Adrift in a Sea of Tools: 6 Questions to Ask Your Integration Platform

Security teams are adrift in a sea of tools. Every year, new technologies enter the market, acting like a lifeboat by responding to evolving threats in new ways. Simultaneously, large vendors that reach across the high-value enterprise customers may feel like the Goliath to the start-up tool’s David. As security teams struggle to manage anywhere between 70 to 130 discrete tools, their word of the year is “consolidation.” While security teams may appreciate that a solution solves a problem innovatively, they need a tightly integrated security tool ecosystem to gain everyone’s favorite cybersecurity marketing words: “comprehensive, holistic visibility in a single pane of glass.” 

In response, security vendors must adopt the terms “Unified API” and “Integration Platform.”  In the crowded security technology market, out-of-the-box integrations act as a market differentiator, especially when multiple tools offer the same security outcomes. When deciding whether to build the integration internally or outsource development, many realize that a Unified API through an integration platform provider enables them to extend the integration’s value. An integration platform with a Unified API creates integrations by placing tools into different categories. Essentially, once the Unified API is built, any technologies that help manage the capability are more easily onboarded.  

Problematically, traditional business application integration and Unified API platforms may be unable to manage the unique challenges of building integrations for a security tool. Unlike traditional business application APIs, security integrations require specialized experience. Security tool APIs differ from conventional business APIs in three main ways:

• Data formats and schemas: Security tools use various data formats, including proprietary ones, as well as schemas with distinct fields, structures, and nesting levels. 
• Security and compliance requirements: Business application APIs transmit traditional personally identifiable information (PII) but security APIs may include sensitive information that attackers can use to compromise the customer’s environment, like hostnames and user credentials. 
• Flexible use cases: New threats and risks often necessitate updates to security tools’ schemas, which can cause an API to stop functioning when the vendor adds new fields, changes field names, or alters the log structure. 

Once you identify an integration and Unified API platform that can manage these unique integrations, you can delve into how the tool enables customers to optimize the value of their investment in your product.  

How Many Types of Security Tools Does the Platform Support Integrations For?

While security is complex, the move toward zero-trust network architectures has taught people how to categorize tools under the capabilities they offer. For example, firewalls and web application firewalls (WAF) monitor network traffic, even if they take different approaches and work at different layers. 

For your customers to gain the most value from your solution, you must integrate with more than just a security information and event management (SIEM) tool. In connected environments, tools often need to integrate across multiple security capabilities. For example, since an identity and access management (IAM) tool controls user access to resources, combining it with a firewall enables the security team to control network access across different segments. 

To ensure that your customers can integrate your solution with others that support and augment your capabilities, you should look for a platform that offers as many security tool categories as possible, including:

• Security event management
• Ticketing and notification
• Vulnerability management
• Data Storage
• Identity management
• Endpoint security
• Network security
• Cloud security 
• Asset management
• Email security

How Is The Platform Secured?

Security APIs connect with and transmit sensitive security tools. You need to have confidence that your platform won’t be a single point of failure for you or your customers’ security. Additionally, if you need to comply with data protection laws, standards, or frameworks, your platform could pose a third-party risk. 

As part of making your decision, some considerations include whether the platform:

• Provides role-based access controls so you can implement the principle of least privilege
• Offers attestation over its security, like a SOC 2 Type 2 report
• Enables you to meet your compliance requirements, like supporting FIPS encryption

How Do The Platform’s Integrations Enable Customers to Optimize Their Investment in My Solution?

Integrations only offer customer value when they improve threat detection and incident response. Customers increasingly use artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), agentic AI, and model context protocols (MCP) for predictive analytics and response automations. If the integration only forwards data from your solution to a SIEM, it offers limited value. It may reduce noise and improve alerts, but it fails to strengthen investigation times or help automate response actions. 

The platform’s integrations should parse and normalize the data between applications so that all tools can understand and use the information. Despite a lack of standardization across the security space, several vendor-agnostic data formats have been increasingly popular, including:

• Open Cybersecurity Schema Framework: to standardize log data for use in analytics models
• Structured Threat Information Expression (STIX™): to standardize cyber threat intelligence (CTI) 

Further, to ensure that this normalized data can be used by all tools in all capacities, the platform should support bi-directional integrations for querying data during an investigation and building trustworth response automations, like:

• Forcing password resets
• Forcing re-authentication
• Enabling or disabling users
• Changing user groups
• Quarantining devices

Does The Platform Support On-Premises and Cloud Applications?

Any platform that works with security tools must support on-premises and cloud applications. Customers maintain on-prem security solutions for various reasons, including:

• Legacy or internally designed tools: Enterprise organizations often build their technologies deeply integrated into their current cybersecurity ecosystem, making them costly to replace with cloud solutions. 
• Control over data: Security telemetry manages sensitive internal organizational IT data, so on-premises solutions enable organizations to protect it more effectively. 
• Compliance: Controlling data more effectively often relates to an organization’s compliance posture, an increasingly business-critical initiative. 

Whether the on-premises deployment is unique to an individual customer or related to an off-the-shelf on-premises vendor, your platform should be able to implement the appropriate integration quickly. As part of this, you should ensure that the provider understands the unique challenges around:

• Connectivity: Integrations with on-prem solutions must ensure secure, persistent, low-latency connectivity to the cloud. 
• Data formats and schemas: Internally designed applications often have their formats and schemas, beyond even the off-the-shelf proprietary ones. 
• Version compatibility and drift: Legacy and internally designed applications may have software versions that do not follow modern API specifications. 

Does The Platform Support Self-Hosted Implementations?

If your solution focuses on responding to security concerns for highly regulated industry verticals, you should consider whether the platform supports self-hosting. As a self-hosted implementation offers benefits like:

• Data privacy and compliance: Full control over data flows, storage, and access. 
• Network and latency optimization: Integration performance and reliability by avoiding inefficient round trips through the public cloud. 
• Customization and extensibility: Easier enforcement of your internal security controls, audit logging, and monitoring policies. 
• Cost predictability at scale: Control over integration use, especially for high-volume or long-running integrations.
• Version control and lifecycle management: Easier synchronization between integrations and updates from internal release cycles to control upgrade cadence, rollback, and version planning that improves stability. 

6. What User Analytics Does the Platform Provide?

Whether you’re trying to track an integration’s popularity with customers or manage costs, you need the platform to provide key user metrics. You should ensure that the platform provides visibility into these key performance metrics for your integrations:

• Usage data: Insight into business metrics like total cost of ownership (TCO), return on investment (ROI), integration and asset reuse, efficiencies gained, and customer satisfaction and conversion rates. 
• Data connection failure: Insight into integration availability and reliability to ensure SLA compliance.
• Incident timing: Insight into error and success rates, system downtime, and defects. 
• Cause analysis: Insight into the speed at which the platform discovers, investigates, and remediates issues. 

Synqly: The Unified API Integration Platform That Understands Security and Operations

Built by security veterans specifically for security vendors, Synqly addresses the use cases that our customers need. Security teams need and want integrated solutions, and we understand how to build and maintain security tool APIs. Our security-focused integration platform provides a single API across multiple vendors within a security control category, reducing the time and resources required to deliver a broad, integrated security system. 

Contact us today to see how to improve revenue with a unified security API that understands you and your customers.