from boards and CFOs. CISOs who can show they’ve reduced spend while improving clarity and speed will be better positioned to make the case for what they really need.

When it comes to building a strong security program, visibility is the single most important foundation. “The biggest challenge for CISOs is visibility,” says Morey J. Haber, Chief Security Advisor at BeyondTrust. “There is no way to perform any action to remediate a flaw, stop a security incident, or provide forensics without visibility.”

Without visibility, the rest of the security stack loses effectiveness. “Once visibility meets a satisfactory critical mass of adoption, other disciplines like automation and data loss prevention can be prioritized,” he explains. “You cannot fix or measure a problem unless you have full visibility into the problem.”

Achieving that visibility means looking across the entire ecosystem and ensuring every tool and function contributes to a unified view. Haber asks a simple question of every solution: does it work in isolation, or does it integrate into the broader cybersecurity infrastructure? “All events, logs, etc., should allow integration into the corporate SIEM,” he says. “Even something as simple as remote access should allow for detailed logging to ensure all access is appropriate.”

This is where vendor consolidation becomes a powerful strategy. According to Haber, using overlapping tools can be counterproductive. “There should not be duplicate solutions for EDR, firewalls, IDS, etc. unless absolutely necessary,” he notes. “This allows consistency for all logging to ensure correlation and automation can occur consistently.”

Haber believes that visibility must span every layer and workflow. “At every layer, at every function, and for every workflow, information security should always have visibility,” he says. “This includes everything from the cloud to remote employees. Mapping all of the critical layers ensures that tooling exists at each layer.”

With the right foundation of visibility in place, security teams can move faster, respond smarter, and build more cohesive defenses. As Haber puts it, “I always start with visibility.”

Redefining security maturity

Too often, CISOs measure maturity by how many tools they’ve bought. But real maturity is the ability to respond quickly, communicate clearly, and recover from incidents without chaos.

That requires tight processes, well-trained people, and tools that work together—not a shelf full of dashboards that no one logs into.

In a recent Help Net Security interview, Sean Embry, CISO at eBay, discussed key aspects of cybersecurity leadership, emphasizing the importance of balancing long-term strategic planning with immediate threat response.

Less may be more

Tool sprawl didn’t happen overnight, and it won’t be fixed in a single quarter. But the trend is clear: security teams want fewer moving parts, not more. They want tools that integrate, simplify, and support their mission, not distract from it.

For CISOs, the message is this: tool reduction is not just an operational cleanup—it’s a strategic move. By consolidating where it makes sense and cutting what doesn’t deliver, security leaders can make their teams faster, leaner, and more effective.

And that’s a story your board will want to hear.