Why consolidate security tools? One platform can cut costs by up to 80 %

According to the advisory firm Gartner, large enterprises use 45 security tools on average, and larger companies even use 50-60.

For growing digital companies this is a typical scenario. They enter the market with one product and deploy one security tool. Two years later they are serving thousands of customers and handling global traffic, which means more cloud workloads, APIs, identities and data flows. As the company grows, so does the number of vendors, contracts and the need to renew them regularly.

The more the infrastructure grows, the more it costs to run. High security costs are not a matter of one expensive tool but rather of a combination of many tools that are not fully aligned with each other.

⇢ Every vendor has its own interface, API and support, which means that even a simple change breaks down into several steps across systems.

⇢ Incident data is fragmented, tools monitor only their slice of reality and correlation between them is often missing.

⇢ Costs grow not only with licences but with the volume of logs, fees and the operational load on teams.

⇢ Integrations between tools create technical debt that slows down both development and incident response.

#1: Complexity and the price you pay for it

Once a company reaches a certain size and operational maturity, its security and performance architecture often consists of a combination of separate specialised tools, such as a CDN, a WAF, DDoS protection, DNS or load balancing and bot protection. Each of them is delivered and managed by a different provider.

The individual technologies work well on their own. The trouble is that each has its own interface, configuration method, API, change deployment process and support.

Data from Forrester shows that over the past five years 52 % of IT teams have taken on responsibility for securing remote and hybrid workers, 46 % have added public cloud applications and 53 % compliance and audits. Every new responsibility usually means another tool and another process.

In practice this means that even a relatively simple adjustment, for example a change in security policy or access rights, breaks down into several steps across the cloud, SaaS applications, the web layer and the internal infrastructure. DevOps teams then spend a disproportionate amount of time coordinating changes between environments instead of continuously improving security and performance in response to the latest cyber threats.

Technical complexity has a direct impact on operations too. Every vendor uses a different data format, a different record structure and a different way of communicating between systems, which requires building integration layers, maintaining configuration tools and continuously adjusting integrations when application interfaces change. If a vendor changes its API, an existing integration can fall apart. Research shows that 48 % of infrastructure leaders consider difficult integration the main obstacle to adopting new technologies.

All of this feeds directly into the rising cost of your company's security and its business. The licence price is clearly visible on the invoice. The consequences of so-called security tool sprawl, a fragmented security environment that grew without a unified architecture, show up not only technically but financially.

A fragmented security stack simply creates a cost spiral. Individual vendors solve similar problems under different names and in different bundles. DDoS protection, bot management, load balancing or API protection therefore often appear across products, each as a separately priced feature. The organisation does not pay for one coherent security model but repeatedly for partial capabilities that are not fully integrated with each other. The result is not a higher level of protection but more complex operations and a growing bill.

With every additional vendor come not only licences but operating costs. Data moves between different platforms, which raises egress fees (charges for outbound data transfer from cloud services). Integrations require more tools, maintenance and human capacity. In practice the total cost of the security stack therefore often rises by tens of percent above the licences themselves, without a corresponding increase in protection for the organisation. According to Nonasec, organisations needlessly pay 30-50 % more for security sprawl than they would have to.

#2: Coverage gaps, or when everyone sees only their own piece

Every security tool sees only its slice of reality, while attackers respect no boundaries between vendors. The CDN watches traffic, the WAF guards the application layer, DDoS protection watches volumetric anomalies, the DNS system watches queries and load balancing watches the distribution of traffic between servers. But if nothing ties these tools together, a fragmented picture emerges. An attack can then start in one layer and show up in another, but the shared context and unified correlation of events are missing. From the outside the tools look like a robust defence; in reality they are isolated signals without shared logic.

The reason the tools do not "see" each other is mostly architectural. A typical example is the separation of global traffic management and local management in the data centre: two systems that fulfil a similar function but are configured differently. As soon as another data centre or a new server is added, the number of places where a consistent configuration has to be maintained grows. Each such place is a potential point of inconsistency.

According to the latest data, 49 % of organisations consider tool overlap a problem, 46 % identify gaps or failures between tools and 41 % link poor integration directly to increased security risk. Fragmentation therefore does not mean only operational complexity but a real weakening of the defence: a rule may apply in one layer but not in another, the response may be fast in one part of the infrastructure and delayed in another. And it is precisely these inconsistencies that an attacker exploits.

Fragmentation brings security risks as well. According to data from The Sequence, 49 % of organisations consider the overlap of tool functions a problem and 41 % link poor integration to an increased risk of incidents. Every new integration point, they note, represents a potential security weakness and a further complication in resolving incidents. Not to mention that resolving an incident across several support desks in practice extends the remediation time and multiplies the negative impact of the attack on the business.

Another layer is the cognitive load that the combination of so many tools places on security staff. The more interfaces and dashboards, the more frequent the switching between them and the higher the risk of error. In this context Gartner has been warning for more than two years that burnout in security teams is a major systemic risk, arising precisely from the growing complexity of the environment and the shortage of qualified professionals.

The most common form is alert fatigue. According to research by the Ponemon Institute, the average security operations centre receives roughly 17,000 malware alerts a week, of which fewer than 20 % are actually investigated, the rest being cognitive noise. More tools therefore mean more alerts and more scattered attention, not necessarily a higher level of protection.

One platform as the solution

Consolidating vendors does not mean simplification at the expense of security. It is rather an architectural answer to the growing complexity and cost of the security environment. According to ADAPT CIO Edge Research, 68 % of technology leaders plan to consolidate their vendors. Gartner also predicts that by 2027, 70 % of organisations will optimise the number of their cloud-native vendors down to a maximum of three. Consolidation is thus becoming a standard strategy, not an exception.

Practical experience shows that consolidation can cut operating costs by tens of percent, simplify contract management and reduce the administrative burden. The main benefits are above all structural:

• lower total costs,
• less operational complexity,
• a consistent security policy,
• faster incident response,
• a stronger negotiating position with vendors.

How Cloudflare solves it

Cloudflare builds its approach on a single global network where services such as the CDN, the web application firewall, DDoS protection, bot protection, DNS and load balancing work over the same operational context. The security layers are therefore not separate products but parts of one architecture.

For example, the combination of load balancing and secured access to private infrastructure makes it possible to route traffic to private addresses without opening access to the data centre, which reduces the attack surface and removes the need for costly hardware appliances. Tiered caching at the same time reduces the load on origin servers and the volume of outbound data, which translates directly into lower costs for data transfer and for running the origin infrastructure.

Concrete numbers come from the case of Baselime: after migrating to Cloudflare, its annual costs fell from more than 700,000 dollars (roughly 14.3 million CZK) to approximately 118,000 dollars (2.4 million CZK), that is by 83 %. Alongside the savings, the operational load dropped dramatically and the latency of processing user requests decreased.

Fewer tools, more control

Consolidating tools cuts costs and at the same time responds to four structural pressures: the growing strategic importance of security for company leadership, the move to the cloud and hybrid environments, the shortage of qualified professionals and the need for automation. Automation, however, only works where there is a unified platform, not a fragmented set of tools.