It’s 2023, and the world is becoming increasingly digital, with more and more businesses turning to online platforms to run their operations. As a result, there is a growing demand for cybersecurity. However, with so many different vendors available for IT security, it can be difficult for businesses to know where to start and which vendors to trust.
The Top 4 Mistakes IT Leaders Make When Hiring IT Security Vendors
- Not understanding the big picture: Securing your business is more than good antivirus. To have all your budget tied up into the best antivirus, but not have a solution for other areas like email phishing, is a mistake.
- Not starting with the end in mind: You must identify “what data are we trying to protect, what would our financial liability be if we are breached, and would this threat most likely come from internal employee, an outside criminal, or both”.
- Purchasing the best cybersecurity products: The best cybersecurity product might sound good, but adding multiple vendors, each responsible for their own area, creates a complex system with expensive integrations into a SIEM.
- Getting sold on features instead of outcomes: Salespeople will get you hooked on how their product has the best feature, but if that feature does not integrate with the rest of your cybersecurity stack, you are creating manual processes that will lead to a slower incident response.
5 Challenges Having Too Many IT Security Vendors in Your Cybersecurity Stack
As we learned the hard way, having too many IT vendors can be problematic for several reasons.
First, the more vendors you have, the harder it is to prove compliance. Being able to prove each mailbox, server, and computer has the appropriate protection across all vendors is time consuming.
Second, installing and updating different products across thousands of computers takes time. Fixing installation issues is a nightmare and is cumbersome on your engineers.
Third, having multiple vendors is more expensive. With each vendor getting a smaller piece of the pie, you have less leverage and are less important which makes it harder to negotiate better pricing.
Fourth, your vendors do not work with each other. Instead, each vendor sends you the alerts, and it is up to you to triage and know what to do with it. IT become the router between vendors, and no one talks to each other.
Fifth, dealing with vendors is not always easy. We service customers across the United States, and our point of contact changes depending on what city or state the customer was located.
What Our IT Security Vendor Consolidation Looked Like
Using a formula, we downsized from ten to three vendors. This took us 57 days and a lot of research, webinars, and hands on trial licenses. While some may argue that there are better products in specific areas, overall, we have simplified our security offering, provided a learning path for engineers, and have gained efficiencies through product integrations.
Conclusion
In conclusion, consolidating vendors helps to reduce costs, streamline processes, and improve security. If you want to learn the specifics of our vendor consolidation process, keep an eye out for a new post that will review exactly what products we were using and the changes we made.
