Enterprises continue to add cybersecurity tools at a rapid pace, but mounting complexity is increasingly undermining the very protection those tools are meant to provide. A 2024 Gartner survey of 162 large organizations found that enterprises now operate an average of 45 cybersecurity products. More than half of executives surveyed, 52 percent, said operational complexity is the single biggest obstacle preventing effective security. While mid market organizations typically manage fewer tools, smaller IT and security teams often face the same level of strain, and in some cases even greater operational pressure, as they attempt to manage security with limited resources.
The rise of security platforms was meant to address this problem. Platforms emerged as a response to unchecked tool sprawl, promising unified visibility, tighter integration across controls, improved alert correlation, and faster response times. Research supports the theory. The 2025 IBM Institute for Business Value report indicates organizations with higher platform maturity identify and contain incidents more quickly than peers relying on fragmented tooling. Yet consolidation alone has not consistently delivered these benefits. A 2025 Gartner survey shows 62 percent of companies are actively consolidating security vendors, with another 36 percent planning to do so within three years. In practice, many of these efforts focus on cost reduction, contract simplification, or procurement efficiency rather than true architectural integration. Vendors have accelerated acquisition strategies to meet demand, but integrating products, teams, and technologies remains difficult, often resulting in platforms that function more like marketplaces than cohesive systems.
This tension is increasingly visible at the enterprise level. Palo Alto Networks has long advocated platformization, and its announced acquisition of CyberArk sparked debate about whether identity security can be effectively absorbed into large scale security platforms. While few dispute the importance of identity in modern environments without clear perimeters, skepticism persists around whether mega platforms risk becoming overly complex environments that are difficult to deploy and manage. At the same time, the pace of attacker innovation shows no sign of slowing. Cybersecurity Ventures estimates cybercrime will cost the global economy $10.5 trillion in 2025. Investment in innovation continues, with Crunchbase reporting $9.4 billion poured into cybersecurity and privacy startups in the first half of 2025 alone, and IT Harvest tracking more than 4,000 vendors offering roughly 10,000 products. Enterprises will continue adopting specialized tools where necessary, particularly when new attack techniques emerge faster than large platforms can adapt.
Organizational structure further complicates platform adoption. Security ownership inside many companies remains fragmented, with different teams controlling endpoint security, cloud security, identity, and operations. Platform buying decisions often involve large committees, long evaluation cycles, and competing priorities. Large enterprises can afford to blend platforms with best of breed tools, but mid market organizations rarely have that flexibility. For them, purpose built platforms represent a clearer opportunity. Vendors increasingly focus on platforms designed specifically for mid market realities, emphasizing essential capabilities rather than enterprise scale breadth. By reducing unnecessary features, these platforms lower operational overhead, reduce risk, and shrink total cost of ownership from deployment through day to day management.
For mid market teams with limited staff, platforms must also cover the full attack lifecycle. Prevention and exposure visibility help prioritize remediation before incidents occur, while strong pre execution protection remains critical for vendors rooted in endpoint security. Detection and response still matter, but must be simplified through native agents, APIs, and integrations across endpoints, identities, cloud, network, and email. As competition increases in this segment, innovation is shifting toward practical security outcomes rather than platform optics, offering mid market organizations a more realistic path to reducing complexity and improving resilience.
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