To answer that, we first need to look at how the cybersecurity landscape has evolved and where we are today.

We are currently amid a massive cybersecurity rethink. For the last 30-40 years the best way for organizations to protect themselves was to purchase the “best” of each security point product. However, over time this has led to disconnected security stacks with coverage gaps, unnecessary overlap, and overloading already busy IT departments. This is what we call a “Best-of-Breed” security approach and it also requires customized IT skillsets to maintain.

1. Having multiple security solutions creates complexity which leads to confusion and inconsistency in applying policies and responding to threats. This is a massive risk as the greatest financial impact to an organization happens in the period of time between incident detection and containment. The larger this window is, the more detrimental and costly the attack on your business.
2. The Best-of-Breed approach leads to blind spots. Blind spots lead to an increase in risk; you can’t mitigate the incidents you don’t know about. While the Best-of-Breed approach is the illusion of risk reduction, it does not effectively reduce an organization’s risk.
3. Lastly, if your organization’s security posture is custom fit; so are the resources to manage it. Whether you’re a small business or an enterprise, hiring the right team to support your Best-of-Breed approach is challenging long term (we talk more about this below).

The fact of the matter is that if you have overlapping security products from multiple vendors, you do have security blind spots, even if you (or your MSSP) are using a SIEM to stitch all those signals together. For more information on the Best-of-Platform approach, check out this blog post. It’s about a 14-minute read, and it contains a ton of useful detail about how the Best-of-Breed approach is leaving businesses vulnerable to costly attacks.

In the image above, the left-hand side shows individual security products while the right-hand side shows the IT skillsets needed to maintain each product(s). Another way to visualize the diagram is to imagine this being your IT environment, leveraging five different security products and having three different IT resources managing various areas based on their skillset. Setting up a team this way may leave room for gaps where the right resources are not readily available to mitigate blind spots.

The short answer is turnover on your IT team in a Best-of-Breed security environment creates gaps that increase your organization’s risk. As a business leader, you do not want custom, unpredictable resourcing–especially when recruiting IT members is so competitive.

In the recruiting world, Human Resources will often use a term to describe searching for a candidate with a very specific skillset as; “I am looking for a purple haired squirrel.” A security stack IT position that relies on custom resources is, by definition, the perfect purple haired squirrel. And it’s inherently volatile because when there’s turnover on your IT team and only a handful of people can fill those specific roles, your organization is left unprotected.

As the diagram above shows, the longer it takes for your organization to fill the open IT position(s); the longer your organization is vulnerable to cyberattacks. Companies can’t continue to patch together security—you’ll never be protected.

What we have learned–and lived–is that the true “best” security posture is one that tightly integrates to provide a complete, holistic picture of the organization, with no overlap or conflict in the process for investigation of or response to incidents.

Smart organizations are beginning to rethink their security posture. If you aren’t sure where to start, the best next step is to get an assessment to understand where your organization stands today and what security gaps currently exist for your organization.