Why tool consolidation matters for developer security

With threats to cloud native applications rising, security leaders feel more pressure than ever to counter an ever-changing risk landscape. But thanks to a rapidly expanding security solutions market, many respond to these growing demands by adding more products.

With so many new tools arising to tackle security challenges, it sometimes seems like the right answer is always “one tool out of reach”. But at a certain point, adding more and more tools to a security tech stack ends up hurting — not helping — the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of the entire organization. In many ways, tool sprawl is one of the biggest challenges facing today’s security leaders.

To reverse the effects of tool sprawl, security leaders need to take a step back and find practical ways to implement security tool consolidation. According to a Gartner survey, 75% of organizationsare already pursuing security vendor consolidation in 2022. Many organizations are starting to see the adverse effects of security tool sprawl and consolidating their security efforts as a result.

The cost of failing to consolidate your security tools

After adding too many tools to an already highly-diversified toolkit, security teams often find themselves in a downward spiral of tool sprawl. An over-tooled security tech stack ultimately causes unnecessary complexity for organizations as they try to reduce risk. And worse yet, it’s particularly detrimental to developer security, making security processes complicated and hard to adopt. Here are a few adverse effects that organizations experience from tool sprawl — and the likely drivers of the industry-wide shift towards security tool consolidation.

Misuse of already-limited security resources

Security is already understaffed and low on resources as it is. According to Enterprise Strategy Group, over half of organizations have a problematic shortage of cybersecurity staff and skills. As a result, there aren’t enough people to manage an over-tooled security tech stack. An understaffed security team doesn’t have time to focus on the new developer training, management processes, ROI tracking, and ongoing adoption investments that come with every new tool.

Bottlenecks in development pipelines

Most of today’s security teams see value in a DevSecOps approach to application development, shifting security practices as far left in the software development lifecycle as possible. Tool sprawl hurts an organization’s ability to do this. Different tools with different integrations in development pipelines end up creating friction, widening visibility gaps, and becoming bottlenecks in the SDLC. To make matters worse, each new tool comes with new APIs, making it an operational nightmare to implement security automation across tools.

It wastes both the development and security teams’ time

Each security tool comes with a distinctly different reporting system. And eventually, looking at different consoles and dashboards becomes very time-consuming. These disparate reports often hinder timely incident responses and cause resistance to developer adoption. According to another ESG report, “27% of survey respondents (i.e., cybersecurity professionals) say that their security products generate high volumes of security alerts, making it difficult to prioritize and investigate security incidents. Thus, more security tools = more alerts = more work = more problems.”

The benefits of security tool consolidation

Organizations need to consolidate security wherever possible to prevent their tech stacks from getting out of control and creating any of the above issues.

This doesn’t just include consolidating similar types of cybersecurity tools (e.g. all AppSec tools together, all cloud tools together, etc.). Thanks to infrastructure as code (IaC) and cloud growth, the lines between application, software supply chain, and cloud security are more blurred than ever before. Several elements — custom code, open source libraries, containers, and infrastructure — are all contained within any given application. And from a development perspective, each of these different components look like parts of a whole. They are all lines of code in the same project. Because of this, tool consolidation isn’t just about combining “like kinds” of tooling. Instead, it’s about empowering developers to secure all of these various components, without needing to switch between tools.

 Tool consolidation can help with…

• Reducing overall risk. By uniting cloud and application security, you’ll build a foundation with significantly more coverage — cloud to code, code to cloud.

• Driving developer adoption with unified workflows. Developers will no longer need to leave their familiar workflows to work with security tools. And even if they do in some cases, they will only need to learn a limited number of new workflows. Unified workflows make training and adoption easier for everyone.

• Achieving compliance. Consolidating security vendors leads to a much quicker compliance process. For example, asking for a Software Bill of Materials for only one tool will take a fraction of the time it takes to go to multiple vendors for that same SBOM.

• Reducing procurement and cost. In the end, security consolidation saves money. Fewer vendors mean less time wasted in procurement and, in most cases, fewer overall costs.

Consolidate with Snyk’s developer security platform

Snyk’s developer security platform exists to unite several areas of security — cloud, application, and the software supply chain. We provide one platform to tackle vulnerabilities from code to cloud, and back again. Instead of looking through several disparate tools, developers can use a single platform to see all the components that make up their applications.

Our platform includes:

• Snyk Code for securing static code as it’s written.

• Snyk Cloud for establishing and enforcing cloud security policy as code.

• Snyk Container for automatically finding and fixing container and workload vulnerabilities.

• Snyk IaC for securing infrastructure from the source.

• Snyk Open Source for identifying and mitigating security and license issues in open source dependencies.

All of these tools cover specific areas of security but feed into the same platform, creating a consolidated security hub for developers, security teams, and cloud architects alike. And while they each cover a different aspect of the SDLC, all of our tools are powered by a common source — Snyk’s security intelligence database made up of public sources, developer community data, proprietary expert research, machine learning, and human-in-the-loop AI.

Find out more about Snyk’s developer security platform today!