If there’s one theme echoing across the Bitdefender 2025 Cybersecurity Assessment Report, it’s that the very tools meant to protect organizations are now creating their own kind of risk. Complexity—born from overlapping tools, complicated solutions, and a patchwork of compliance requirements—has become one of cybersecurity’s biggest challenges.
The Bitdefender survey of 1,200 IT and cybersecurity professionals revealed that the leading security solutions challenge right now is complexity (31% say it’s their top concern), followed by extending protection across environments (29%), internal skills challenges (28%), and having too many cybersecurity solutions to manage (27%). Here is the complete list of top security solutions challenges:
Bitdefender Director of Cybersecurity Services Nick Jackson regularly works with organizations on their challenges. Based on his experience, these individual complexity concerns are linked.
“I’m gazing down the list, and you can easily connect every single one together. You can say that the skills shortage is what makes organizations rush, rather than find a way to manage things carefully. So they go and buy another solution, which makes things even harder to manage, and then that extends to the challenge of protection across multiple environments,” he says.
“Then there are numerous regulations to manage, across different tools or environments that may now be incompatible, and it makes everything involved more complex. To me, these results make complete sense.”
Additionally, complexity seems to increase another challenge: visibility. In the research, 77% of respondents said they lack enough insight into their environment.
While large enterprise organizations have long had highly complex environments and large teams to manage them, small and mid-sized organizations face a two-pronged complexity problem: they often lack the resources to manage the disparate tools in their environments, even as attackers increasingly target them.
“Financially motivated threat actors no longer care as much about who you are or which industry you are in, they care more about things like which software you’re using and the related vulnerabilities. What we are seeing is that mid-market and even smaller companies are now being targeted the same way that only big companies used to be,” says Bitdefender Technical Solutions Director Martin Zugec.
“This reveals the problem with complexity, because we still tend to look at security solutions and compare the features and the check boxes. We want to buy the one that checks every box. But can you afford to have a dedicated team of 10 people managing that complex environment? If not, then you are choosing the wrong solution.”
That’s the heart of the issue. Many organizations, particularly mid-market companies, are adopting enterprise-grade security stacks without the resources to run them efficiently. The result: a dense forest of tools that are difficult to integrate and nearly impossible to optimize.
Regulatory demands further compound the complexity issue. One-quarter (25%) of respondents said that adhering to data compliance and regulations is among their top three challenges. Whether it’s GDPR, CCPA, or another regulation, compliance obligations require significant time.
And ironically, the push to remain compliant often drives the addition of new stand-alone tools and reporting mechanisms—each promising better oversight but collectively adding to the very complexity they aim to solve.
Every layer of complexity widens the attack surface. More integrations mean more potential misconfigurations. More vendors mean more third-party exposure. And as organizations deploy point solutions faster than they can integrate them, blind spots multiply.
The good news is that simplifying the security stack doesn’t mean sacrificing capability. It means integrating intelligently—choosing unified platforms that work across endpoints, the cloud, identity, and network layers rather than stacking disconnected tools on top of one another.
Also, for many organizations, Managed Detection and Response (MDR) is part of that simplification strategy. Rather than adding headcount, MDR provides expert coverage and 24x7 monitoring as an extension of the internal team. This model not only alleviates resource strain but also consolidates signals and standardizes response workflows—critical steps toward reducing complexity and risk.
So how does your organization go from complex to streamlined while also pivoting from a reactive posture to a strategic one?
Bitdefender’s Jackson says it’s a journey you can start right now, but you must be proactive. “You want to begin by stepping back and really thinking at a strategic level: What do we want to achieve? What skills do we need? What direction do we want to go? Instead of having multiple teams doing different things, buying different solutions and working with every single cloud provider under the sun, it means thinking as a business. That’s where you strategize what you do and how you will to work together?”
Bitdefender can help you address the security complexity problem. Simplification tools include the unified GravityZone platform, the newly launched GravityZone PHASR (Proactive Hardening and Attack Surface Reduction), and GravityZone Compliance Manager. And if your organization is considering MDR, learn more about Bitdefender MDR.. It's time to reduce fragmentation, streamline oversight, and refocus on what matters most—preemptively stopping attacks before they start.
The complexity problem isn’t going away on its own. As the assessment shows, cybersecurity and IT professionals are wrestling not just with the sophistication of attackers but with the sprawl of their own defenses.
The future of cybersecurity belongs to organizations that can integrate intelligently, automate confidently, and partner strategically—turning complexity from a weakness into an advantage.
Related Webinar: From AI to Attack Surface: What’s Shaping Cybersecurity Priorities in 2025