Tool sprawl - definition & overview

Tool sprawl happens when a company accesses an unnecessarily high number of IT tools that individually address different use cases.

Disparate tool engagement means organizations often experience a negative ROI on the tools they use, as more time is spent navigating between them than completing actual work.

With tool sprawl, each tool potentially creates a data silo, which often requires manual data translation between utilities, causing bottlenecks and other barriers to development. Confluent information will be stored and processed disjointly, resulting in avoidable redundancies and inconsistencies.

In this period of rapid digital transformation, there likely exists a specific tool that deals with exactly that one problem that your organization is dealing with. Because of its specificity, this tool does not efficiently interface with any of your other programs in use or bear any other use cases, but what it does, it does so very well, and so you decide to bring it on board.

But having one more tool in your tech stack means the lid won’t easily close anymore. And when you’re looking for a security tool, for example, your security team has to do a lot more digging than you otherwise would to find it. Furthermore, if you break a tool, it might take longer to notice it’s broken and proceed with repairs.

The inefficiencies and setbacks caused by tool sprawl can have a lasting impact on an organization, not just in the IT department but throughout the business as a whole. It is critical for modern companies to recognize the problems tool sprawl can cause, and develop a solution that avoids some of these pitfalls without compromising data security and development.

Having unchecked tool sprawl can make it difficult for your IT professionals to do their jobs, including endpoint management and endpoint security.

Business effectiveness and efficiency are dependent on IT performance and productivity. However, tool sprawl and fragmentation can slow essential processes and create more work for the humans working in IT. With better tool integration and consolidation, this could have been avoided.

Tool sprawl can have long-term effects on your IT department, including:

• Decreased IT productivity. Having the right tools in place is necessary for IT teams and can increase performance and productivity if used effectively. However, too many tools force complexity in day-to-day processes, increasing the time it takes teams to complete tasks and reducing productivity.
  
  

• Lack of visibility. Disparate, poorly integrated IT tools make cybersecurity monitoring and incident response processes slower and more complex. The resulting security gaps mean that performance and security issues will be harder to detect and address.
  
  

• Less time for innovation. More tools mean more monitoring, troubleshooting, and repair performed on existing utilities and less time spent on their improvement and advancement, as well as the improvement and advancement of development, the IT strategy and your organization’s service.

Problems in IT can lead to more significant issues at the organizational level.

• Increased cost. Every new tool comes with its own inherent product expense but also represents the cost in both time and employee wages for the teams needed to monitor, maintain and run that particular tool.
  
  

• Data silos. Otherwise, correlative data cannot be compared, integrated, analyzed, or used efficiently when kept separate in different utilities. Access to deeper insight and opportunities for innovation are lost when data silos are built by tool sprawl. Learn more in our guide to log analytics and log management.
  
  

• Lack of collaboration. When different teams access different data sets – or the same data filtered through different, disparate dashboards – this creates barriers to understanding and communication, making cross-departmental, cross-team, and cross-product collaboration nearly impossible.

Reducing the number of tools you use or organizing your tools with a dedicated consolidation solution enables collaboration, communication, and better, more efficient infrastructure monitoring and data access for improved productivity, patch management, network monitoring and innovation in IT distinctly and across your business.

Especially for SaaS organizations, better business-IT communications allow you to strategize IT operations and software performance to meet organizational goals – something that might not be possible if your IT pros are busy navigating a maze of monitoring tools.

Tool consolidation helps to break down data silos, which then can reveal better possibilities for organizational advancement, empowered by efficient IT processes and a cleaner toolkit.

Sumo Logic is an integrative, cloud-based analytics service consolidating DevSecOps implementations for better observability and security. With Sumo Logic, you can securely integrate multiple cloud products, native applications and other tools into one dashboard for more efficient IT processes without sacrificing your favorite, use-case-specific utilities.

Learn more about critical tool consolidation and see how Sumo Logic helped Acquia achieve tool consolidation on time and under budget.

How can a company consolidate its tools?

• Conduct a tool audit 

• Identify the core functionalities required to meet business objectives

• Prioritize tools that offer integration

• Implement a centralized platform to replace individual tools

How can companies assess the costs associated with tool sprawl?

• Document the purpose of each tool and which departments or teams use them

• Identify any overlapping functionality between tools

• Assess licensing, subscription and maintenance costs of each tool

• Measure how tool sprawl impacts productivity and efficiency

• Evaluate the compatibility of your tools and the cost of integrating them

• Quantify security risks

What are the most common mistakes of tool consolidation to avoid?

• Ignoring user needs

• Overlooking integration challenges

• Rushing the process

• Inadequate communication with stakeholders

• Neglecting training and support

• Insufficient change management

• Inadequate testing of new tools

• Neglecting performance monitoring