Industry Insights

How to Tackle Tool Sprawl with a Unified, Future-Ready Approach

In today’s digital-first era, enterprises are embracing hybrid work, cloud adoption, and SaaS applications, placing significant demands on their current network architecture, operations, and monitoring. In the process of infrastructure modernization, many IT leaders are facing a paradox: instead of simplifying, their network and security tool stacks are getting heavier, more fragmented and more complex to manage. The resulting tool sprawl is undermining the business agility and visibility that the network was supposed to deliver. With the right architecture and unified solution, IT leaders can regain comprehensive visibility and build a network for the future.

Current Trends in Network Infrastructure

Let’s analyze the macro trends reshaping how networks are built today and the challenges that arise from these shifts:

Cloud-native, distributed and application-centric networking: Networks are no longer just connecting branch offices and datacenters. They support SaaS, multi-cloud workloads, AI applications, WAN and LAN edge devices and IoT.

Zero-Trust, Secure Access & Edge-first: Traditional perimeter-based models are breaking down. Modern branches, remote workers and SaaS access all demand connectivity and security enforcement for all users, devices and applications anywhere

Automation, Observability & AI-driven Operations: As networks scale in complexity, manual operations become expensive and time-consuming. IT leaders are seeking full-stack observability and granular telemetry to power AI-driven root cause analysis, predictive analytics, and operational automation.

Edge compute is a necessity for modern branches: Branches are increasingly hosting applications, including local inference for AI, acting as a micro-datacenter.  As a result, networks must provide software-defined overlays, containerized networking, and accelerate edge compute services to scale operations.

Cost efficiency, skills shortage and faster time-to-value: Enterprises face tighter budgets, limited networking and security skills and need to deliver ROI. Every investment must cost savings, security risk reduction or new revenue opportunities.

The Shift Creates Significant Challenges with Tool Sprawl in Network & Security

While the technology environment is shifting rapidly, many organizations struggle with the accumulation of point products that individually seem to serve their purpose but collectively create inefficiency, blind spots, and higher costs. Key pain-points include:

Fragmentation and product silos: Multiple network monitoring tools, security consoles and management dashboards that fail to correlate events, alarms and incidents across the infrastructure. Industry stats found organizations average more than four observability tools and >50% plan to consolidate.

Operational overhead: IT staff spend time switching between dashboards, correlating events to root-cause analyze across tools, rather than proactively resolving issues. Research shows larger tool sets correlate with more admin errors and slower incident response.

Increased costs: IT staff must manage licensing, receive training, and integrate with existing tools, resulting in added expenses while tool redundancies and overlapping capabilities drive wasted investments. One research found 65% of IT/security professionals say their organizations are juggling “too many tools”.

Limited visibility and slower time-to-resolution: With telemetry scattered across multiple dashboards, alert fatigue increases, leading to slower root cause analysis and resolution. For example, many businesses report that they still learn about service disruptions through customer tickets rather than through proactive observability.

Skills gaps: With every additional tool, there is a growing problem of finding the IT teams with the right skill set or training for existing teams. This in turn, increases the burden on already overburdened NetOps and SecOps teams. For example, 60% of MSPs report moderate to high burnout associated with tool sprawl.

The Right Solution: What Enterprises Should Demand

In order to overcome these challenges, the right solution should unify network and security with deep observability and automation. This unification should deliver native integration, single telemetry data, and a single pane of glass that can leverage the power of AI/ML to drive proactive operations. Most importantly, it must reduce complexity, lower TCO and accelerate time-to-resolution by delivering easier management, unified policy and automated workflows.

Versa Delivers Unified Architecture for Future-ready Infrastructure

Versa collapses the stack: Versa eliminates tool sprawl by unifying SD-WAN, NGFW, SSE and SD-LAN into one software-defined unified platform – Versa One. Unlike other vendor approaches to integration by acquisition, this SASE platform delivers unified policy and management across the network and security. This removes the need for 10+ disparate vendors across WAN, security, cloud access, and monitoring.

Versa provides universal Zero Trust enforcement: Versa applies Zero Trust security controls, including micro-segmentation, device profiling, posture checks, and inspection, consistently across all edges. Whether traffic goes to data centers, the internet, SaaS, or the cloud, Versa enforces the same zero-trust policies for users, devices, and applications at branches or remotely.

Versa offers a single observability solution: Versa delivers complete observability into network and application performance, including SLA deviations, SD-WAN analytics, MOS scores, and the correlation of events that led to performance degradation. In addition, security events such as unauthorized access, unknown vulnerabilities, zero-day threats, and compromised files are all delivered from a unified data source. Unlike stitched dashboards or SIEM-assembled observability tools, Versa’s telemetry is correlated, making NetOps and SecOps operate from a single source of truth with no CLI complexity, no cross-tool navigation, and zero manual correlation. This provides IT leaders with faster RCA, higher operational confidence, and proactive experience management because Versa can detect degradation and threats before they impact users.  

Versa with Digital Experience Management: DEM actively probes apps, measures latency/jitter/loss, and learns degradation at every network hop. This is particularly critical for AI and SaaS applications, where real-time responsiveness is essential to the user experience. As a result, performance problems are mitigated before users start experiencing issues.

Versa, as the Edge Compute platform, supports containerization for network, security, and switching, allowing enterprises to create service chaining, containerized functions, or third-party VNFs at the branch or micro-DC. With Versa, the branch can be transformed into a compute-capable edge appliance that eliminates point products by consolidating on a single, general-purpose hardware.

Conclusion

The modern network is no longer simply about legacy routers, switches and firewalls for connectivity and security. It has evolved into a connectivity fabric for SaaS and cloud access, AI inferencing, zero-trust security and analytics powered by AI/ML. Yet, many organizations are weighed down by tool sprawl, with dozens of dashboards, workflows, and distributed data that are not fit for a hybrid workforce, IoT, and modern applications.

The answer lies in a unified, platform-first approach: one architecture that spans network, security and built-in AI-powered automation. It should offer observability across the network and security to facilitate easy troubleshooting and minimize Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR). Discover how Versa One can help eliminate your tool sprawl here.