Security tooling pitfalls for small teams: Cost, complexity, and low ROI

In this Help Net Security interview, Aayush Choudhury, CEO at Scrut Automation, discusses why many security tools built for large enterprises don’t work well for leaner, cloud-native teams. He explains how simplicity, integration, and automation are key for SMBs with limited resources.

Choudhry also shares how AI is beginning to make a difference for mid-market companies in managing risk and compliance.

What are some specific examples of security tooling or vendor approaches that simply don’t scale down to the needs of leaner, cloud-native teams?

One of the biggest challenges for lean, cloud-native teams is the widening cybersecurity skills gap. Hiring, training, and retaining skilled security professionals is already difficult, and these teams are often operating without the depth of expertise that larger enterprises can afford. Yet they face the same complex regulations and sophisticated threats.

The result is that many tools marketed to them are scaled-down versions of enterprise solutions that focus on making security look easier, not on actually keeping the organization secure. An example are GRC platforms. At its core, a good GRC tool should help companies establish a security program with strong controls that keep risk within tolerance levels without slowing growth. But in the mid-market, GRC is often reduced to checklist-driven compliance automation. These tools excel at producing policies, collecting evidence, and speeding up audits. What they don’t do is account for whether those policies are meaningful or whether the controls are implemented effectively. If your security policy is just a template with your company’s name swapped in and no one validates its alignment with your actual environment, the risk is still very real, just hidden behind paperwork.

From your experience, what are the most critical consequences when SMBs try to retrofit enterprise-grade platforms into their environments?

Retrofitting enterprise-grade platforms into SMB environments is often a disaster in the making. These tools are designed for organizations with layers of bureaucracy, complex structures, and entire teams dedicated to each security and compliance function. A large enterprise like Microsoft or Salesforce might have separate teams for governance, risk, compliance, cloud security, network security, and security operations. Each of those teams would own and manage specialized tooling, which in itself assumes domain experts running the show.

SMBs are a different reality. Often, teams of <5 people are handling all of those responsibilities. When they try to adapt enterprise platforms, several issues surface.

• Enterprise tools are often expensive, costing more> $ than $100k annually. This cost alone can consume budgets that would be better spent scaling security initiatives or extending team capacity.
• Implementation is painfully slow, panning over 6-12 months, requiring additional budgets and effort investment with a Systems Integrator (SI). Something as simple as a workflow adjustment that should be done through the UX, will often trigger a 2-3 week long change request with the SI. By the time the implementation is complete, the organization would have matured more, making the old workflows somewhat obsolete, leading to a never-ending implementation.
• The payoff is limited. Most SMBs end up using only 20 to 30 percent of the tool’s functionality, because their processes simply don’t demand the complexity the platform was built for.

They are much better served with tools purpose-built for their scale; platforms that offer intuitive UX, jargon-free language, easy onboarding flows, and quick integrations across their tech stack. Tools that assume one person may be covering multiple domains, and solve that person’s pain points in a size-appropriate way, are far more effective than retrofitting enterprise systems never designed with SMBs in mind.

What role do integration and ease of use play when choosing a “platform” for a team with limited engineering bandwidth?

For lean security teams, integration and ease of use can mean the difference between staying on top of risks and constantly playing catch-up. In our user interviews, two themes stand out again and again: simplicity and automation.

Picture a three-person security team at a fast-growing SaaS company. Their engineers don’t have the time to learn a complex tool. They need something they can open, understand, and act on immediately. The expectation is clear: the platform should bring the right information together so they can resolve issues – not waste hours hunting for context or clicking through clunky workflows.

Now layer in the daily grind of handling security issues. Take a simple cloud misconfiguration. Without automation, the GRC analyst has to dig through complex AWS setups, notice the issue, raise a Jira ticket, figure out the right assignee, contextualize and set the priority, and chase updates. Meanwhile, the engineer pulls time away from building features to track down where the misconfiguration happened, search for a fix, apply it, and finally update Jira, all while the GRC analyst is chasing him for updates. That back-and-forth can stretch over days, and introduces friction nobody wants.

With the right integrations, the entire loop looks different. The GRC tool spots the misconfiguration through its AWS integration, assigns priority based on risk, generates a Jira ticket with enriched metadata and remediation steps, and routes it automatically. The engineer spends five minutes fixing the issue and closing the ticket, while the analyst is notified in real time. No chasing, no context-switching. The misconfiguration is caught, assigned, tracked, and resolved with minimal effort.

For teams without bandwidth to spare, the ability to work with tools that are simple, intuitive, and seamlessly integrated into their stack can determine whether security issues are handled swiftly or allowed to escalate.

Are there specific use cases, like alert triage, log analysis, or compliance automation, where AI is already proving itself in the mid-market?

GenAI introduces the capability to scan through complex, sprawling, heterogeneous data and, when used correctly, can build expert-level insights that get you to action quickly. Take GRC for instance. Agentic GRC takes a proactive approach to governance, risk, and compliance. GenAI systems now contextualize, interpret, and recommend decisions. These advanced tools deliver insights tailored to your organization, explaining the significance of each event and guiding the next steps.

A few examples of this shift:

• Context-aware risk scoring: Instead of flooding teams with alerts, AI connects signals from tools like SIEMs with business-critical assets and sensitive data to determine which risks truly demand attention.
• Dynamic compliance mapping: GenAI continuously scans regulatory updates, whether NIS2, CCPA, or PCI DSS 4.0, and cross-references them with current controls to surface where organizations may be falling short.
• Forward-looking threat detection: By analyzing indicators such as supplier activity, code commit patterns, or even geopolitical trends, AI can anticipate risks before they turn into incidents.

This shift opens new possibilities for everyone, more so for SMBs with lean, and often non-existent security teams. It equips them with decision intelligence that once required layers of experts, making them faster, sharper, and better prepared in the face of growing risk.

If a CISO or founding engineer had to focus on just three actions to reduce breach risk tomorrow, what would you recommend?

1. Get compliant with a foundational security framework

“Compliance is not security” is a statement that sparks heated debates amongst many security experts. However, the reality is that even checklist-based compliance can help companies with no security in place build a strong foundation. Frameworks like SOC 2 and ISO 27001 help establish the baseline of a strong security program, ensuring you have coverage across critical controls. If you deal with Personally Identifiable Information (PII), GDPR is the gold standard for privacy controls. And with AI adoption becoming unavoidable, ISO 42001 is emerging as a key framework for AI governance, helping organizations manage AI risk and build responsible practices from the ground up.

2. Strengthen third-party risk and access hygiene

A significant number of breaches stem from vendor environments or misconfigured accounts. Apply the principle of least privilege, review access regularly, enforce strong authentication, and tighten vendor governance. Automating patching and requiring encryption for sensitive data can reduce exposure dramatically and quickly.

3. Test and refine your incident response plan

Plans that live in a binder don’t reduce risk; practiced ones do. Run tabletop exercises with executives and engineering leads, simulate real breach scenarios, and refine based on gaps you uncover. Familiarity with roles and communication flows during a crisis can be the difference between swift containment and costly escalation.