October 16, 2025

October is Cybersecurity Awareness Month (CAM). GuidePoint Security is proud to join the national effort, championed by the US National Cybersecurity Alliance (NCA) in collaboration with the Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), to amplify essential cybersecurity practices under the 2025 themes: Stay Safe Online and Building a Cyber Strong America.

Do you spend more time managing your security tools and alerts than on combating actual threats? 

You’re not alone. 

According to a recent report by The Panaseer Team, organizations juggle anywhere from 76 to 130 or more different security solutions. With unchecked tool sprawl, many solutions go under-utilized, leaving security teams frustrated, budgets strained, and real threats harder to see. 

Cybersecurity tools are supposed to make life easier and systems more secure. Each new tool solves something different. But you wake up one day, your inbox is full of alerts, and you’re constantly switching between platforms because dashboards are a chaotic mess. 

It is time to ask yourself: Do we have too many cyber tools?

Here are the top 5 signs that your organization may need to consolidate cyber tools: 

1. Alerts Overload, Minus the Critical Context

Alert overload is real. When your inbox is full of alerts, it’s hard to prioritize and get things done. What’s worse? Conflicting alerts from disconnected tools. 

When tools aren’t integrated, each alert only receives part of the context. In response, an already exhausted team has to tie the threads together and hope they don’t miss anything important. 

As your team chases false positives and closes duplicate alerts, the true threats slip through the cracks.

2. Dashboards Everywhere

Multiple dashboards don’t mean better visibility. In fact, it usually turns into wasted time toggling between screens trying to piece together what’s really happening. 

Analysts end up stuck performing low-value, high-effort tasks to try and fit the puzzle pieces together and spot potential threats. By the time an analyst can connect the dots, the attackers have gained a foothold, moved laterally, and covered their tracks. 

Fragmented tools open the door to visibility gaps and lead to substantial delays in incident response.

3. Time-stealing Manual Processes

When a team spends more energy copying data between platforms, reconciling conflicting alerts, or building workarounds, rather than actually responding to incidents, cyber tools have become a liability. 

Every new tool adds another set of updates, configurations, and integrations, creating even more friction. These time-intensive manual processes slow everything down and increase the risk of missing critical information. 

Excessive manual work spent compiling intelligence and managing alerts is a sure sign of tool sprawl.

4. Attempted Problem-solving Through Tools Acquisition 

Adding a new solution to solve each new challenge might seem like progress, but more tools often create overlap, redundancy, and pile-up costs. Organizations tend to add or inherit tools without first defining proper integration strategies. 

Decentralized security sourcing leads to different teams acquiring overlapping tools to solve similar problems. Duplication wastes resources and creates conflicting methodologies. 

Before long, you’re paying for hundreds of underutilized or improperly managed tools, many of which do the same job, while key gaps still go unaddressed.

5. No Unified Risk View

If you are unable to get an organizational view of your true risk, you’re flying blind. Disconnected tools make it harder to measure effectiveness, detect threats quickly, or make informed security decisions. 

When security leaders can’t see the big picture, they can’t effectively prioritize risks – if they see those risks at all. This can lead to decisions and changes that fail to deliver measurable results.

Recognize any of these warning signs? Unfortunately, they’re only half the story. 
Learn how to spot and address security tool sprawl through strategic consolidation. In this whitepaper, we provide steps you can take to break the cycle through assessments, smarter utilization, and strategic consolidation, as well as highlight some of the expected benefits of addressing tool sprawl.

This October, take a moment to reflect: Are you and your employees practicing the Core 4 every day? Small steps, done consistently, can stop big threats. Cybersecurity is everyone’s job, and together, we can all do our part to stay safe online.