By Mitchell Telatnik

As of late we seen the pace of industry consolidation in cybersecurity continue to rise. Whether it is Google acquiring Mandiant or Microsoft acquiring Miburo, mergers and acquisitions are extremely popular. In fact, in 2021 there were over 430 mergers or acquisitions announced.

While industry consolidation is to be expected, I believe it is widely driven by companies looking to compete in the security platform market and capitalize on increasing security budgets.

The Platform Play

The security industry is changing. More and more players are looking to build platform portfolios that seamlessly integrate with each other. Think of this as an ecosystem, similar to how Apple capitalizes on their consumer computing ecosystem - once your purchase an iPhone, the integration with MacBooks, Apple Watches, and iPads makes leaving the ecosystem less attractive than purchasing from Apple.

“Apple is the only company that can take hardware, software, and services and integrate those into an experience that's an 'aha' for the customer. You can take that and apply to markets that we're not in today.” ~ Tim Cook

Previously, organizations may have purchased a log management tool from Splunk, a firewall from Palo Alto Networks, a directory service from Microsoft, so on and so on. Today, cybersecurity vendors want you to purchase it all from them, and for everything to integrate together out of the box. They want ecosystem lock-in. But for vendors to catch up in the race to the ecosystem, they don’t have the time or expertise to build, so they buy.

Increasing Security Budgets

Keeping up with competition aside, why are companies racing to build the cybersecurity platform now? I think it’s because security is finally top of customer’s minds, and security budgets show it.

[In a 2021 survey, 81% of organizations indicated they were planning on increasing their budget for cybersecurity for 2022](https://www.cybereason.com/blog/security-budgets-are-increasing-but-so-are-attacks#:~:text=Most organizations are planning to,budgets over the coming year.). The rise of ransomware and high-profile attacks in the news, such as Uber and Equifax, has caused executive leadership to worry, and spend, more.

Security vendors notice, including tech companies that weren’t traditional security vendors. Google, for example, recently acquired Mandiant, one of the leading cybersecurity firms.

Conclusion