INTERFACE Boise
August 29th, 2019

  Presented by ExtraHop

Ask any analyst, reporter, or financial observer, and they'll tell you that the security market is ripe for consolidation. For years, security vendors have proliferated, buoyed by high valuations and ever-expanding enterprise security budgets. While this rush to innovate has resulted in better and more sophisticated threat defenses, it has also created a complex web of tools which already overworked, overwhelmed, and understaffed security teams must manage.

This tool sprawl is one reason that so many in and around the security industry believe that an era of consolidation is coming. According to ESG Research, 66 percent of businesses are actively working to consolidate their security portfolio. For many in the security industry, a security platform that essentially puts your "SOC-in-a-box" is an ideal solution to the tool sprawl problem.

But this approach is not without peril. If the security industry consolidates to the point that there are just a few platform solutions, this will not only stifle innovation, it will result in a monoculture — and monocultures are notoriously susceptible to disease. If every organization uses an identical or nearly identical set of security tools, breaking into one means breaking into them all. And once threat actors figure out how to break in once, they'll have the keys to every organization. Just like the world banana population —itself a monoculture — is currently being wiped out by a fungus to which is has no natural resistance, a single cyber threat could take down a vast number of organizations.