By Michael Henry, CEO, Accelerynt
Most enterprise security teams inherited complexity gradually, one reasonable decision at a time.
How Reasonable Decisions Accumulated into Complexity
A new threat surfaced. A visibility gap appeared. A regulatory requirement shifted. Each moment created pressure to act, and teams responded by adding a control, integrating a tool, or expanding coverage. Individually, those decisions reduced risk. Over time, they reshaped the system.
Years later, many organizations now operate security environments with dozens of tools, overlapping data sources, and workflows that require constant coordination. The issue isn’t whether the tools function as designed. The issue is how the system behaves as a whole when teams need to make decisions quickly.
When Local Optimization Reshapes the System
This outcome didn’t come from poor judgment. It emerged from working under pressure, with incomplete information, and real consequences for delay.
When risk shows up as discrete problems, the natural response is to optimize locally. A detection improves coverage in one area. An integration closes a gap somewhere else. A control tightens exposure for a specific scenario. Each action makes sense in isolation. Together, they increase the number of variables the system must absorb.
Over time, optimization at the edges reshapes the core.
The result is a system that requires more interpretation than it should.
The Operational Cost of Interpretation
Analysts move between dashboards to reconstruct context. Alerts arrive without a clear sequence of events. Incidents require translation before decisions can be made. Response slows, not because teams lack skill or intent, but because understanding what is happening takes longer than it should.
In many environments, investigation starts by opening several tools and ends with a shared document or whiteboard where someone tries to stitch together what actually occurred. By the time the picture is clear, valuable time has already passed.
As complexity grows, it’s tempting to assume that additional layers of automation or analysis will resolve the strain. But tools operate on the structure they’re given. When signals are fragmented and context is distributed across platforms, anything added on top inherits those same constraints. Simplifying the system changes the problem space itself. It reduces the amount of interpretation required before a response can even begin.
This friction shows up in predictable ways:
- Increased time spent correlating signals instead of acting on them
- Dependence on tribal knowledge to bridge gaps between platforms
- Rising cognitive load during high-stress incidents
- Difficulty explaining security posture clearly to executives
As systems grow, these effects compound. The environment becomes harder to operate precisely when clarity matters most.
Why the System Needs to Be Easier to Run
The optimizer mindset played an important role in helping organizations respond to rapid change. It enabled progress when threats evolved faster than architecture. It allowed teams to address urgent problems without waiting for perfect alignment. But optimization focused on individual problems tends to produce side effects that only become visible later.
At some point, capability stops being the constraint. Coherence does.
When coherence breaks down, teams compensate with process, meetings, and manual correlation. Those compensations carry real cost during incidents. They slow response, increase stress, and make outcomes harder to predict.
Many security leaders recognize this shift intuitively. They feel it when response timelines stretch despite increased investment. They see it when teams struggle to explain how events relate to one another. They hear it when analysts spend more time navigating tools than making decisions.
This series is about stepping back and looking at the system as it exists today.
Not to discard what’s been built, but to understand how it behaves under pressure. To examine how visibility expanded faster than traceability. To acknowledge how human attention became a constrained resource. To explore why simplifying the environment can improve outcomes for the risks that matter most.
In the next article, we’ll start with visibility. Many organizations have more telemetry than ever before yet still struggle to follow an incident from start to finish. Understanding why that happens is the first step toward building security systems that are easier to run, easier to explain, and more effective when stakes are high.