“More is better” has always been a dangerous assumption in tech. In security, it may be downright reckless. Across the industry today, organizations are drowning in their own defenses: dozens, sometimes hundreds, of overlapping tools, dashboards, and agents, all purporting to keep the enterprise safe. Paradoxically, this glut of security tooling is fast becoming a bigger risk than the threats it was meant to stop.
As platform engineering emerges as the connective tissue of modern enterprise delivery, it’s time to recognize security tool sprawl for what it is: a new breach vector. And it’s platform teams — not just CISOs — who will be on the hook to fix it.
What Is Security Tool Sprawl?
Security tool sprawl isn’t just about buying too much software; it’s the by-product of cultural, regulatory, and organizational habits. Consider how we got here:
- Compliance box-checking. Every audit or regulatory shift drives procurement of yet another point solution.
- Vendor hype cycles. If one vendor has a hot AI-enabled widget, suddenly the board wants it on the stack.
- Team autonomy. Different business units adopt their own tools, creating silos that don’t talk to each other.
- M&A fallout. Companies absorb inherited toolchains during acquisitions, often without rationalization.
The result? A patchwork quilt of technologies stitched together with hope and duct tape.
Why More Tools Can Mean More Risk
On paper, each new tool promises better detection, deeper analytics, or faster remediation. In practice, sprawl introduces vulnerabilities in at least four ways:
- Integration gaps. Tools rarely fit together cleanly. Misconfigurations leave blind spots attackers can exploit.
- Alert fatigue. Too many alarms, too little signal. Security teams drown in noise, missing the real threats.
- Inconsistent policies. When every tool enforces rules differently, the weakest link defines your posture.
- Expanded attack surface. Each tool is itself another piece of software — and thus another potential entry point for adversaries.
Look no further than recent reports of DevOps platforms facing outages and breaches. APIs are left exposed, credentials mismanaged, updates lag behind. The problem isn’t always the core system; it’s the tangled mess of bolt-ons surrounding it.
Why Platform Engineering Should Care
Some might argue: “Isn’t this the CISO’s problem?” Not anymore. Platform engineering is redefining how organizations standardize infrastructure, delivery pipelines, and developer experiences. That mandate increasingly includes security.
Sprawl undermines platform engineering’s very goals:
- Consistency. Platform teams exist to deliver standardized, repeatable environments. Tool chaos pulls in the opposite direction.
- Productivity. Developers waste cycles navigating multiple dashboards, duplicating logins, and reconciling conflicting scans.
- Resilience. A brittle, fragmented security stack makes it harder to guarantee uptime, compliance, and service-level agreements.
If platform teams are to be the enablers of speed and safety in the AI-native, cloud-native era, then rationalizing the security stack is non-negotiable.
Rethinking Security in the Platform Era
What does a better path forward look like?
- Consolidation. Fewer tools, more deeply integrated. Favor platforms over point solutions when possible.
- Security as a product. Treat your security stack as an internal product with an owner, roadmap, and user-centered design. Provide clean APIs so developers can consume security capabilities rather than stumble through tool jungles.
- Shift-left governance. Bake security into pipelines, templates, and golden paths — not bolted on after the fact.
- Observability and automation. Apply modern observability practices to security itself. Automate correlation. Use AI judiciously to triage alerts and surface the issues that matter most.
This is the essence of platform engineering: reducing complexity for end users (in this case, developers and operators) while increasing systemic safety and resilience.
Shimmy’s Take
More security tools don’t make you more secure. They make you confused, distracted, and brittle. I’ve been around long enough to see this cycle play out in waves: antivirus bloat, firewall bloat, cloud security bloat. Now we’re in the DevSecOps bloat era.
What’s different today is that platform engineering offers a way out. By applying product thinking, by consolidating where possible, by integrating security into the very fabric of the developer experience, we can finally break the cycle.
Let me be blunt: If your developers have to swivel between six dashboards just to push code to production, you don’t have a security posture — you have a security problem.
The future isn’t “security everywhere” in the sense of more logos on your vendor list. It’s security everywhere in the sense of being invisible but reliable — part of the platform itself, not an obstacle course wrapped around it.
Closing
Platform leaders, it’s time to Marie Kondo your security stack. If a tool doesn’t integrate, automate, and add clarity, it’s not helping. It’s hurting.
So take inventory. Consolidate. Rationalize. And above all, treat security as a product, not a procurement cycle.
Because in a world where every platform is a potential attack surface, sprawl isn’t just wasteful — it’s a breach vector. And it’s our job, as platform engineers, to close it.