Too Many Cooks in the Kitchen: Why You Need to Consolidate Your Cybersecurity Approach

Christian Wiens Director of Marketing

Christian Wiens is Director of Marketing at MixMode. He has 10+ years of experience as a cybersecurity professional. He has his BA from The University of California, Berkeley and resides in Austin, TX.

When it comes to cybersecurity, more is not always better. As new solutions have emerged in response to rapidly evolving technology and increasingly sophisticated cyber attacks, SOCs have added tool after tool to their arsenals.

It may be a good battle strategy to amass a large supply of weapons, but when those weapons don’t work together, the end result is less than effective. Too many cybersecurity professionals are being tasked with serving as the glue holding together dozens of tools, including SIEM, NDR, NTA, and UEBA, each purchased from a different vendor and each offering proprietary features that can’t be accessed by tools from other vendors, by design. It’s up to security teams to find an ad hoc approach that works.

Even mid-sized organizations can wind up dealing with hundreds of cybersecurity and IT vendors, requiring staff to manage various aspects of their products. Juggling multiple consoles and trying to correlate threats across multiple, unaffiliated software inevitably results in blind spots these organizations only realize when their networks are compromised.

It’s no surprise, given that this scenario is playing out in SOCs across the world, that organizations are doing what they can to consolidate some, or all, of their disparate cybersecurity solutions. In an end-of-year report released in late 2021, Gartner made several predictions about organizational cybersecurity, including these consolidation-related predictions:

By 2025, 80% of enterprises will have adopted a strategy to unify web, cloud services and private application access from a single vendors’ security service edge platform.
By 2025, 70% of organizations will consolidate the number of vendors securing the life cycle of cloud-native applications to a maximum of three vendors.

Advantages of Security Platform Consolidation

Reducing network vulnerability is the primary advantage of security platform consolidation, but consolidation offers some clear business and management benefits, as well. Consolidating platforms:

Optimize staff – using staff more efficiently and effectively is hugely beneficial given the extreme IT skills shortage. A consolidated approach helps staff patch holes and configuration errors early on, before they become vulnerabilities prone to exploitation by threat actors.
Better endpoint detection – consolidation helps organizations implement true end-to-end threat detection, giving staff global insight into network health and granular details related to user activity and technologies deployed throughout the system.
Reduced response time – Industry watchers reports that most cyber attacks are detected more than six months after an initial network breach; in other words, threats may be laying in wait at any given time, ready to be deployed by an outside entity at any moment. Consolidation greatly increases response time and can help organizations surface hidden threats before they become damaging attacks.

MixMode Closes Security Gaps Across Disparate Systems

MixMode’s purpose-built, self-learning AI can detect threats and anomalies across any data stream, at any scale. The platform actually amplifies the capabilities and overcomes the limitations inherent to traditional security platforms so many organizations still utilize: SIEM, NDR, NTA, and UEBA.

Purpose-built for the modern SOCs, MixMode allows for unparalleled cost savings and efficiency gains across entire organizations. The platform automates threat detection and identifies anomalous user behavior with a single, real-time, AI-driven platform.

Learn more about the MixMode platform and set up a demo today.