How Overcomplicating Your Cybersecurity Stack Undermines Zero Trust – and What to Do Instead

Guardian.IO · May 7, 2025 · By Ryan Burch, Founder & Chief Intelligence Officer, Guardian.IO

Introduction

In today’s rapidly evolving threat landscape, the concept of zero trust has become something of a mantra in cybersecurity circles. At its core, zero trust means never implicitly trusting any user or device, inside or outside your network perimeter. Every access request must be verified, every device must be validated, and every transaction must be inspected. That level of rigor sounds ideal on paper. Yet many organizations find that in their rush to adopt zero trust, they have layered on an unwieldy mix of solutions—endpoint agents, identity brokers, network microsegmentation tools, cloud access security brokers, privileged access management consoles, security information and event management platforms, log analytics dashboards and on and on and on.

The result is often the opposite of zero trust. Instead of clarity and confidence, teams find themselves overwhelmed by alerts, bogged down in configuration complexity, and stuck chasing false positives. Meanwhile attackers exploit gaps between tools, or simply wait out the chaos until a critical alert is missed. If you are considering a zero trust initiative, or already underway but frustrated by stalled progress or runaway costs, read on. In this article I will explain why an overcomplicated tech stack actually makes true zero trust harder to implement. I will share best practices for simplifying your approach. And I will show you why an independent, environment-specific assessment (outside of a sales pitch) is the essential first step toward a sustainable and effective zero trust program.

1. The Paradox of Plenty: When More Tools Means Less Security

1.1 Alert Fatigue and Tool Friction

It is counterintuitive, but adding more security products usually increases your overall risk profile. Each tool generates its own stream of alerts. Each alert requires triage. Each product needs to be configured, updated, and integrated with identity and asset inventories. Before long your security operations center is spending more time chasing noise than looking for real adversary behavior. Phishing alerts, endpoint intrusion warnings, anomalous login notifications, vulnerability scanner results, cloud misconfiguration notices—without a disciplined process for tuning and consolidating these signals you end up with alert fatigue. Analysts learn to tune out. Critical events slip through the cracks.

1.2 Configuration Complexity Breeds Missteps

Every security product requires configuration. Some require network appliance deployment, others demand API integrations, and most require careful tuning to avoid hamstringing legitimate traffic or workflows. When you have half a dozen or a dozen tools all touching identity, network, endpoint, cloud or applications you inevitably introduce gaps—policy misalignments, orphaned rules, stale credentials. Attackers hunt for those gaps. It only takes one misconfigured microsegmentation rule or one disabled endpoint agent to open the door.

1.3 Costs That Don’t Scale

Licensing fees, maintenance costs, staffing overhead—each new tool adds financial and human capital burdens. Many organizations purchase enterprise bundles in hopes of checking a compliance box only to discover that they cannot afford the expert resources needed to operate them effectively. Instead of achieving cost-effective risk reduction, they incur a snowballing maintenance burden.

2. Zero Trust Essentials: Focus on Principles Before Products

Before selecting or layering on even one security product, every organization should articulate clear zero trust principles that map to their unique business needs and risk profile.

2.1 Identity as the New Perimeter

In zero trust, identity is the control plane. You must know who is requesting access, what device they are using, where they are connecting from and whether that aligns with your policy. But you do not need to buy every identity broker on the market. First define your identity model: which users or service accounts need access to which resources, under what circumstances. Start by cataloging your critical applications and the identity providers (Active Directory, Azure AD, Okta, etc.) you already have.

2.2 Least Privilege Access

Zero trust demands least privilege. That does not mean you need a separate privileged access management platform right out of the gate. You do need a governance and review process to grant, audit and revoke permissions. Often existing directory tools and access control lists, combined with a lightweight ticketing or permissions-review workflow, can reduce your attack surface. Only once that process is mature does a more advanced PAM solution deliver additional value.

2.3 Microsegmentation with Clear Use Cases

Microsegmentation prevents lateral movement. But before deploying agent-based or network-based segmentation tools, map your network flows. Identify which services need to talk with each other, and why. A handful of targeted microsegmentation rules can deliver significant risk reduction. Don’t segment every VM or container by default. Focus on production-critical segments where an attacker would cause the most damage.

2.4 Continuous Verification and Analytics

Zero trust is not a one-and-done project. It requires continuous monitoring of identity, device posture, application behavior and network traffic. But this does not mandate an all-in-one SIEM-XDR-UEBA-SOAR platform. You need an analytics foundation that ingests relevant logs and telemetry, and correlates events across domains. A modern cloud-native log analytics service combined with selective network and endpoint telemetry often provides the visibility you need at lower cost and complexity.

