Tool Consolidation and ROI: Are Your Security Tools Pulling Their Weight?

The newly released CISO MindMap 2025 by Rafeeq Rehman, is a masterclass in scope. It maps the overwhelming terrain that CISOs must navigate today, from GenAI risks to governance to third-party exposure. One theme cuts through clearly: the challenge of turning security operations into something coherent, strategic, and measurable.

As we read through the MindMap’s recommendations, one in particular stuck with us: Consolidate and rationalize your tools.

We’ve seen firsthand how hard this is with our customers, especially when you're buried in alerts and backlog. So, let’s show you what it looks like to take that recommendation seriously.

Meet two incredible security leaders: Marcus and Priya.

From Tool Chaos to Coordinated Control

When Marcus stepped in as interim CISO at a global fintech firm, the first audit he ran wasn’t of endpoints or compliance gaps. It was of tools.

57 security tools to be exact.

SIEM. EDR. WAF. NGFW. SOAR. CSPM. VM. All best-of-breed. All siloed. Every acronym imaginable, but none orchestrated.

The team was drowning in noise.

• The SIEM flooded analysts with duplicate alerts.
• The WAF triggered anomalies but was often in passive mode.
• EDR logs sat unactioned for days.

Despite the budget, no one could confidently answer: Are we safer this month than last?

So, Marcus flipped the script. He reframed consolidation not as a cost-cutting exercise but as a way to extract more value out of what they already had.

It wasn’t an easy sell. His SecOps lead was skeptical, asking, “Haven’t we tried this before with SOAR?” Their red team worried simulations would never match real-world behavior. But Marcus didn’t promise magic. He promised clarity. And once they saw the first round of signal-to-noise improvements, the team leaned in.

Here’s what he did:

1. Centralized all telemetry and policy data into a shared fabric.
2. Ran attack simulations across infrastructure to see what could be exploited.
3. Automatically tuned policies and detection logic based on what actually blocked attacks.

No new tools. Just smarter orchestration. They’d tried SOAR. They’d tried patch SLAs. But nothing helped the tools actually work together until they stopped thinking in tools and started thinking in coordination.

After integrating and onboarding his new defense optimization platform into his security environment, Marcus leaned over his monitor, eyes locked on the simulated attack path playing out on screen. It was Log4j, an exploit he knew all too well. But this time, it wasn’t just a red team scenario. It was running inside his environment. Live data. Real infrastructure. No assumptions.

This wasn’t a sandboxed test. It was his new autonomous simulation engine using the digital twin of his organization to validate exactly how far the exploit could travel and which controls would catch it or fail.

• The top left shows the Log4j exploit originating through a public-facing system.
• The nodes represent vulnerable assets across cloud and endpoint.
• Each line is a possible lateral movement vector that the simulation traced.
  The alert markers highlight weak points that wouldn’t have triggered in traditional SIEM or EDR logic.

And on the right? The control feedback loop. The new AI-powered defense optimization platform didn’t stop at detection. It automatically:

• Tuned WAF and EDR rules to block the exploit at ingress.
• Flagged two misconfigurations in CMDB that left a legacy system exposed.
• Created a deployable response plan, including impact analysis on business applications.

Bringing it home:
In under 4 hours, Marcus had what would’ve taken his team 4 weeks:

• A validated simulation proving exploitability.
• A response playbook aligned with business risk.
• Confidence that the fix wouldn’t break production.

Over the course of six weeks, Marcus saw:

• Alert volume dropped by 60%
• Response time cut by half
• Tool ROI is finally measurable

Turning Security Debt into Security Strategy 

Priya led cloud security for the fintech firm, working alongside Marcus. Her backlog was legendary: tens of thousands of misconfigurations, IAM issues, and unpatched cloud assets.

Her problem wasn’t visibility. It was triage.

CVSS scores gave no context. Developers pushed back on every ticket. Half the flagged issues were probably false positives anyway. But without a scalable way to prioritize, everything looked critical, and nothing got fixed.

That’s when Priya reframed the problem. She began treating security debt like financial debt: not everything needs to be “paid off” right away, but you better know which interest is compounding.

She reworked the team’s playbook:

1. Quantified risk not just by severity, but business impact + exploitability + defensive coverage.
2. Used automated prioritization across layers (identity, app, infra, cloud).
3. Shifted from just patching to preemptive control hardening.

You could see the difference. The “stack of debt” that once overwhelmed her team started shrinking.

In just a quarter:

• Active exposure dropped 43%
• Vulnerability backlog was cut by a third
• Developer pushback down thanks to better context

Priya’s insight wasn’t just about better tooling, it was about changing how her team defined progress. Security debt would never go to zero, but now it was manageable, explainable, and, most importantly, reducible. The solution wasn’t about fixing everything but fixing what mattered most.

Cyber Resilience: What It All Points To 

Coordination is the strategy. Tool ROI, threat reduction, and faster response all stem from that.

Marcus didn’t buy new tools. Priya didn’t hire more staff. They just made what they had work together.

In the end, Marcus was so happy that he shaved his beard. 🙂

The CISO MindMap is an excellent resource for understanding what CISOs are responsible for. But it’s also a great reminder that coordination is the missing link.

If your stack is full but your risks are rising, maybe the tools aren’t the problem. Maybe it’s time they started pulling their weight, and if you need help building that strategy, Tuskira is a webform away. 

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