In the ever-evolving landscape of cybersecurity, the concept of a ”single pane of glass” has long been the Holy Grail for many organisations. The idea is simple: consolidate all your cybersecurity tools and data onto a single dashboard for improved visibility and control.
While this concept holds merit, particularly in the modern hybrid workforce, it’s notoriously difficult to execute. Why? Because organisations are constantly looking to mature and evolve their security programmes and constantly prioritising and rationalising key requirements. In opposition to the “single pane of glass” analogy, businesses have adapted to the challenging push-pull landscape by layering multiple specialised dashboards into their security architecture to cater to endlessly evolving cybersecurity needs.
Today, organisations are digitally complex, and threat actors exploit this. Security teams regularly steer a web of scattered systems of various capabilities, and manage dozens of disparate security and networking vendors. What’s more, legacy technology, including remote access VPN, is causing serious performance and security gaps in the enterprise, and the resulting “patchwork” layering of tools to accommodate this is a real security concern.
Also known as “tool bloat,” this jumbled network of systems is the achilles heel of enterprise security. The average organisation harnesses 76 security tools, causing a major headache for cybersecurity teams. Picture an enterprise with multiple live security tools and dashboards or “panes of glass” at work. It’s hard for one not to undermine another as each operates mostly in siloes.
Security teams are stuck between a rock and a hard place: trying to ensure they’re protected against the latest threats for their increasingly complex systems, and experiencing serious vulnerability by having too many security solutions to manage. Currently, 60% of cybersecurity professionals feel that their security tools do not allow their operations team to work at maximum efficiency.
What makes things harder is that networking and security teams are often separate entities that operate disparate systems and follow their own processes, with multiple point-based solutions that are reluctant to integrate. Many of these tools have been delivered by project teams and then handed over to operational teams with no clear strategy on consolidation or convergence. This is an inefficient operation, and one that many organisations are looking to improve upon.