The modern organization uses anywhere from 70 to 130 different security tools, often creating a patchwork quilt of point solutions as the security team seeks to respond to new and evolving threats. Simultaneously, security teams need a centralized location for receiving and responding to alerts, often struggling with high volumes of false positives that lead to inefficient processes.
For security vendors, tool proliferation poses a different problem. Customers want interoperable technologies so their teams have broader visibility, yet building integrations is time-consuming and expensive. Developers need specialized skills to understand the various security data schemas, and working on integrations often takes them away from improving the core product.
As security vendors work to improve customer experiences, they need to deploy security application integrations rapidly and determine value with the appropriate key performance indicators (KPIs).
What value do application integrations provide to security vendors?
Application integrations create a seamless flow of security data across various cybersecurity tools so customers can synchronize data effectively and reduce manual processes. From the customer’s perspective, the value lies in improved security metrics, like mean time to detect (MTTD) or mean time to respond (MTTR).
To remain competitive in today’s security solution market, vendors need to consider the value proposition for their customers, including the following benefits:
- Improved insights: To optimize their security analytics, organizations need to feed the models as much data from as many tools as possible, so providing integrations becomes a market differentiator.
- Streamlining workflows: Integrations enable customers to connect data sources and build automations across various internal stakeholders to meet their needs, like security information and event management (SIEM) solutions and governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) platforms.
- Improved data consistency: Integrations can normalize security data to a standardized format, enabling security teams to overcome usability challenges from diverse and often proprietary schemas.
Common challenges when building integrations for security tools
Despite the business value that integrations offer, many security vendors struggle to deploy them. To improve revenue and differentiate themselves in the market, technology providers should plan how to overcome the following challenges:
- Maintaining data security: Cybersecurity tools generate sensitive data, like usernames and IP addresses, so building the integrations must consider how to prevent unauthorized access and meet compliance requirements.
- Ensuring scalability: Integrations must be able to manage increased data volumes as the user base expands without impacting performance or user experience, meaning that the vendor needs to have the appropriate infrastructure.
- Achieving seamless interoperability: Customers want all security tools to communicate cohesively, which can mean asking for integrations with homegrown or legacy tools, vendors with a smaller customer base, which increases the cost to build the integration, or competitors with similar or adjacent products.
- Normalizing complex data schemas: Security data has complex schemas for field names, structures, and nesting, and comes in various formats, including Syslog, JSON, XML, or vendor-specific formats, like Windows Event Logs.
17 Key Metrics for Security Integrations
When building integrations, security vendors should consider the following metrics that enable them to align their road maps with business objectives.
Speed to Integration
This KPI measures response time and latency, with faster response times correlating to improved customer satisfaction. For security vendors, this is a crucial metric that customers will use to integrate security telemetry into their threat detection and response.
Indirect Revenue
Most security solutions generate indirect revenue from their integrations. While direct revenue is typically charged on a pay-per-call model, indirect monetization relates to the value that the security solution provides. When security tools enhance their capabilities by integrating with other technologies, vendors can reach new markets, drive innovation, and improve customer satisfaction, ultimately leading to revenue growth.
Cost Reduction
Integration reuse means that organizations ultimately reduce overall costs. With a build-once, integrate multiple times approach, security vendors reduce burdens on their development teams. For example, using an Integration as a Service platform (IPaaS) or providing a unified API across a category of tools, like SIEMs, optimizes reach while limiting costs.
Number of Developers
The more developers interact with the integration, the more the integration contributes to direct and indirect revenue. Monitoring this metric and the increased traffic provides insight into how customers use a security tool.
Documentation Quality
Proper documentation improves customer engagement and maintains integration reliability. By keeping documentation up-to-date as the security vendors make changes to the integration, it improves troubleshooting and reduces technical issues, reducing overall costs of building the integration and improving the customer experience.
Developer Onboarding Time
A shorter developer onboarding time means that the integration provides user-friendly documentation and has an intuitive design. By reducing developers’ dependency on external support, security vendors foster improved integration adoption that contributes to direct and indirect revenue.
Number of Customers
Tracking the number of customers using an integration provides insight into business performance, enabling security vendors to make strategic business decisions. Additionally, new customer acquisition metrics can help assess the integration’s strategic performance.
Number of Partners
Integrations enable security vendors to partner with other technology vendors to optimize customers’ investments. Partner integrations can extend a security vendor’s customer reach and help identify strategic business partnerships.
Partner-Developer Churn
Partner-Developer churn rates indicate service or support issues within an integration. High churn can suggest underlying problems that require additional review or potential deficiencies in the service offering.
Number of Applications
Tracking the number of applications that integrate with a solution provides insight into how relevant that security tool is across the cybersecurity technology stack. Monitoring this metric offers insight into how security teams value a solution.
Service Failure Rate
High failure rates suggest that the integration needs performance improvement. By monitoring this metric, vendors can address issues and prevent their integration from becoming a customer security blind spot or impacting their analytics.
Usage Metrics
Security vendors can gauge utilization and adoption by tracking the number of calls the integration makes. These metrics enable strategic planning for business objectives and help optimize the integration’s performance.
Latency
Security vendors gain insight into application and integration performance by measuring the delay between when a user takes an action and when the application responds. Tracking this metric helps troubleshoot and resolve issues while optimizing the customer experience.
Synqly: Building Integrations that Connect Security Vendors and Customers
Building integrations is time-consuming and challenging for security vendors, yet they need to ensure that their solutions enable interoperability across a complex cybersecurity technology stack. As customers adopt security analytics to improve their incident detection and response capabilities, they want to aggregate and correlate more data from their diverse tools. To distinguish themselves in a crowded market, security vendors need to provide out-of-the-box integrations from the start.
Synqly provides a unified API and acts as a cybersecurity-focused integration platform so that security vendors can connect their solutions to their customers’ technology stacks more easily. Built by security veterans specifically for security vendors, Synqly’s platform provides a single API across multiple vendors within a security control category, reducing the time and resources required to deliver a broad, integrated security system.
Contact us today to see how a unified security API that understands you and your customers can help you achieve your business objectives.
