For the past decade, there has been one almost dogmatic rule in the IT world that dictates buying best-in-class solutions. Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs) built their digital fortresses by selecting individual components like building blocks, where the firewall came from one vendor, the EDR system from another and identity protection from yet another.
This strategy, known as ‘Best-of-Breed’, has led to a situation where, by 2025, the average large enterprise is managing a complex ecosystem of dozens and sometimes almost a hundred different security tools.
Today, at the beginning of 2026, we can declare with full responsibility the bankruptcy of this model. It was not the inefficiency of individual applications that killed it, but their fundamental inability to work together at the pace imposed by modern artificial intelligence. It is the platformisation of cybersecurity that is the trend that is redefining not only the IT architecture, but also the financial balance sheets of the world’s largest corporations.
Response to the demise of the “Best-of-Breed” model
Until two years ago, having specialised niche tools was a point of pride, indicative of a company’s technological sophistication. Today, it has become an operational nightmare, symbolised by the phenomenon of alert fatigue.
Security Operations Centres are drowning in information noise as isolated systems generate thousands of notifications that do not add up to a logical whole. Until now, the security analyst has wasted much of his or her working time just switching between consoles and trying to correlate facts manually. When faced with modern attacks using autonomous artificial intelligence, which can perform reconnaissance and attack in fractions of seconds, a human trying to combine data in spreadsheets stands no chance.
That is why, in 2026, the modern security leader understands that the platformisation of cybersecurity is not an option but an operational necessity – he or she is looking for the tightest and best integrated ecosystem, not individual gadgets.
Why has the platformisation of cybersecurity become a financial and technological priority?
This transformation is happening now with such rapidity because three key pressure vectors are converging, the most important of which is technology. In order to implement the AI-based autonomous defence promised by suppliers, the algorithm must have access to the full context of events. It needs to be able to see everything from the CEO’s laptop to the cloud servers to the gateway logs. If the data is locked up in dozens of separate databases, artificial intelligence remains blind and useless. The platformisation of cybersecurity breaks down these walls, creating a single coherent lake of data on which algorithms can effectively identify and neutralise threats.
Financial pressures are an equally important factor. The end of the era of cheap money has forced companies to brutally review costs, and maintaining relationships with dozens of suppliers means a proliferation of negotiation processes, invoices and costly API integrations.
By migrating to a single platform, the total cost of technology ownership can be reduced by up to a third, making the CFO the security department’s greatest ally in the consolidation process in 2026.
Additionally, the market faces a skills gap, as finding an expert with deep knowledge of a dozen niche technologies borders on the miraculous. It is much easier and cheaper to source an engineer certified in a single ecosystem, making the platformisation of cybersecurity also solve staffing issues.
The technological dimension of cybersecurity platforming: one agent, full automation
The modern platform is more than just a bundle of products sold at a discount. It is a fundamental change in architecture, with a unified agent as a key innovation. We remember the days when corporate laptops lost performance under the weight of many different security programmes running in the background.
Effective cybersecurity platformisation involves installing a single lightweight sensor that performs multiple functions simultaneously, from antivirus to vulnerability scanner. The second pillar is the automation built into the core of the system. The platform gains the ability to self-heal, which in practice means that when a suspicious connection is detected, the system is able to automatically disconnect the device from the network and reset the user’s privileges, without involving a human in the process. The analyst only receives a report of the action taken, allowing him or her to focus on more complex tasks.
How does the platformisation of cybersecurity change the supplier market in 2026?
The security market in 2026 is beginning to resemble the operating systems market of the 1990s, where the winner takes all. We are seeing an aggressive battle between the main camps, including the hegemon in the form of Microsoft and contenders such as Palo Alto Networks and CrowdStrike. Microsoft is capitalising on its dominance in the office and cloud environment by offering integration that is hard to compete with on price.
Competitors, on the other hand, are vying for the title of independent alternative, making a series of acquisitions to fill gaps in their portfolio and not functionally diverge from the leader. In this battle of the giants, innovative start-ups offering point solutions suffer the most.
Corporate customers see that platformisation of cybersecurity has greater long-term benefits, so they are forgoing niche innovations, preferring to wait until their main platform implements similar functionality as part of a standard upgrade.
Operational risks
Enthusiasm about simplifying the architecture cannot obscure the systemic risks, which are being talked about increasingly loudly behind the scenes. The biggest risk is total dependence on a single supplier. Once a company has implemented full cybersecurity platformisation, it becomes hostage to the vendor’s pricing policy, and withdrawing from such a relationship is a multi-year and costly process.
We are already seeing providers who have gained a dominant position start to raise subscription prices. The second risk is creating a single point of failure. If a platform update contains a bug, as has happened in the past, a company can lose protection on every front simultaneously.
There is also a quality dilemma, as platforms are usually good at everything, but are rarely the best at every single aspect. Managers are faced with the choice of accepting a module that is marginally less effective than the market leader in exchange for full integration. In 2026, the answer is increasingly in the affirmative, as better visibility of the whole compensates for any scoring deficiencies.
Platformisation of cybersecurity as the foundation of a new strategy
The trend seen in 2026 is not a passing fad, but a logical response to the evolution of digital threats. In a world where attacks are automated and supported by algorithms, defence systems need to operate as one cohesive organism, not a collection of loose organs.
The clear lesson for business leaders is that the platformisation of cybersecurity is making simplicity the new benchmark for effective protection. A complex infrastructure is an ideal environment for hackers, so it is high time to sort out the technological clutter, consolidate resources and prepare for a war of algorithms in which the winner will be the one with better data and a more consistent picture, not the one who has accumulated more expensive gadgets.
