News Desk 2024: The Rise of Cybersecurity Platforms

Omdia's survey of cybersecurity leaders demonstrated that they're currently in a conundrum — drowning in security products they want to pare down but instead having to add layers to cope with the exploding threat landscape.

It's a challenge they are looking at cybersecurity platforms to solve, but it's going to take time.

Maxine Holt, who leads the Omdia cybersecurity research group, joined the Dark Reading News Desk at Black Hat USA 2024 fresh off the Omdia Summit, where her team of analysts presented the detailed results of their 2024 survey of cybersecurity decision-makers. They found the typical organization is running somewhere between 21 to 50 separate cybersecurity tools. And while three-quarters of organizations indicated they were interested in cutting that number down to a more manageable number, 87% of respondents had nonetheless added tools to their systems over the past year.

"They're struggling with the threat landscape," Holt said. "It's not as easy as unplugging one thing and plugging in something else."

These organizations will have the opportunity to migrate over to a cybersecurity platform over the next three to five years, as their contracts sunset, according to the survey.

Major players in the cybersecurity platform space, including CrowdStrike, Palo Alto Networks, Fortinet, and Check Point, stand to gain market share in the next few years as the shift occurs, but Holt stressed the need for a healthy ecosystem of vendors.

"We have to support the thousands of vendors in the space so they can innovate," Holt said.