Buying the Tool Before Building the Process

September 21, 2025

There’s a pattern I’ve seen repeat itself in security programs of all sizes:

We buy the tool before we build the process.

The market is flooded with vendors offering point solutions for every imaginable security problem — cloud security posture management, identity governance, vulnerability scanning, risk quantification, AI-powered threat detection, and so on. The demos look slick. The dashboards are beautiful. The promise of automation is irresistible.

And so the contract is signed.

The Problem Starts Here

But here’s what often happens next:

  • The tool arrives before the team is ready.
  • The processes to feed, tune, and monitor the tool are incomplete or non-existent.
  • The staff who will operate and maintain the system weren’t involved in the buying decision.
  • The organization mistakenly believes risk is now “handled” because a tool is in place.

Months later, the expensive software sits underutilized, poorly configured, or generating noise that no one has time (or training) to triage.

Buying Without Thinking Through the Lifecycle

Security controls are not one-time installs. Every new tool you bring into the environment creates:

  • Integration work: Does it fit into your existing tech stack? APIs? Data feeds?
  • Maintenance overhead: Who updates it? Patches it? Tunes it?
  • People requirements: Do you have staff trained on it? If they leave, who backfills?
  • Process dependencies: How does it fit into incident response, governance reporting, or audit cycles?
  • Metrics burden: Are you measuring its efficacy and demonstrating its value?

If these conversations aren’t happening before procurement, you’re signing up for shelfware risk.

Sometimes Manual First is Smarter

Ironically, starting with a manual process is often the better path. When you begin manually — even if it’s painful — you:

  • Learn where the real friction is.
  • Discover which data you actually need, and in what format.
  • Understand how the process fits into your broader workflows.
  • Avoid over-automating steps that may not even be necessary.

By feeling the operational pain, your team builds real requirements based on lived experience — not based on a vendor pitch deck. Then, when you automate, you’re targeting the parts of the process that truly benefit from automation, rather than automating for automation’s sake.

Why This Keeps Happening

There are several systemic drivers behind this behavior:

  • Executive pressure: “Do something” often translates into “buy something.”
  • Sales cycles optimized for buyer psychology, not operational reality.
  • Fear of being behind peers who’ve bought similar tools.
  • Overreliance on vendor claims rather than internal capability assessment.
  • Disconnect between procurement, compliance, security leadership, and operations teams.

A More Sustainable Approach

Instead of racing to add another product, ask:

  • What problem are we solving?
  • Can we handle the operational burden?
  • Do we have process maturity to make this effective?
  • How will success be measured over time?
  • Who owns the tool once the initial deployment is complete?

In many cases, strengthening internal processes, training, and cross-functional alignment yields more risk reduction than adding another blinking dashboard.

Security as a Discipline, Not a Shopping List

Security isn’t about how many tools you own. It’s about how effectively your people, processes, and technology work together to reduce meaningful risk.

The best security programs I’ve seen operate from this mindset:

“Don’t buy what you can’t support.”

These kinds of operational realities are at the heart of practical, business-aligned security leadership — the type of thinking I continue to explore on this site.