By: Anton Abaya
The uncomfortable truth is that breaches rarely occur because organizations aren’t using the top cybersecurity tools. Even the most advanced artificial intelligence (AI) and cutting-edge security software in the world cannot compensate for a well-meaning employee clicking a convincing phishing link or an outdated incident response procedure creating confusion during a crisis.
Effective cybersecurity is like a three-legged stool: people, processes, and technology are the three interdependent pillars upon which it rests. Remove one, and the entire security posture becomes unstable. Yet too many organizations pour resources into technology while leaving the other two aspects underdeveloped and wobbly, rendering security tools as “shelfware.”
It is within those organizations that treat technology as a silver bullet that the Pellera Technologies team and I often see the results of cybersecurity assessments remain unchanged or worsen year-over-year. And, quite frankly, this is becoming an alarmingly common trend.
Why Technology Is Not a Silver Bullet
According to The Hacker News coverage of a recent Gartner® report, “misconfiguration of technical security controls is a leading cause for the continued success of attacks.” So, the problem isn’t that the top cybersecurity tools don’t work — it’s that they don’t work alone. The tools are only as effective as the people who configure them and the processes that govern their use.
At Pellera, we see misconfigurations exploited time and again. For example, trending in the last few years are misconfigurations in Active Directory Certificate Services (ADCS), which our Red Team abuses quite frequently to escalate access from a low-privileged account to domain administrator access, often using credential-based and adversary-in-the-middle attack techniques. Some tools can detect it, but nobody is looking.
Pouring fuel on an already raging wildfire, many organizations have rushed into the cloud (ISC2 Security Congress: Cloudy With a Chance of Breaches) without fully addressing shared responsibilities. The result is a tangled web of abstracted integrations that demand skills far beyond what many traditional IT teams possess.
While social engineering is a tale as old as time, it’s ever evolving and now supercharged. One of the most alarming trends we’re seeing is the rise of AI-powered vishing attacks, where deepfake audio is used to impersonate executives or manipulate helpdesk staff. Our own Red Team has been busy simulating these attacks, cloning executive voices using as little as 30 seconds of publicly available audio. As generative AI becomes more accessible, defending against these tactics, already one of the hardest human-based attack vectors, will only become more challenging.
>> Related Read: Pellera Cybersecurity Threat Intel Report
Top 13 Cybersecurity Tools for 2025
When properly implemented and managed, today’s best cybersecurity tools shield sensitive data while providing the continuous monitoring that human teams simply cannot maintain around the clock. These top tools include:
- Network, cloud, and email security solutions that monitor threats in real-time
- Vulnerability scanners that methodically search for system weaknesses
- Next-generation firewalls that filter out malicious traffic
- Intrusion detection and prevention systems that stand guard at network perimeters
- Enterprise-grade antivirus software that prohibits device-level infections
- Robust encryption tools that protect data in transit and at rest
- Penetration testing platforms that regularly probe defenses
- Identity and access management (IAM) tools that control authentication, authorization, and user privileges to protect digital assets
- Endpoint detection and response (EDR) solutions that monitor device-level threats 24/7
- Extended detection and response (XDR) solutions that integrate data from multiple tools to provide a unified, organization-wide view of security threats
- Security information and event management (SIEM) systems that analyze data from multiple sources to detect and respond to security events as they happen
- Security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR) platforms that orchestrate incident response processes, allowing human teams to act more quickly and efficiently
- Cloud security posture management (CSPM) tools that continuously identify cloud-control plane misconfigurations that you, the Tenant, own and are not the responsibility of the CSP, or Landlord.
Again, many of these tools are essential, but they’re only as strong as the people and processes around them. If a tree falls in the forest, and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? Likewise, if a critical alert fires and no one sees it—or knows what to do—did the breach not occur?
The Limitations of Relying on Tools Alone
While cybersecurity tools promise measurable outcomes, clear ROI calculations, and the comfort of tangible defenses, taking a technology-singular approach can leave organizations more vulnerable than their security budgets might suggest.
