Security Sunk Costs: Why Over-Engineering Kills Agency Defences

2024-08-14

There’s no shortage of “innovation” in cybersecurity these days, but stand inside most agency SOCs and it’s easy to see we’re drowning in tools—and still missing the point. The obsession with chasing best-in-class solutions, especially in Singapore’s well-resourced public sector, has led to security architectures so convoluted that almost nobody can explain them end-to-end. This isn’t the fault of the engineers or architects; it’s baked into the procurement culture, where buying shiny new features often trumps solving actual business problems.

Here’s the dirty secret: complexity is the enemy of effectiveness. The more layers you add—hoping to catch every conceivable threat—the harder it gets for defenders to maintain, troubleshoot, and even notice when something goes wrong. I’ve seen teams caught solving ticket escalations between five different monitoring platforms, all the while an actual attacker slipped through a simple misconfiguration that was nobody’s job to own. Few want to admit that sometimes, less is more and most of the real risk is hiding in plain sight, waiting for complexity to obscure it.

It’s even worse in environments where leadership equate spending money with reducing risk. If a security budget doubles this year, everyone feels safer, but the measurable impact on breaches or process improvement is often marginal. The result is security architecture that looks “world-class” on paper but collapses under pressure—not because staff aren’t competent, but because nobody is empowered to say “enough.” If every tool has a partial owner and every dashboard has a different story, who actually sees the big picture?

If you’re running security at any scale, take a step back from the product spreadsheets and ask: is this all making it easier or harder for the frontline teams to do their jobs? Can a new hire trace how an alert becomes an incident response action, or do they get lost hopping from one platform to the next? The healthiest security teams I’ve seen are ruthless about simplicity. They recognise that real control means cutting through the noise, focusing on a handful of strong, well-understood defences—and then getting out of their own way.

Over-engineering is the silent killer. Don’t let “best practices” blind your agency to the reality that every extra moving part is a place for things to break. Audit your architecture for clarity, not just for compliance. Fight for simple controls that you can actually operate under stress. And when vendors come knocking promising magic, remember that complexity is often just risk in disguise. Sometimes, the bravest thing you can do for privacy and security is to say “no” to more.