Count them.
How many separate products currently have a say in whether a given person can reach a given application?
Firewall rules. A VPN. Perhaps an application gateway, perhaps a web gateway. Things published directly to the internet because at the time that was the pragmatic answer. SSO. MFA. MDM. Conditional access policies. And now, most likely, a cloud-delivered access platform bought in the last three years.
Most people get to seven or eight and become unsure whether they have missed one. That uncertainty is the finding. If the number cannot be stated confidently, nobody in the organization can answer the question those products exist to answer.
I wrote this in 2019
In March 2019 I published a post here called “The Madness of IT Security Sprawl”. I have just reread it, and the uncomfortable thing is not that parts of it are dated. It is that none of it is.
Here is what I wrote then:
“The reality is that the more security products you have, the more fronts you must defend. That complexity is magnified with every additional security product you throw at this tidal wave of attacks.”
And this, which I would now revise in only one respect:
“There is no truth to the commonly held belief that the more solutions deployed, the harder it is for an attack to be successful. That approach has been tried for the past three or four decades, and it still doesn’t work.”
The revision is the number. In 2019 it was three or four decades. It is now four or five.
The list, then and now
The 2019 post named what organizations were running. I listed: two-factor authentication, single sign-on, administrator access, partner access, customer access, file access, VPN, mobile device management, cloud access, RDP.
Read that list again and notice what is not on it.
No cloud-delivered access platform. No SASE. No agent governance of any kind. Those are the things that have been added since — and not one of the ten items on the original list has gone away in the meantime.
That is the whole argument in two lists. Seven and a half years, several new categories, nothing retired.
What I got right, and what I would say differently
The 2019 post said: consolidate your security. I still believe that, but the word has since been taken.
Every large vendor now sells consolidation. Platform, single pane, unified policy — the language is universal, and much of it is sincere. So “consolidate” is no longer a differentiating claim, and repeating it in 2026 would be joining a chorus rather than making a point.
What the chorus does not do is consolidate all of it. A platform consolidates the applications it can reach — and for most of them, that means the modern ones. The thick clients, the systems expecting a Kerberos ticket, the OT segments, the legacy applications behind an injected header stay outside, on whatever was there before.
Partial consolidation is not consolidation. It is a smaller number of larger pieces, which is an improvement in operations and no improvement at all in architecture. The platform becomes one more item on the list rather than a replacement for it.
That is the sharper version of the 2019 argument, and it took the intervening years to see it clearly.
It used to be one place
I have worked in IT since 1985. When I started, access control was centralized — not as a philosophy, but as a consequence. There was one system. A terminal, a mainframe, and one place that decided who could reach what.
Nobody called that an architecture. But it had a property worth naming: there was exactly one place where the question was answered, and therefore exactly one place to look when you needed to know the answer.
Everything since has been the story of losing that property, one reasonable decision at a time.
Forty years of partial fixes
Client-server distributed the decision across machines nobody controlled centrally. Connecting to the internet brought the firewall, to decide what could come in at all. Remote working brought the VPN — a second front door, with its own rules and its own administrators.
The VPN granted more than it should, so application gateways and web gateways arrived to constrain what happened after it. There were now too many places to authenticate, so SSO. Passwords stopped being sufficient, so MFA. The device stopped being ours, so MDM. The application stopped being ours, so cloud access brokers.
And when all of that still could not answer the question, the industry produced a new category to answer it properly.
Every one of those solved a real problem. Every one was, at the time, the right purchase. And every one answered part of the same question in a new place.
The seams grow faster than the products
This is why the estate feels harder to reason about every year even though each individual purchase was sound.
Three systems have three boundaries between them. Eight systems have twenty-eight. Each boundary is a place where two policy models meet and can diverge — and no boundary belongs to anybody. The team running each system owns the system. Nobody owns the space between them.
Policy divergence at those boundaries is not a failure of diligence. It is the arithmetic.
And nothing is ever actually removed
Products get replaced, in the sense that a newer one is bought. But the newer one covers a subset, so the incumbent survives for the remainder.
Look at what is still running in your estate right now. Firewall rules written by an engineer who left in 2017. An MDM deployment for a device population that has shrunk to forty handsets. A gateway kept alive for one application. A VPN that was supposed to be retired eighteen months ago.
None of it is anyone’s fault. Each was superseded rather than removed, because removing it entirely would have meant solving the awkward remainder — and the awkward remainder is always the expensive part.
The current generation is doing it again
Cloud-delivered access platforms cover what they can reach and leave the rest. The applications that could not move stay on the old path, and the old path stays with them.
That is not a criticism of a category. It is the same pattern, in the current decade, for the same structural reason. I have written separately about what it looks like from the inside — the question of why, after buying a modern access platform, you still have a VPN.
Why I think this is the breach story
I would argue — and it is an argument, not a citation — that this is the main reason breaches keep happening to organizations that are spending seriously on security.
Not because they underspend. Spending has risen steadily for two decades. Because the answer to “who can reach what” is distributed across a dozen systems that cannot see each other, and an intruder does not need to defeat that architecture. They need one seam between two parts of it.
Nobody is defending the seams, because the seams are not on anyone’s list.
The next one is already here
AI agents are being deployed into production estates now. They act on behalf of people. They hold credentials. They make requests at machine speed, against the same applications your staff use.
And a category of products is forming to secure them.
So here is the question worth asking before buying one: will governing what an AI agent can reach be a separate system from governing what a person can reach?
If the answer is yes, then to borrow my own words from 2019: that is one more front to defend. Humans decided in one place, agents in another, and a fresh seam between two populations that will increasingly do the same work against the same systems.
In five years someone will write a post about the AI access product nobody could remove, because it covered part of the estate and something had to stay behind for the rest.
The pattern never announces itself as a pattern. It arrives as a reasonable purchase, with a good demo, solving a real problem.
An AI agent is a principal making a request. If the place where access is decided already evaluates who is asking, in what context, against what policy, for every request — then an agent is another kind of requester, not another product category.
This is not nostalgia
The mainframe was not better. I am not proposing a return to 1985, and anyone who lived through it would not want one.
The point is narrower than that. One property of that era was worth keeping — that a single place decided who could reach what — and it was lost as a side effect of forty years of necessary changes, rather than because anyone decided it should be.
What has changed is that keeping it is now possible again. A single enforcement point can sit in front of the whole estate — and the word that matters there is whole.
The SaaS applications and cloud workloads a modern platform already handles well. The internal web applications. The thick clients. RDP and SSH sessions. OT environments. The legacy systems expecting a Kerberos ticket or an injected header. And the agents now arriving alongside the people.
That distinction is worth being precise about, because a product that covered only the difficult half would be another partial answer — one more item on the list, and exactly the thing this post argues against. The claim is not that we specialize in what others cannot reach. It is that one place decides, for everything.
Not as a migration. One population at a time, beside whatever is already there, until each old path has nothing left to serve.
Count them again in two years
That number should be going down.
For most organizations it has only ever gone up — and the next increment is already on the roadmap, wearing the word “AI”.
It does not have to. Stop the madness.