Reduce tool sprawl: improve productivity with tool consolidation

Tool sprawl can cause negative ROI, as teams waste time navigating between disparate tools rather than focusing on meaningful work. By moving multiple monitoring and security tools to a single platform, your teams will spend less time switching between tools.

Tool sprawl can force complexity in day-to-day processes, creating additional work for your teams and hindering their productivity. Multiple tools call for complex updates and time-consuming integrations, which can lead to a greater need for downtime—an additional headache for you and your teams. Consolidating your tools draws everything into one simple and customisable dashboard, providing easy access to data and information.

A bloated tool stack can make observability difficult for IT teams. Tributary information is often stored and processed disjointly, resulting in data redundancies and inconsistencies. Each additional tool can create a data silo, which often requires manual data translation. As a result, this slows processes, reduces efficiency, and causes bottlenecks and other barriers to development. Tool consolidation unites teams with a single platform and source of truth for data, insights, and collaboration—which breaks down silos and improves visibility.

As mentioned, too many tools can create complexity in day-to-day processes. This complexity increases the time it takes teams to complete tasks, reducing productivity. Toolset consolidation can improve performance, as your teams stay in the same platform even as they switch tasks, improving efficiency and productivity. Plus, it can boost your developer experience, also known as DevEx, and increase the speed of delivery as a result.

Each new tool comes with its own inherent product expense and carries the cost of the teams needed to monitor, maintain, and run that individual tool. By consolidating, you’ll reduce the number of licences you need to pay for, as well as the amount of support and tool maintenance required.

Organisations that are battling tool sprawl often use multiple tools for the same purpose, creating duplicate functionalities. Tool consolidation identifies and eliminates redundant tools and gathers what remains into a single, unified platform that’s easier to maintain and manage. Having your data stored in one platform makes relevant processes more efficient and effective.

Disparate, poorly integrated IT tools make cybersecurity monitoring and incident response processes slower and more complex. The resulting security gaps mean that security issues will be harder to detect and address. By consolidating your tools and taking a centralised approach to tech management, you can implement more consistent security measures across all systems and enhance security.

Tool sprawl can create compatibility issues between different systems. The incompatibilities that crop up in data formats, integration capabilities, or system requirements can hinder the smooth transfer of data and information between systems, creating data inconsistencies and the potential for errors.

Consolidated tools provide better scalability and flexibility, allowing organisations to easily adapt to changing business needs. It becomes easier to add or remove functionalities as required, ensuring that the toolset remains aligned with the organisation's evolving requirements.

Complex organisational structures and unstructured decision-making processes hinder agility in decision-making. But consolidating your toolset can help streamline processes, reduce the time spent managing multiple tools, provide insight into development gaps, improve velocity, and reduce the risk of downtime. Improvements in these areas can lead to more agile decision-making and faster response times, providing businesses with a competitive advantage.

Consolidating tools can eliminate duplicate functionalities and optimise resource allocation, which helps businesses reduce the number of servers and systems needed to power multiple tools. By reducing the amount of servers and systems, you can lower your energy consumption, which can help you achieve or work towards sustainability goals.