The Real Cost of Disjointed Security Tools in the SOC

The effects are tangible. I’ve seen customers hit with alert storms due to overlapping or misconfigured tools, drowning analysts in noise and allowing real threats to go undetected. Or a lack of expertise — which 32% of respondents say is a source of inefficiency in their SOC — causes threats to slip through the cracks. In one case, a customer running multiple firewalls had a single firewall engineer managing all three firewall vendors. Because the engineer didn’t fully understand the intricacies of each product, they wrote a rule to prevent traffic from a high-risk region but didn’t properly implement it across every firewall. As a result, a misconfigured rule hierarchy allowed an attacker to bypass protections and deploy ransomware through an Exchange server sitting on the DMZ.

Tool dispersion often leads to poor hygiene as well. One client wasn’t using a centralized log aggregator but instead relied on piecemeal syslog data, with large visibility gaps and no clear assurance they were even receiving logs from all devices. Their antivirus was cutting-edge, but rarely updated. The illusion of protection was there, but the reality was a gaping blind spot.

Eventually, organizations face a difficult math problem: Can one engineer effectively manage four tools? And if not, what are you sacrificing?

Disjointed tooling can also have downstream effects on compliance and operational rigor. I’ve seen SOC teams resort to building shadow ticketing systems just to bypass the bottlenecks of centralized IT, introducing tools without approval or security vetting. Documentation lags behind. Rogue software flourishes. In some cases, terminated employees retained access to collaboration platforms like Slack for weeks due to misaligned identity and HR systems — a data exfiltration risk hiding in plain sight.

The bottom-line impact of tool sprawl

All of this adds up to a stark financial reality. Each new tool requires budgeting for licensing as well as for staffing, training, integration, and upkeep. When your architecture demands two engineers per tool but your budget allows for one engineer across four, you’re not just inefficient — you’re exposed.

One public-sector organization I worked with successfully reduced their toolset from hundreds of vendors down to 25. The result? A whopping $40 million savings, which was reinvested in staffing and enablement. Yes, some features were lost — but they were able to gain better people and ultimately strengthen their security posture.

Tool rationalization often starts as a cost-cutting exercise. However, security leaders should approach it as a strategy for resilience. Start by validating what you already have:

• Do any of your tools’ features overlap?
• Are they fully deployed, properly configured, well integrated, and are you using all the available features? For example, integrating identity management, SIEM, SOAR and HR systems is crucial for preventing exfiltrated data. 
• Do the detections your tools generate address your highest-priority use cases?
• Are you actually monitoring and acting on the data?

And most importantly, which tools do your team actually feel provides benefits? 

Remember the people behind the tools 

Focus not on the most advanced feature sets, but on the tools your team can actually use effectively. A single well-staffed and integrated EDR platform, for example, is better than three half-deployed solutions, especially when it frees up the budget to hire, train, and retain your analysts. In many cases, the path to better security is not more tools, but smarter use of fewer ones. 

Analysts should be empowered to work efficiently within a cohesive ecosystem, not forced to patch together context across disparate platforms. 

Security is as much of a human endeavor as a technical one. If your tools are making it harder for your team to succeed, it’s time to rethink your approach. Ask yourself, ‘What is the easiest way to make my team more efficient?’ rather than ‘What hole am I trying to plug?’ Start building a SOC that prioritizes integration, usability, and resilience.

To learn more about how teams can eliminate inefficiencies and build a smarter and more automated SOC, download the State of Security 2025 report.