According to Harvard Business Review, every industry moves through four distinct stages.
- The opening stage: Companies rush to enter, build and expand.
- The competition stage: Several key players fight to establish themselves within the market.
- The consolidation stage: Through acquisitions and mergers smaller companies dwindle while the larger players expand their market share.
- The monopolisation stage: Consolidation slows as the biggest players control between 70% and 90% of the market.
Today the cybersecurity industry is at stage three and on its way to stage four.
In fact, according to Vanta nearly 200 cyber companies have consolidated into just 11 dominant players over the past 20 years.
This has been driven by an increasing number of mega-deals, acquisitions and mergers from technology giants such as Palo Alto Networks, Cisco, Microsoft, IBM and Fortinet, who have been acquiring smaller firms to fill strategic gaps.
Between 2023 and 2025, more than 800 deals worth over £127.2 billion ($167bn) in disclosed value have been made in the cybersecurity industry.
At first glance this appears to benefit cybersecurity vendors and business leaders alike, providing solutions with broader coverage, greater economies of scale and simplified vendor relationships.
In reality, this consolidation has led to a ‘buy-and-bolt’ approach to software and vendor solutions that is putting businesses at risk.
Why the ‘buy-and-bolt’ approach is a problem
In boardrooms around the world business leaders aim to build security architectures that scale, remain coherent and deliver measurable ROI.
It is not surprising that many invest in one-stop cybersecurity platforms attracted by their promise to deliver this architecture.
What they often do not realise is that they are paying for a mosaic of acquisitions presented as a single unified platform.
When niche tools with different development paths, data schemas, engineering cultures and codebases are merged, problems emerge.
Modules may work well in isolation but fail to combine to provide genuine security, creating both visible risk and hidden costs for enterprise customers.
The cost for enterprise customers
From a business leader’s perspective, the stakes of adopting an ineffective cybersecurity platform are high.
- Operational friction
Platforms with disconnected modules can create operational friction, costing companies valuable time.
Internal teams spend hours reconciling logs, aligning threat data and tuning overlapping alert rules, which impacts productivity and slows response times during a breach.
- Data inconsistency
Disparate tools often record metrics, telemetry, risk scores and contextual data using different schemas.
Correlating this information across modules becomes guesswork rather than insight, leading to inconsistent data that weakens a business’s ability to analyse, identify, predict and respond to cybersecurity risks.
- Delayed detection and response
Because data sits in silos and integration is only superficial, teams are slower to identify cross-domain threats or lateral movement.
- Escalating breach costs
The business consequences of the ‘buy-and-bolt’ model can be severe.
According to IBM, the global average cost of a data breach in 2024 rose to £3.51 million ($4.48m), a 10% increase from 2023.
Enterprises that underinvested in integrated, modern detection suffered disproportionately higher losses. These extended beyond direct financial damage to include regulatory fines and greater board scrutiny.
When platforms are thin constructs of acquisitions, their promise of simplification becomes hollow, costing companies time, money and trust. Platforms like Heimdal offer a critical alternative.
Heimdal: Modules made, not merged
Heimdal Security was founded in 2014 in Copenhagen, Denmark and is still distinguished by its unified approach to platform cybersecurity.
Heimdal provides all essential functions including threat prevention, vulnerability management, antivirus and email security, delivered through a single interface built entirely in-house.
This means a unified technology stack with consistent data models, mapping strategies and internal logic across modules. Businesses can expect specific advantages from this that are absent in the buy-and-bolt model.
- Data consistency and insight
When every component shares a unified schema and data pipeline, Heimdal can correlate context across endpoints, identity, email, network and threat signals.
This enables real-time threat detection that spans domains with consistent and reliable data.
- Reduced integration risk
New features or modules are designed from the start to operate coherently rather than being retrofitted.
This avoids version dependencies, API mismatches and the engineering debt that plagues acquisition-based platforms.
- Better total cost of ownership and predictability
Operating within a single platform removes the expenses of licensing, onboarding and maintaining third-party modules.
This makes cost models more predictable and reduces the overhead businesses spend on adapters, glue code and custom integrations.
- Faster innovation cycles
Heimdal’s unified codebase allows product teams to deploy feature enhancements, analytics improvements and cross-module automation more quickly.
This reduces both the time and cost typically spent on integration efforts.
- Strategic resilience
By avoiding fragmented acquisitions, Heimdal does not inherit legacy technical debt.
The platform evolves organically, meaning enterprise customers do not carry forward any ‘legacy tax’ over time.
Picking the right platform for your business
For business leaders focused on long-term scalability, resilience and ROI, choosing cybersecurity platforms that deliver truly unified solutions is critical.
As a Heimdal partner, we have seen first-hand the difference this approach makes.
Vendors that retain authority over their architecture and own their technology stack rather than outsourcing or absorbing multiple third parties can offer greater flexibility, integration and data protection.
They sell not on feature lists but on the KPIs that matter most to your business such as fewer false positives, simpler operational overhead, reduced incident dwell time and predictable costs.
As breach costs, cyber threats and regulatory pressure continue to rise, the cost of a flawed platform can be devastating for businesses.
While no platform is perfect, buy-and-bolt platforms are inherently compromised by their lack of integration and disjointed structure.
Unified alternatives such as Heimdal are designed to meet the security needs of businesses rather than the demands of a consolidating cybersecurity market.