Security SaaS Integration & TCO: Unlocking the True Total Cost of Ownership

Security teams continue to struggle to achieve the same objectives as their enterprise IT counterparts. While business departments gain insights through integrated technologies and correlated datasets, the security team’s data remains siloed, creating visibility gaps and alert fatigue arising from disconnected tools and information. 

Security vendors often position their solutions as a way for customers to reduce the total cost of ownership (TCO) for a given cybersecurity challenge. Marketing and sales promote the out-of-the-box connectors that buyers want. Unfortunately, many security vendors offer only a limited number of native integrations, often telling buyers that custom integrations are available during onboarding. 

Disappointingly for customers, these integrations may not be available immediately. Even more distressing, customers may find themselves onboarding the solution, asking repeatedly for the integration, and waiting for months or years before the vendor fulfills its promise. For dissatisfied customers, the same ease of onboarding that a SaaS solution provides also makes offboarding easy, increasing customer churn and reducing revenue. 

For security vendors to fulfill their promise of reducing their customers’ total cost of ownership, they need to provide true native SaaS integrations across the entire cybersecurity technology stack. 

What is Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) in a SaaS Security World?

Total cost of ownership (TCO) is the financial estimate that buyers and owners use to understand a security solution’s direct and indirect costs. Integrations enable data transfers across the complex security stack, breaking down data silos and automating threat detection and incident response. 

For a SaaS security solution, TCO encompasses the following costs:

• Subscription fee: the solution’s direct cost.
• Implementation: hourly rate of staff time spent deploying the technology. 
• Customization: hourly rate of staff time spent configuring the solution. 
• Training: hourly rate of staff time spent learning how to use the technology.
• Support: hourly rate of staff time spent working with the solution’s customer success staff when experiencing issues. 
• Integration: hourly rate of staff time spent connecting the solution into the security technology stack so that automations and workflows work as intended. 

How Does a Failure to Provide Native Integrations Increase a Security Solution’s TCO?

Security vendors often position their solutions as a way to reduce the overall TCO of a customer’s security program. However, the failure to provide broad integrations across the security technology ecosystem often increases TCO, leaving customers dissatisfied enough to choose a competitor’s product. 

Lack of Integrations Increases Direct Costs

Direct costs are the tangible, predictable expenses associated with acquiring and implementing SaaS solutions and their integrations. When security vendors fail to provide native integrations, they essentially pass on those costs to customers, increasing the following:

• Subscription fees: Fees for integration platforms the customer needs to connect the solution to the ecosystem. 
• Implementation and configuration: Fees for professional services, consultants, or the internal staff hours required to configure integration flows.
• Data Migration and transformation: Transforming data from on-premises systems and cloud-native solutions so that all solutions use the same data schema which becomes even more expensive with security solutions that have diverse schemas and proprietary data formats. 
• Training and onboarding: Training employees on the new technology which increases when a lack of integration leads to ineffective workflows. 

Lack of Integrations Increase Hidden Costs

Despite being more difficult to quantify, indirect costs are the ongoing operational costs related to managing a system. When security vendors fail to provide native integrations, they drive up these costs by increasing the following:

• Ongoing maintenance and support: Developers maintaining custom code, managing API changes, and troubleshooting integration failures. 
• Manual data management: Manually exporting, re-formatting, and importing data across non-integrated systems. 
• Service disruption: Missed detections from data failures or lost productivity from getting the services running again. 
• Scalability limitations: Customer-developed APIs failing to grow with the security stack add to future expenses. 

Why Providing Application Integrations Improves Customer Security Tool Adoption

When security vendors offer limited native integrations, they often promise customers custom integrations to fill the gap. In the long term, providing built-in customizations improves customer adoption, increasing annual recurring revenue (ARR) and acting as a competitive differentiator. 

Providing the depth and breadth of native security integrations that customers need enables them to:

• Gain operational efficiencies: Data transfer across the security ecosystem fulfills a vendor’s assertions about reducing repetitive, low-value tasks, like automating incident response activities. 
• Eliminating data silos: Connecting datasets from across various security SaaS applications meets customers’ expectations by enabling them to leverage data analytics models that inform decision-making. 
• Enhancing data accuracy: Transforming security data enables customers to eliminate manual processes that can lead to errors or false positives..
• Improving security and risk management: Integrating security SaaS applications enables teams to gain the promised visibility into security measures and control effectiveness across their environment. 
• Elevating user experience: Seamless workflows across the security ecosystem improve analysts’ user experience, enabling them to leverage data without being tied to multiple platform interfaces. 

Using a Security SaaS Integration Platform to Drive Customer Adoption by Fulfilling TCO

As buyers move closer to contract, they begin asking more pointed questions about integrations. The more times that the sales team can say “yes” to the solution’s ability to integrate with other security technologies, the more times customers will say “yes” to completing the purchase. For many security vendors, the costs of building integrations internally mean that developers step away from improving the core product. However, outsourcing API development can cost anywhere from $331,200 to $441,600 with annual maintenance increasing the costs by $32,400 – $43,200 every year until retiring the integration. 

Using a SaaS integration platform built for security enables security vendors to provide a breadth and depth of integrations across critical security control categories, including:

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

When choosing a security SaaS integration platform to provide a faster, more cost-efficient path to meeting customer integration demands, security vendors should consider how the platform responds to the unique issues related to security tool APIs. 

Align integrations to business objectives

Integrations tie directly to customer experience and sales promises. By leveraging a unified integration platform, vendors can:

• Scale efficiently: Support the security categories most critical to customers, from SIEM to IAM, without the overhead of building from scratch.
• Adapt quickly: Onboard new tools or respond to customer requirements with flexible mapping and runtime configuration.
• Deliver confidence: Provide operational visibility and troubleshooting dashboards that strengthen customer trust and reduce support overhead.

Reduce internal and customer TCO

Integrations reduce the customer’s TCO for implementing the security solution. However, adopting an integration platform built for security reduces the costs associated with owning the integration integration itself through:

• Connector reuse: One connector for multiple providers in the same category drastically cuts engineering effort.
• Standardization support: Common schemas like OCSF accelerate data normalization and reduce custom coding.
• Developer enablement: Well-documented APIs, SDKs, and prebuilt UI components shorten time-to-market while improving user experience.
• Accelerated time-to-market: Faster integration delivery helps sales close deals sooner and with fewer custom commitments.

Ultimately, the security integration platform lowers costs for both the security vendor and the customers improving overall revenue. 

Extend value across the customer lifecycle

When integrations are easy to deploy and manage, they become a selling point that drives adoption. The integrations that fulfill sales and marketing promises differentiate the security vendor’s solution, maintaining customer expectations and leading to upselling opportunities. Some considerations when working with a security-focused integration platform include:

• Streamlined setup: Automated credential handling and schema mapping accelerate onboarding.
• Operational ease: Built-in monitoring and logging tools reduce friction for both customers and vendor support teams.
• Configurable at runtime: Customers can adjust integrations without waiting on vendor releases, increasing satisfaction and stickiness.

Synqly: A Security-Focused SaaS Integration Platform That Improves Vendor and User TCO

Synqly is the security integration solution that enables security vendors to reduce costs, accelerate their product’s time-to-value, and ensure secure, scalable growth. With Synqly, vendors can provide pre-built connectors across key security and IT categories with data normalized to industry standards and built-in monitoring for troubleshooting. 

Built by security practitioners, Synqly’s platform embeds security and compliance best practices, evidenced by our GDPR Data Privacy Agreement and SOC-2 Type 2 certification.  

Contact us today to see how Synqly can provide the SaaS integrations that lead to your security solution’s success.