Tackling tech fragmentation: Why unified security platforms are critical in the AI age

New research from Palo Alto Networks reveals that technology fragmentation has become one of the most pressing cybersecurity challenges for European organisations. In the UK, 64% of organisations identify tech complexity and a lack of interoperability as critical obstacles to building and maintaining a strong security posture.

As enterprises rapidly adopt AI, cloud services, and other emerging technologies to drive efficiency and scale, they’re also introducing new layers of complexity into their environments. This expanding digital ecosystem often leads to siloed systems and disconnected security tools, making threat detection and response slower and more difficult.

While 82% of UK organisations remain confident in their use of AI, the rise of AI-powered attacks is testing that confidence. The reality is that without an integrated approach to security, advanced tools can become liabilities rather than assets.

To meet today’s evolving threat landscape, organisations must move beyond point solutions and embrace a unified security strategy: one that simplifies infrastructure, improves visibility, and enhances agility using AI across the entire environment. Only then can innovation and protection scale together.

Too many tools

Organisations are overwhelmed by managing an ever-growing number of security products, each generating its own stream of alerts and data. This fragmented ecosystem leads to alert fatigue, duplicated efforts, and an increased risk of critical threats being missed amid the noise. Rather than enhancing protection, the sheer volume of tools and notifications often creates operational inefficiencies, draining valuable time and resources. Security teams are forced to toggle between platforms, triage endless alerts, and manage integrations. These activities consume bandwidth but rarely contribute to strategic improvements in security posture. To highlight this, our research points out that almost half (48%) of respondents said fragmentation has increased workloads for security operators.

The overabundance of tools has also shifted the focus of cybersecurity teams away from value-driven initiatives toward reactive maintenance and monitoring. Instead of dedicating time to threat hunting, risk assessment, or building a forward-looking security strategy, skilled personnel are buried under the weight of tool management and alert handling. This is backed up by the findings in our research that 50% of UK security professionals agree that fragmented solutions are limiting their ability to deal with threats. 

To break this cycle, organisations must prioritise platform consolidation, intelligent automation, and outcome-driven security architectures that reduce complexity, elevate visibility and allow teams to focus on what matters most: defending against evolving threats and delivering long-term resilience.

Harnessing AI to tame AI threats

Nearly every organisation (92%) today is looking to adopt AI, not just for productivity gains in daily operations, but also to strengthen cyber defences. However, this growing reliance on AI also significantly expands the attack surface, introducing new vulnerabilities and complexities.

The rapid evolution of generative AI has equipped threat actors with powerful tools to automate and enhance their attacks, making them faster, more sophisticated, and harder to detect. The result is an overwhelming surge in security alerts, leaving organisations struggling to keep up with the pace and scale of emerging threats. At the same time, the unmonitored use of unsanctioned AI applications by employees introduces additional risk, creating potential data exposure points and further complicating the already challenging task of threat management.

To counter this, organisations must use AI not just defensively, but strategically. By integrating AI into their cybersecurity frameworks through intelligent threat detection, AI-powered defence systems, and predictive threat intelligence, they can anticipate and neutralise threats before they materialise, staying a step ahead of adversaries.

In parallel, the fragmentation of security tools across organisations continues to hamper cyber resilience. Embracing platformisation, consolidating tools into a unified, modular ecosystem can address this issue by enabling real-time threat sharing, improving visibility, and reducing the operational burden. 

Platformisation leading the way

By consolidating and integrating various security functions, organisations can streamline their defences against increasingly sophisticated threats. Although our research highlights 90% of UK organisations are open to a platform-based approach to security, only 41% have either fully consolidated or mostly consolidated their cyber solutions on security platforms.

In addition, the platformisation approach can enable rapid detection of incidents, within 10 seconds, and swift remediation in just 1 minute on average. With the rise of fragmented technologies and AI tools, platformisation becomes an essential strategy, consolidating and streamlining management processes, enabling teams to focus on high-priority tasks and reducing the burden of dealing with an overwhelming variety of specialised systems and security tools.

In a landscape where fragmented technologies increase the attack surface, it is essential for businesses to have an efficient, cohesive cybersecurity strategy. With AI tools and tech fragmentation expanding vulnerability points, platformisation plays a critical role in enabling businesses to monitor and manage their vulnerabilities through a unified interface, avoiding the complexity of dealing with multiple cybersecurity vendors. This approach strengthens defence capabilities while ensuring that security is not fragmented itself.

Navigating AI-driven threats requires more than just technology - it demands clear insight. Yet tech fragmentation undermines that clarity, creating blind spots and slowing response. By consolidating their security stack, organisations can enhance visibility, prioritise critical risks, and shift from reactive firefighting to proactive, strategic defence.