3. Why a One-Size-Fits-All Approach Fails

3.1 Unique Environments, Unique Gaps

No two IT environments are the same. Your mix of legacy on-prem applications, cloud workloads, managed service providers and third-party SaaS integrations creates a bespoke attack surface. A cookie-cutter zero trust reference architecture cannot capture those unique complexities.

3.2 Sunk Cost Fallacy and Tool Inertia

When organizations invest heavily in a vendor’s flagship security suite they feel compelled to use every module even if it does not align with their actual needs. This leads to under-utilized or misconfigured components sitting idle while attackers exploit the interfaces between them.

3.3 Organizational Dynamics and Skill Gaps

Adding more tools can exacerbate skill shortages. Your security staff can only become expert in so many consoles. Overloading them with disparate interfaces and policy languages leads to burnout and operational errors.

4. The Independent Environment Assessment: Your First Step

• Comprehensive Asset Inventory We build a complete picture of your assets—workstations, servers, cloud instances, network appliances, managed services and SaaS applications. Without a clear inventory you cannot apply least privilege or microsegmentation effectively.
• Risk Prioritization Aligned to Business Impact Not all assets are equal. We work with your stakeholders to rate each system by criticality and potential impact if compromised. This lets you focus scarce budget and staffing on the high-risk areas that matter most.
• Gap Analysis Across People, Process and Technology We examine your identity lifecycle processes, your network and endpoint controls, your logging and analytics foundation and your incident response playbooks. We identify mismatches between policy and actual configuration, and between tool capabilities and operational practices.
• Tailored Roadmap Rather than a generic checklist of products, we deliver a prioritized roadmap that aligns to your needs. You see exactly which controls deliver the greatest risk reduction for your environment, and which tools you actually require to implement them.

5. Simplification Strategies for Sustainable Zero Trust

• Tool Rationalization Inventory every security tool and map it to a specific use case. Decommission products that are redundant or misaligned. Consolidate overlapping functions into a core set of platforms you can manage well.
• Phased Implementation Roll out zero trust controls in phases:
  1. Identity & Access Management: Strengthen MFA and enforce across all users and endpoints, conditional access policies and stale-account cleanup.
  2. Network Controls: Apply firewall-based segmentation around critical assets.
  3. Endpoint Controls: Deploy posture assessment agents only on high-risk devices.
  4. Analytics & Response: Tier your logs and telemetry, onboard high-value sources first.
• Process Centricity Embed zero trust principles into your IT change management, identity governance and incident response processes. Conduct regular tabletop exercises to simulate authentication failures, lateral movement attempts and privilege escalation scenarios.
• Automation and Orchestration Automate repetitive tasks—de-provisioning inactive accounts, continuous compliance checks for segmentation policies, scripted alerts for anomalous cloud-privilege changes—so analysts can focus on high-value investigations.

6. Real-World Case Study (Condensed)

Client Profile: Mid-sized financial services firm with 2,000 employees, hybrid on-prem and multi-cloud environment.

Challenge: After investing in three major security suites, the client still experienced inconsistent policy enforcement, alert overload and stalled zero trust progress.

Assessment Findings:

• 47 percent of licenses for advanced modules went unused.
• 125 legacy service accounts had never been reviewed.
• Over 300 microsegmentation rules in firewall logs had never been validated.
• SIEM ingestion costs were 40 percent above budget for low-value sources.

Simplification Roadmap:

• Decommission two overlapping network-security vendors, migrating to a single firewall console.
• Revoke dormant service-account credentials and implement monthly reviews.
• Simplify microsegmentation to focus on 10 critical east-west flows.
• Re-architect logging to ingest only critical identity, network and endpoint events into a cloud-native analytics platform.

Results:

• Alert volume dropped 65 percent, enabling the SOC to detect and investigate real threats faster.
• Annual licensing and operational cost savings of \$450,000.
• Completed zero trust phase one in 6 months, with clear milestones for phases two and three.

7. Conclusion: Focus on Fit, Not Features

Zero trust is more than a buzzword or a feature checklist. It is a discipline that demands clarity, rigor and alignment to your unique environment. Overcomplicating your stack with every new tool on the market will only slow you down, drive up costs and leave gaps for attackers to exploit.

Start with an independent assessment. Prioritize controls based on risk and business impact. Rationalize your toolset and implement zero trust in phases. Above all, embed these practices into your people and processes so that security becomes a natural way of working, not an afterthought bolted onto an already bloated tech stack.

About the Author

Ryan Burch is Founder and Chief Intelligence Officer of Guardian.IO. With over two decades of experience in enterprise and federal cybersecurity—including spearheading the Better Business Bureau’s Scam Tracker and leading red-team exercises—Ryan brings a practical, balanced approach to security. Guardian.IO combines rigorous assessments, actionable threat intelligence and ongoing advisory services to help organizations of every size achieve real security outcomes.

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