When it comes to switching IT vendors, many organizations are hesitant to undertake the process, citing disruptions to operations, complex integration tasks, and a general reluctance to take a chance on moving from a “good-enough” solution to one that is unknown. But in today’s IT environment, and particularly in cybersecurity, switching to a new vendor is easier than it’s ever been before.

Best-of-breed vs. vendor consolidation

For decades, there has been a lively debate between a best-of-breed IT strategy — selecting solutions from multiple vendors based on their fitness for an organization’s specific needs — and a vendor-consolidation strategy — choosing fewer vendors to provide a variety of interoperable solutions.

Each of these approaches has its pros and cons, and the debate is certainly not settled. But as CSOonline reported, a 2022 Gartner survey revealed that a majority of enterprise respondents — fully 75%, compared to only 29% in 2020 — are actively consolidating vendors in the specific area of cybersecurity.

Factors driving consolidation

A common argument in favor of the vendor-consolidation strategy is that it reduces costs. By provisioning multiple solutions from a single vendor, you can negotiate lower total prices. Furthermore, a suite of integrated solutions designed to be interoperable out of the box will likely reduce long-term admin and management overhead. And initial deployment and configuration is simplified and accelerated. I covered this topic in more detail in this blog post from a year ago.

But in the case of cybersecurity, it turns out that cost savings are not the predominant driving factor. Instead, according to 65% of respondents to the Gartner survey, the top benefit they expect to gain is an improvement to their risk posture.

“Security and risk management leaders are increasingly dissatisfied with the operational inefficiencies and the lack of integration of a heterogenous security stack. As a result, they are consolidating the number of security vendors they use.”

— John Watts, VP Analyst at Gartner

Some of the reasons that vendor consolidation can improve your risk posture and reduce your risk from cyberthreats are:

• Reduction of “alert fatigue” that can result from too many different solutions generating many redundant alerts. Under these conditions, IT teams can more easily overlook alerts that indicate a serious and urgent incident.
• Shared threat intelligence improves security by ensuring that when one element of your infrastructure — e.g., your app security platform — identifies a new threat signature, it immediately shares it with other elements, such as your network security platform. This is critical today when many complex attacks leverage multiple threat vectors.
• Consolidated logs and reports not only simplify and accelerate your analysis and response to incidents. They also make it much easier to conduct security audits, identify potential vulnerabilities, and demonstrate ROI

Vanishing barriers to vendor-switching

Pursuing cybersecurity vendor consolidation will involve switching vendors for at least some of the elements of your overall cybersecurity infrastructure.

There are other reasons to consider switching vendors, including:

• Your company’s infrastructure is growing and adding services that expand your attack surface in ways your current provider can’t accommodate. You’ll need to switch to a vendor with a more comprehensive set of capabilities.
• You’re experiencing a growing number of attacks, suggesting that your security vendor is not updating capabilities to match change and evolution in the threat landscape.
• Customer and technical support are taking longer to respond, which indicates a worrisome need for your vendor to cut costs — or else a simple lack of focus on addressing customer needs.
• Your vendor has undergone a change of ownership or management, leading to a change in overall focus and direction — or a complete abandonment of the security function for which you engaged them.

Fortunately, many of the things that used to make switching vendors challenging no longer present a genuine difficulty — which should give you greater confidence to undertake a change sooner rather than later:

• The increasing availability of cloud-based platforms and solutions dramatically reduces the sheer logistical issues involved in provisioning and deploying products from a different vendor. Of course, ease of deployment is only one of many benefits to be gained by leveraging cloud-delivered solutions.
• On-premises appliances can be deployed more easily than ever, thanks to the use of zero-touch deployment technology. Different vendors use different methods to implement zero touch, but if you choose to deploy on-prem appliances, you can likely choose a vendor who lets you do so with very little need for trained IT personnel on-site at every location.
• Innovative machine-learning-powered discovery and configuration capabilities can largely automate the process of ensuring that all elements of your IT infrastructure are fully protected by some of today’s more advanced security platforms.

Choosing the right vendor

Once you’ve considered all the reasons you may have for switching … and the real, tangible benefits of vendor consolidation in the cybersecurity space … and all the reasons that switching is actually much easier today than it might have been in the past — now all you need to do is make sure you’re choosing a vendor that can meet all your needs for a consolidated security infrastructure.

When you’re evaluating options, be sure to take a look at Barracuda. Over the past 20 years, we’ve been continuously expanding and improving our security offerings, culminating today in a platform-based approach that delivers integrated, comprehensive, proven full-stack solutions to address email security, network security, application and API protection, and data protection. In addition, our managed XDR solution delivers SOC-as-a-service to up-level your entire security profile and provide expert oversight, management, and incident response across all vectors.

Schedule a consultation to thoroughly evaluate your needs and discover whether Barracuda’s suite of integrated security platforms may be right for your organization.