How a Data Security Platform Tackles the Toxicity of Tool Sprawl

One of the main causes of security operations (SecOps) pain is the sheer number of disparate protection tools now in use across the enterprise, leading to an ever higher volume of alerts, operational inefficiencies, and increased cost. There’s no denying the cybersecurity threat landscape has become extremely dynamic and complex — encompassing data, applications, APIs, and containers as well as multi-cloud, on-premises, and hybrid environments, just to name a few. Each of these environments requires security tooling to address potential vulnerabilities and respond to threats and incidents. However, increased tool adoption and use come with a downside.

Redundancy, wasteful spending, and system complexity. That’s IT tool sprawl. And it’s the root of countless, needless tools purchased for IT purposes. Tools which are typically misused or statically ingrained within legacy systems. This trend is severely exhausting organizational resources, including unnecessary spending and inefficient, vulnerable, and siloed data. Tool sprawl is also a main culprit of fractured IT teams. Not only does this division create risky security gaps, it also fails to satisfy the requirements of end-users. And this issue doesn’t just affect Fortune 100 companies. From SMB to large enterprise, no business is exempt. Gartner’s 2023 CIO Agenda Report lists tool sprawl as one of the top ten monitoring challenges for CIOs.

Companies often don’t realize they have a tool sprawl problem until it becomes exorbitantly expensive or creates security issues. Unfortunately, security issues often go unnoticed until the effects of a breach are felt. Disparate, siloed data protection tools only compound the issue with an unmanageable volume of alerts, false positives, and security gaps, adding significant time, money, and resource costs to the equation. 

SecOps teams require specific tools to build, manage, and monitor their systems. But when more tools are added without proper planning and integrations, they can cause more harm than good. Accenture Security estimates many of their clients average 60 – 80 tools in their security architecture, with some companies as high as 140, which is an overwhelming amount of sprawl. It takes time for security teams to become familiarized with each tool, provision and configure, and then make actionable use of its telemetry.

Complicating this effort is the cybersecurity talent shortfall, the rapidly changing vendor ecosystem IT and security leaders are facing, and the challenges associated with the evolving threat landscape. In addition, many standalone tools don’t work well with others, often requiring their own unique implementation, dashboards, and outputs. Despite the complexity in the tooling ecosystem, there is an opportunity for simplification for security teams. Removing steps, complexity, and burden adds tremendous value to those involved in the cybersecurity process.

In the Gartner Hype Cycle for Data Security, 2022, Privacera is recognized as a representative vendor in a new solution category: Data Security Platform (DSP). DSPs address tool sprawl by aggregating individually-mature technologies into a unified solution. Traditionally, data security has been delivered by disparate products, resulting in operational inefficiencies and an inability to support, for example, data risk assessments, open data, commercial data, and internal innovations and collaborations involving data. DSPs provide consolidated security and protection capabilities for data by aggregating formerly siloed capabilities under a common policy instrument, significantly streamlining data security. Especially in cloud-based data stores, a DSP reduces integration costs, manual work, and friction by connecting previously disparate data security controls and capabilities.

The Privacera DSP secures data using a combination of fine-grained data access controls, data masking, and data encryption to provide a zero trust framework. Privacera provides observability into the data environment, including data access monitoring (DAM) — a category in which Gartner recognized Privacera as a sample vendor in its Hype Cycle for Data Security, 2022. Additionally, data audit and reporting capabilities support compliance requirements and data risk assessments.

Privacera is a broad-spectrum DSP that can be deployed as a SaaS-based service or self-managed software. Privacera’s other integrated DSP capabilities include automated discovery of sensitive data, instant visibility into data assets, and distributed, cloud-native policy enforcement across leading platforms such as Amazon Web Services and Snowflake.

Minimize security tools and mitigate sprawl, while enhancing enterprise-wide efficiency and data protection. Learn more about consolidation and centralization with a data governance and data security platform. Get Privacera’s buyer’s guide.