Can a Single Pane of Glass Ever be Discovered for Cybersecurity?

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.

In conclusion, whilst a “single pane of glass” might have historically been the holy grail, the likelihood of finding the solution (and the grail) is equally unlikely…besides, it may not exist. For most organisations consuming this much data in a single pane could prove to be challenging. Therefore, organisations must realise that they are always likely to have to manage across a number of single panes of glass… but not too many, and certainly not 76. Reducing complexity and consolidating tools into a more manageable and connected ecosystem, such as SASE, EDR, Identity, SIEM/SOAR etc., might be the best starting point.

Netskope SASE addresses this exact problem head on. It combines our market-leading Intelligent SSE (including FWaaS, SWG, CASB, and ZTNA) and Borderless SD-WAN to provide a cloud-native, fully-converged, and single-vendor SASE solution. The unified dashboard means that customers benefit from a zero trust security approach, combined with network optimisation across the whole data journey to deliver total security without any compromise on performance.

Netskope SASE is the wide-reaching, multi-layered and reinforced pane of glass for the modern organisation. It combines the objectives of networking and security services to safeguard users, apps, and data and to provide reliable, seamless access from any location.

To find out more about Netskope’s leading SASE solution, click here.