Too Many Security Tools?

Intriguing thought, though the actual result, 8 percent, seems it might be within the noise of measurement.   Work recording the institute name, which I had not heard of.

Too many security tools weaken enterprise incident response, study finds
NEWS by Davey Winder

Missing the wood for the trees. Those with large numbers of tools must make sure the staff, expertise, and proper organisational alignments, expectations, and structures are in place.

What if we were to tell you that not only does your enterprise likely have too many security tools, but doing so hinders your incident response effectiveness? What if the Ponemon Institute told you the exact same thing, based upon an analysis of insight from 3,400 security and IT professionals globally? 

The latest Ponemon Institute Cyber Resilient Organisation Report,  sponsored by IBM, found that formal, enterprise-wide security response plan adoption is on the up. Across the last five years, enterprise incident response planning adoption has seen a 44 percent growth rate. That's the good news.

Less comforting for security professionals are the findings as they relate to the number of security tools being employed by enterprises. On average, enterprises use a total of 45 different security tools and 19 of these will be employed in response to a single incident. If that sounds like a positive, you are probably in the wrong line of work: more does not mean merrier when it comes to security tools and incident response. 

The Ponemon Institute research found that, on average, those enterprises employing more than 50 security tools were eight percent less effective in detecting, and seven percent less effective in responding to, a security incident than those using fewer tools. This negative benchmarking proved to be applicable across multiple categories of the threat lifecycle, according to the report. ... "