Moving from OK to Best in Class: 20 Quotes from Experts Proving The Need for Security Integrations

In the beginning, there was the SIEM. And it was, well, ok. Organizations wanted to implement security information and event management (SIEM) solutions because they needed real-time security alerts. 

Back in 2005, the impossible dream of the SIEM was to ingest log data from across the organization’s environment so that security teams could respond to threats faster. In these nascent days of digital business operations, the security tools, telemetry, and threats were less dispersed. However, as the public internet and cloud services became the IT norm, security teams found themselves reactively adopting new technologies in an attempt to respond to each new threat. 

And it was, again, ok. 

Today, balancing the cost of SIEMs has changed the cybersecurity technology landscape. Organizations need to connect more tools, collect more data, and leverage analytics models. Modern security teams manage anywhere between 70 and 130 discrete tools, yet many remain isolated from the broader security analytics solution because security vendors struggle with time-consuming, expensive integration development processes. 

And this time, it is not ok. Customers and security experts tell the tale of disconnected tools and need better than any other resource could. For security vendors to go from “ok” to “best in class,” they need an integration strategy. 

To create a cost-effective, optimized integration strategy, they need a cybersecurity-focused integration platform. 

2022: Survey Says “Standardization Is the Key”

By early 2021, organizations were already noting that the COVID pandemic accelerated their digital transformation strategies. Both the e-commerce and pharmaceutical industries reported fast-tracking their digital transformation strategies by four to six years. In short, organizations suddenly expanded their IT environments beyond the castle walls of their internal networks, creating new risks and generating far more security data. 

To mitigate these new risks, they adopted even more point solutions because they needed to rapidly onboard security tools, and cloud-based monitoring technologies answered the call. 

Problematically, security teams faced a new challenge. Each tool solved a problem, but security teams had no way to easily integrate them into a single, cohesive view. 

“The sheer volume of disparate security tools and a lack of native interoperability between them is one of the biggest challenges facing cybersecurity operations today… Each new security tool must be integrated with dozens of others, creating a compounding number of custom integrations that must be managed… at a scale which has become unfeasible.” – Chris Meenan, VP of Product Management at IBM Security csoonline.com 

“When new tools are introduced but can’t communicate with other platforms or security tools, it makes it even more difficult to get a useful view of the true threat landscape.” – Kelly Bissell, Global Managing Director at Accenture Security Csoonline.com 

While security vendors sold technologies labeled as “best in class” and “next-gen” and cloud-native,” security teams had no way to optimze their purchases because vendors failed to provide the necessary APIs and integrations.

“Security leaders are wrestling with integration gaps across an expanding set of application, service, and infrastructure providers.” – Patrick Coughlin, Group VP Security Market at Splunk​ ironnet.com 

“In the security landscape, it hasn’t necessarily been an easy thing to get integrations to happen between different solutions, but they are happening at an increasing level.” – Mauricio Sanchez, Research Director for Network Security at Dell’Oro Group Sdxcentral.com 

“Too many security tools are making it hard to implement security. So we’re looking for more and more integrated solutions.” – Frank Dickson, VP, IDC Security & Trust Sdxcentral.com 

Simultaneously, security vendors wanted to provide the integrations, but they faced their own struggles. Security APIs were just different from traditional business APIs. 

“These APIs are not necessarily built on the same standards, so specific, custom code is still required to integrate product A with product B.” – Chris Meenan (commenting on the lack of standardized APIs for security tools) Csoonline.com 

Security vendors found themselves making difficult decisions about allocating developers time. Should they focus on their core product or should they shift to building the APIs that customers kept requesting?

 “Security and risk management leaders are dissatisfied with their current operational inefficiencies and lack of integration of their existing heterogeneous security stacks… Many organizations are seeking more efficient and integrated solutions rather than point security products.” – John Watts, VP Analyst at Gartner​ darkreading.com 

In response to these challenges, security companies banded together to develop a new, vendor agnostic data format, the Open Cybersecurity Schema Framework (OCSF). 

“Normalizing data prior to ingestion has been one of the biggest pain points for security professionals, and the universal framework proposed by the OCSF… simplifies this time-consuming step, ultimately enabling better and stronger security for all.” – Erkang Zheng, CEO of JupiterOne​ ironnet.com 

Fundamentally, they realized that collaboration was more important than competition. If their technologies could integrate, they could expand their customer base. 

“If we can minimize the complexity of using security data from disparate sources, we can save security professionals millions of hours every year.” – Sam Adams, VP of Detection and Response at Rapid7​ ironnet.com 

2023: No One View to Rule Them All

Without security vendors giving customers what they needed, security teams failed to gain the “comprehensive, holistic insights in a single pane of glass” that they so desperately sought. While solving the initial security problems, these deployments created a new set of blindspots that undermined organizations’ security objectives.

