Security Controls Aren’t Failing — They’re Just Misconfigured

The sheer volume of security tools in today’s enterprise IT environments disguise a critical truth: more tools don’t equal better protection. This was among the key takeaways from Gartner^®'s April 2025 report ¹ on security controls optimization. According to the report, “cybersecurity leaders had a mean of 43 cybersecurity tools in their product portfolio." The report further found that 5% of organizations are fielding over 100 tools. Significantly, "[d]espite significant spend on security tooling, 61% of security leaders have suffered a breach because of failed or misconfigured controls in the last 12 months.”

These fact adds an important wrinkle to an already complicated exposure landscape. We already know that you cannot achieve reliable security without paying attention to the configurations of your connected devices. But it turns out that the configurations of your security tools can themselves pose a threat. Think about that for a moment. The things you're using to solve a problem may exacerbate that same problem. Yikes!

We're witnessing a"silent failure" of security tooling, where default or misaligned settings undercut protection efficacy without triggering alarms. They’re errors of oversight, scale, and assumption. And they’re prolific. Naturally, expanding security stacks, overlapping coverage, and interdepartmental isolation only add to the challenge.

To solve this, we need to stop focusing on control presence and start focusing on control effectiveness. A shift in focus that reflects the difference between whether a security tool is deployed and whether that tool is optimized to mitigate threats in practice.

GYTPOL: Continuous, Context-Aware Control Optimization

Gartner rightly identifies a huge and growing security liability for enterprise organizations. And they've also accurately framed what's needed to get ahead of it. The problem is that most security teams are already under-resourced and overburdened. It's why they were so eager to embrace tooling to begin with.

They have enough trouble assessing, maintaining, hardening, and tracking the thousands of devices and millions of settings under their purview. Adding the granular oversight of configurations across their complex and overlapping security stacks is easier said than done. And because technical security control optimization is a moving target — driven by both threat evolution and internal business change — it’s not a one-time task.

Thankfully, there's GYTPOL. Providing a comprehensive platform for security posture management and configuration risk remediation, GYTPOL works across Windows, macOS, Linux, and cloud workloads to identify and resolve the misconfigurations that undermine your defense.

GYTPOL doesn't just flag problems, but closes the loop with push-button remediation. That part is key since, by bridging the gap between detection and correction, it leaves no room for ineffectiveness. You get what you see and you're able to see the results in near real time.

Not only that, but GYTPOL can also be used to validate the effectiveness of other tools; telling you, for example, where Group Policy Object (GPO) rules have been misapplied, or where enforcement scripts don't work as designed, or where you have conflicts between MDM policies and domain-level policies. 

And because GYTPOL takes a broad view of exposure, looking at it in the context of the wider operation, every alert includes an analysis of its functional dependencies. That means that whenever remediation would bear any downstream ramifications, you'll know about it ahead of time.

Such business-aware safeguards ensure no change jeopardizes critical systems. And by mapping interdependencies across your stack and architecture, it helps break down operational silos and clarify areas of functional overlap.  

Outcome-Driven Metrics for Security Effectiveness

Gartner recommends that decision-makers “identify and refine outcome-driven metrics (ODMs) to measure outcomes of an investment in controls and their optimization.”

GYTPOL supports this shift by helping security teams track and improve metrics like:

• Time to detect misconfigurations (MTTD)

• Time to remediate misconfigurations (MTTR)

• Strength of endpoint protection configurations

• Reduction in alert noise and false positives

• Coverage of critical exposures with compensating controls

GYTPOL goes beyond static hardening templates to inform users where to focus, why it matters, how to fix it, and what impact (if any) the change will have — empowering IT and security teams to act confidently and decisively. 

Breaking Down Silos Across Security and IT Ops

A major challenge is the disconnect between Security and Operations teams. Security teams may know what needs fixing, but Ops own the systems — and often lack the visibility or tooling to act decisively.

According to Gartner, “operational friction with security controls optimization is often tied to poor initiative scoping, lack of relevant domain expertise, siloed operations, and poor coordination with asset owners and operations teams.”

GYTPOL addresses this challenge head-on by enabling cross-functional ownership.

• Security teams gain the ability to define posture goals.

• Endpoint teams receive actionable, scoped remediation tasks.

• Operations teams get visibility into business impact before changes are made.

This leads to a shift in thinking whereby accountability for security becomes shared across IT, reducing bottlenecks, interdepartmental friction, and decision paralysis.

In a world where breaches are more often the result of invisible missteps than sophisticated attacks, configuration optimization is not a luxury — it’s a necessity.

Gartner’s message is clear: “for your security controls to be effective, they must be selected, deployed, configured and optimized continuously to protect against specific threats identified by the business.” And that requires not just visibility, but a system of action.

GYTPOL fills that gap — proactively, safely, and at scale.

• GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.

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1. Gartner, Reduce Threat Exposure With Security Controls Optimization, 3 April 2025