In an era marked by escalating global tensions, sophisticated cyber threats, and increasing digital interconnectivity, organisations are reinforcing cybersecurity as a cornerstone of responsible growth and digital transformation. Cybersecurity is no longer just a compliance requirement — it is a boardroom priority ingrained into core business strategy. Through proactive investment, responsible AI usage, and ongoing employee awareness, organisations are building cyber-resilient enterprises that secure their ecosystems of partners, customers, and stakeholders while facilitating innovation and expansion.
Building that resilience demands the right balance between People, Process, and Technology. AI-powered technology plays a significant role in protecting data and infrastructure today, but tools alone have never solved problems alone. Every security tool carries its own strengths and weaknesses, and limitations that are rarely apparent at the point of purchase often surface only after deployment.
Some of the very often experienced issues which we generally ignore while calculating total cost of ownership of any security tool are –
- Integration issues with other security tools / platform and IT platform at times barred us to utilize tools capability to the fullest. When it is necessary, we generally get into few developmental work \ third parties’ integrations software. We need to think trough while evaluating a tool about possible required integrations and future aspects.
- Fals positives from the security tools have been one of the greatest flipsides and we need to put a lot of effort to fine tune and remove the same. It requires continuous tuning and validation and effort. We must get OEM into the game to reduce such noise and focus on core capabilities.
- Logging capability of any security tool is very important as we need to send security logs to SIEM platform. Many a times, we realise at a later stage that tool lacks security logging of few parameters which is necessary to have full visibility into the event and make actionable alerts.
- Licensing models are frequently complex and poorly understood at evaluation stage, resulting in organisations buying either too few or too many SKUs. OEMs routinely structure licensing so that one or two critical capabilities sit behind additional spend. Full clarity on the complete capability map, SKU dependencies, and phased requirements is non-negotiable before any commercial commitment.
A tool with great capabilities but poor manageability creates its own risk. Regular training is required as platforms continuously evolve. Out-of-the-box dashboards rarely deliver the visibility organisations actually need, requiring teams to invest time building customised views. Regular configuration and deployment reviews by the OEM should be a contractual expectation, not an afterthought.
When we aim to buy a security tool, we need to consider above factors (but not limited to) as cost of owning a security tool and take buying decision accordingly. This is generally overlooked and at time becomes very difficult to justify all such hidden costs to the top management.