“[You have] one analyst trying to respond to feeds from multiple systems and, in some cases, multiple dashboards. This leads to missed alerts that could have prevented an incident from becoming a major crisis.” – Steve Winterfeld (writing on Security Boulevard)​ securityboulevard.com 

As security teams struggled to reduce key metrics, like mean time to detect (MTTD) and mean time to respond (MTTR), security vendors began discussing the challenges and inching toward improving these experiences. 

“The interlacing of multiple tools complicated coordination and control of the architecture… additionally, the lack of integration across tools made investigating and resolving security and performance issues a complex and time-consuming effort.” – Security team at Carrefour  blog.cloudflare.com 

2024: Languishing Security Tools and Increasing Costs

With no way to integrate the tools, organizations had no solutions, but they did have a lot of expensive, ornamental technologies collecting dust. 

“Many products just sit on the shelf because they don’t integrate well, they overlap, or they’re too labor-intensive to implement.” – Olivia Rose, former CISO and founder of Rose CISO Group Siliconeangle.com 

Further, these expensive, disconnected technologies exacerbated security team problems. The security team needed the information, but it had no way to incorporate into alerts. In the end, inability to integrate and monitor these security tools became another security risk.

“The lack of integration often results in siloed data, a higher risk of misconfiguration, inconsistent security policies and increased administrative overhead… Adding more tools has exacerbated vulnerabilities rather than alleviated them.” – Taimur Aslam, CTO at Cytex (unified resilience platform vendor) Siliconeangle.com 

2025: To Correlate Is Insight, To Integrate Is Divine

These collections of dusty security tools are the enterprise ITl verison of the unpacked box leftover from the last move. Security teams don’t want to throw them away because they need the coverage. However, they have no way to gain insights from them. 

Today, the voices asking for security integrations have become louder. 

“When CISOs want to tame tool sprawl, they should start by focusing on integration and consolidation, rather than adding more tools… Instead of expanding the toolset, CISOs should prioritize ensuring that the existing tools work together seamlessly, creating a unified security ecosystem.” – Piyush Sharma, CEO of Tuskira 

“Cybersecurity investments will continue to favour multiple point solutions that do not play well together. This will lead to detrimental effects on reporting and visibility, and security teams will bear the brunt — more gaps, more vectors, more paths to privilege.” – Morey Haber, Chief Security Officer at BeyondTrust (2025 prediction)​ 

Calls to eliminate data silos come from every part of the industry. Without integrations, the security tools fail to live up to their promises. 

“There’s the lack of integration that comes from standalone tools, and the silos of data that inevitably arise as a result.” – MSP Success Magazine 

Security teams and CISOs know that the key to protecting sensitive data is correlating data from security tools. In a word where the perimeter no longer exists, correlating security telemetry across users, devices, networks, data, and applications is the answer. 

“All events, logs, etc., should allow integration into the corporate SIEM… Even something as simple as remote access should allow for detailed logging to ensure all access is appropriate.” – Morey J. Haber, Chief Security Advisor at BeyondTrust 

To correlate, however, security teams need to integrate. 

“In isolation these tools are effective; however… if not properly integrated, they at best become another overhead, at worse impact the effectiveness of the existing stack.” – Simon Phillips, CTO at SecureAck​ 

“Tools that are hard to use or overly complex to integrate are dead on arrival. Integration and automation are table stakes today.” – Buzz Hillestad, Information Security Officer and Security Architect 

Synqly: Powering Integrations for Weaving a Tapestry of Security Insights

Hovering in the background behind these challenges was the whisper of a solution, the cybersecurity fabric. 

“A well-integrated cybersecurity fabric, facilitated through high-quality integrations across a broad ecosystem of best-in-breed technologies, enables organizations to focus on digital transformation initiatives and other business priorities.” – James Young 

The security fabric architecture offers a solution – a true solution – that allows organizations to connect their disparate security tools so that they can correlate data and use data analytics to gain insights. 

Customers need built-in integrations to gain the full value of your security solution, and you need a partner to eliminate the burden of developing them. Built by security professionals who understand the challenges that these integrations bring, Synqly’s Unified API enables security vendors a solution for simple, secure, scalable product integrations. 

With Synqly’s bi-directional integrations, security vendors solve their customers’ challenges by eliminating data silos. Meanwhile, customers can optimize their use of your solution by receiving and sending data across their interconnected security technology stack. Our embeddable user interface means that your customers can select the integrations they need, directly from your solution, to gain an immediate return on investment. 

To see how you can improve the value your solution provides customers and how to give them the visibility they need, contact us today.