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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.