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According to a recent Gartner survey, 75 percent of firms want to pursue security vendor consolidation in 2022, up from 29 percent in 2020.
ohn Watts, VP Analyst, Gartner, said, “Security and risk management leaders are increasingly dissatisfied with the operational inefficiencies and the lack of integration of a heterogenous security stack. As a result, they are consolidating the number of security vendors they use.”
According to the report, 57 percent of firms work with fewer than 10 vendors for their security needs, as they seek to optimize to fewer vendors in important areas such as secure access service edge (SASE) and extended detection and response (XDR).
The survey was performed online between March and April 2022, with 418 individuals from North America, Asia Pacific, and EMEA participating. Its goal was to identify businesses’ security vendor consolidation efforts and goals, as well as the drivers and advantages of consolidation activities.
During the Gartner Security & Risk Management Summit in London, Gartner analysts are highlighting how enterprises can influence their security vendor strategy and projects.
Improving Risk Posture Is the No. 1 Benefit of Consolidation
Organizations want to combine their security providers to decrease complexity and improve risk posture, not to save cost or better procurement, according to the survey results. Sixty-five percent of respondents intend to improve their overall risk posture, but only 29 percent expect to cut licensing spending.
“Cost optimization should not be the primary driver for vendor consolidation,” said Watts. “Organizations that look to optimize costs must reduce products, licenses and features, or ultimately renegotiate contracts.”
Organizations who have not yet pursued security vendor consolidation said that the two biggest hurdles to consolidation were time constraints and an overly tight vendor partnership (34 percent of respondents for each answer).
SASE and XDR Are Opportunities for Consolidation
Long procurement processes or requests for bids are enabling consolidated products, such as XDR for endpoints and SASE for edge connection and security with backend integration.
According to the survey, 41.5 percent of respondents intend to implement SASE across their firms by the end of 2022, while 54.5 percent intend to implement XDR by the end of 2022.
Dionisio Zumerle, VP Analyst, Gartner, said in a statement that to begin their consolidation journey, security and risk management leaders should explore XDR and SASE as appealing possibilities. SASE enables secure business access, whereas XDR focuses on identifying and responding to threats by increasing visibility across networks, clouds, endpoints, and other components.
In fact, the survey found that 57 percent of organizations resolved security threats faster after implementing an XDR strategy. SASE projects are used by more than half of the organizations studied to simplify network and security policy management and improve security posture.
Zumerle stated that while 89 percent of surveyed firms prefer SASE and XDR to work together, security and risk management leaders will typically choose to keep them separate yet interoperable. This is a method that has been verified by 46 percent of the firms surveyed, and it offers them the flexibility to choose best-of-breed capabilities.
Watts stated that consolidation should be planned by security and IT leaders for at least two years in advance, as it takes time to effectively consolidate and consider incumbent vendor switching costs. It is also critical to anticipate vendor M&A disruption, as the security sector is always consolidating yet never consolidated.
