Partner Content: The Benefits of Tool and Technology Consolidation in Cybersecurity

Today’s MSPs are inundated with security tools from vendors offering to boost their managed security business. While building a comprehensive product portfolio is important for protecting customer environments, having multiple tools that are not well-integrated and multiple vendors and licenses to manage can be a hinderance rather than a help.

At best, this issue of tool sprawl can lead to increased workloads for already overstretched teams, and at worst poor visibility can create security blind spots, leading alerts to slip through the net and putting customer environments at risk.

The issue of tool sprawl

Tool sprawl can be caused by a number of factors, including mergers and acquisitions, changes in security strategy, or a lack of communication between different parts of the business.

For security teams, monitoring numerous alerts across multiple siloed consoles that cannot be managed centrally is inefficient, and can be a drain on time and resources. Reporting may be inconsistent across systems, and team members are too busy navigating between tools to focus on strategic tasks that could lead to new sources of revenue or better experiences for customers. In short, monitoring and incident response is significantly hampered.

As well as impacting productivity, tool sprawl may also be a cost drain. When point solutions are adopted to solve specific security problems, you may be paying for tools that you no longer need or have duplicate functionalities. Furthermore, MSPs may need to recruit specialist talent to manage individual consoles.

According to the Acronis Cyberthreats Report, H2 2024 from the Acronis Threat Research Unit, MSPs will continue to face significant challenges in securing complex IT environments in 2025, and many will continue to struggle to hire the skilled cyber professionals they require. As such, any efforts to streamline management and boost productivity cannot be overlooked.

Prioritising consolidation

To remediate these issues and more, tech stack consolidation should be a priority for all MSPs, particularly for cyber security service providers.

Consolidation is the process of reducing the number of tools your organisation uses, or bringing multiple tools under one platform operated by one vendor. Having visibility in one place makes identifying and fixing vulnerabilities more efficient, as technical teams are not required to switch between multiple tools. Furthermore, the ability to share information across security tools reduces data siloes, resulting in more accurate reporting and richer insights into threats.

Not having to pay for solutions from multiple vendors also means simplifying licensing and can reduce the total cost of ownership. According to research from IDC, cybersecurity consolidation can save an average of 16% of total tool costs.

Faster incident response is also a key driver behind consolidation. IDC found that consolidation can reduce mean time to respond to an incident by an average of more than 20%.

Single-vendor security

For many MSPs, natively integrated security solutions from a single vendor may be the answer: having a single license for a comprehensive solution rather than multiple disparate tools. Having a single centralised console simplifies tasks such as onboarding, account management, alert monitoring and deploying updates, allowing teams to focus on adding value in other areas rather than managing vendors.

To avoid the issue of tool sprawl, MSPs must assess their current tech stack to determine where complexity has crept in. Auditing the number of vendors you are currently working with and evaluating whether their solutions are still benefitting both you and your customers is key to this

Opting for a natively integrated solution enables you to provide clients with more consistent protection with a comprehensive security platform, easing the burden of client management.

This post is sponsored by Acronis.