Cybersecurity products, at their core, are designed to do one thing: keep the digital/online assets of a business safe.

For small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), this challenge is even more pronounced.

They are targeted by cybercriminals with alarming regularity (some reports suggest as many as 73% of small businesses experienced data breaches of cyberattacks in 2023) but also lack the resources and expertise to manage the enterprise security tools which dominate the market.

As such, Coro decided to launch an in-depth investigation into these tools. Our 2024 SME Security Workload Impact Report aims at gaining a more detailed understanding of how these tools are failing SMEs, where they are spending the most time, and how security vendors can improve their offerings moving forward to provide SMEs with more practical approaches to cybersecurity.

The survey was conducted with 500 U.S. cybersecurity decision makers in companies of 200 to 2000 employees across a broad variety of industry sectors. Below is a rundown of the key findings:

• Respondents spend an average of 4 hours 43 minutes managing their cybersecurity tools every day, with an average 11.55 tools in their security stack
• 52% of respondents said the most time consuming task was monitoring security platforms, followed by vulnerability patching
• Respondents estimated it takes 4.22 months for a new cybersecurity tool to become operational; with equal time spent on installation, configuration, training staff and integration with their existing security stack
• On average, respondents manage 2029.91 end point security agents installed across 655.92 endpoint devices
• More than half (53%) of respondents must deal daily or weekly with vendors’ updates of these endpoint agents

The workload complexity facing security professionals, combined with the overwhelming demands it places on already limited resources, are driving SMEs and mid-market companies to consolidate their cybersecurity tools. 

A staggering 85% of respondents say they are looking to consolidate their tools in the next 12 months. The most important benefit cited was improving their security posture.

Consolidate to survive

The industry trend speaks for itself: Consolidation is a top priority for SMEs. If done correctly, we believe that this consolidation could be the key to unlocking a more accessible version of cybersecurity for the businesses in need of it the most.

To view the full results of the report, see here.