How to Regain Control of Your Security Stack Before Vendors Own Your Roadmap

Avoid vendor sprawl and make strategic, future-proof decisions in a fast-moving market.

Author: Rudolf von Rohr
Estimated read time: 5 minutes

You’ve invested in tools. You’ve signed the contracts. You’ve trained your teams.

And yet—somehow—you feel less in control of your security stack than ever.

You’re not alone.

Today, many CIOs and CISOs find themselves overcommitted to vendor ecosystems that promise simplicity but create lock-in. New features are launched without consultation. Licensing models shift. Roadmaps are vague or opaque. And integration with your broader stack? Often left to your team to figure out.

You didn’t just buy a product. You bought someone else’s strategy.

Let’s break down how this happens—and how you can regain control before your roadmap is written by someone else’s product manager.

Vendor Sprawl: From Best-of-Breed to Best-of-Blame

The drive to close gaps and stay compliant leads most enterprises to adopt:

• Endpoint protection from Vendor A

• Identity from Vendor B

• Network security from Vendor C

• Analytics from Vendor D

• SIEM from Vendor E

Each choice, reasonable in isolation, slowly creates complexity, silos, and dependence.

And when these vendors start to expand horizontally, adding overlapping features, you’re left paying multiple times for tools that don’t speak the same language.

You don’t have a stack. You have a patchwork.

The result?

• Lack of visibility

• Redundant costs

• Integration fatigue

• Roadmap risk — when a vendor pivots, so do you

Why Roadmap Awareness is a CISO Priority

When evaluating a vendor, you’re not just buying capabilities today.
You’re investing in their direction — and whether it aligns with yours.

Ask:

• What are they building next?

• Are they shifting toward platformization?

• Will they remain open or close their ecosystem?

• How often do they acquire vs. develop natively?

• How transparent are they with feature rollout and change management?

Understanding the trajectory of a vendor is as critical as evaluating the current feature set.

Fail to ask these questions, and you risk being locked into a product that grows in the wrong direction — or grows too fast, without maturity or fit.

The Real Cost of Vendor-Driven Security

When vendors drive your security roadmap:

• You spend more time managing contracts than managing risk

• You lose agility — changes must be approved, tested, and often delayed

• You build around their limitations, not your strategy

• You accumulate shelfware: features you pay for but never use

And worst of all: You lose leverage.

Multi-Vendor SASE: The Key to Strategic Control, if done right

The future of security infrastructure lies in modular, interoperable, and identity-centric architecture. That’s exactly what Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) provides — if implemented with the right strategy.

At Rheintec Solutions AG, we help you:

• Assess vendor trajectories — not just their brochures

• Select interoperable best-of-breed components from leaders like Zscaler, Ubiquity, and others

• Build for resilience, not just procurement cycles

• Stay flexible, with integration patterns that support your evolving business and workforce

• Maintain architectural control, even as vendors evolve

We act as your infrastructure integrator, not a reseller — guiding you toward a lean, scalable, and future-proof stack that you own, understand, and can pivot when needed.

Questions Every CISO Should Be Asking Today

• Which vendors are driving our roadmap — and are we okay with that?

• What parts of our stack are at risk of lock-in or forced migration?

• Are we designing for agility or for ease of procurement?

• Do we have internal capability to pivot if a vendor shifts direction?

• Is our architecture built to evolve, or built to please?

Regain Control Before It’s Too Late

In a world of increasing complexity, control comes from architecture, not vendor contracts.

Let’s review your current stack and explore how a multi-vendor SASE strategy can help you:

• Reduce risk

• Lower cost

• Increase visibility

• And most importantly: own your own roadmap
  

Enterprises build security infrastructure they control — not the other way around.

Let us execute.