The Compliance Trap
The conflation of compliance with actual security has spawned what is often referred to as “compliance theater,” where organizations that excel at checking regulatory boxes remain fundamentally vulnerable to real-world attacks. This is exacerbated by the fact that many cybersecurity tools can readily satisfy the kinds of standardized, auditable controls that compliance frameworks focus on.
Deploy a SIEM system, configure endpoint protection, implement network segmentation, and voilà: Checkmarks appear next to compliance requirements. But compliance auditors aren’t penetration testers. They verify that controls exist, not that they’re properly configured, actively monitored, or integrated into a coherent defense strategy.
>> Related Read: Why Compliance Is Starting to Require Continuous Penetration Testing
Misconfigurations & Unused Features
Perhaps nowhere is the gap between security spending and security outcomes more visible than in the epidemic of misconfigured and underutilized cybersecurity tools. And the problem is getting worse, not better.
Even as organizations continue adding cybersecurity tools to their arsenals, recent research shows that 55% of companies admit their existing tools aren’t as effective as they should be. However, the tools perform exactly as engineered. The problem lies in how they’re implemented.
For example, organizations can pay substantial EDR licensing fees for advanced behavioral analytics, threat-hunting capabilities, and automated response features, but never enable them. Instead, they run their sophisticated EDR platforms in basic antivirus mode, wondering why their expensive security investments aren’t delivering the promised protections.
The “Hammer Without a Carpenter” Problem
Much like a hammer without a carpenter is just a hammer, a top cybersecurity tool without a skilled expert at the helm who understands how to wield it effectively is just a tool.
This isn’t necessarily a staffing issue, though. It’s more of a strategy problem. Organizations consistently underestimate the human infrastructure required to operationalize security technologies. They budget for software licenses and hardware procurement, but forget to account for the training, governance process development, and ongoing management that transform tools into actual cybersecurity capabilities.
Why People & Processes Are Critical to Cybersecurity Success
Technology can automate responses, detect patterns, and enforce policies, but it cannot think strategically, adapt to novel threats, or make the nuanced decisions that effective cybersecurity requires. The most successful organizations recognize that their tools are only as strong as the people who operate them and the processes that govern their use.
While the vision of agentic AI replacing the carpenter in the “hammer without a carpenter” scenario is both provocative and plausible, it’s equally likely (or perhaps inevitable) that early iterations of such AI won’t build like artisans, but behave more like frantic security interns in a high-stakes Whack-a-Mole competition. The result? Another hammer (albeit a fancier “smart AI” hammer) that still needs a carpenter.
Skilled People to Optimize Tools
Consider the typical SIEM deployment. Out of the box, SIEM tools can generate thousands of alerts daily, overwhelming IT teams with a mixture of genuine threats, false positives, and routine network activity. Without skilled analysts to create custom detection rules, tune alert thresholds, and develop playbooks for common scenarios, SIEM platforms become very expensive log aggregators. The alerts pile up, genuine threats get lost in the noise, and organizations can develop what security professionals call “alert fatigue.”
The human element becomes even more critical when we consider that approximately 60% of data breaches involve human factors, whether through social engineering, credential theft, or simple mistakes. No firewall can prevent an employee from clicking a clever phishing link. No endpoint protection system can stop an authorized user from accidentally sharing sensitive data with unauthorized parties. And no web application firewall can prevent logic flaws introduced into production due to weak secure coding practices.
These scenarios require human judgment, security awareness, and the kind of contextual decision-making that technology cannot replicate, or at least not yet.
While rapid incorporation of AI into cybersecurity tools offers the promise of a potentially better tomorrow by helping enable the human factor to be more effective, remember that attackers are also now using AI on the offense.
Processes That Drive Continuous Risk Management
Effective security programs are built on processes that ensure continuous adaptation and improvement. Incident response procedures provide structured approaches for handling security events, but only if they’re regularly tested and playbooks are updated based on lessons learned. Tabletop exercises reveal gaps in coordination and decision-making that no security tool can address. Purple teaming elevates from the tabletop, testing your people, process, and technology against real-world attack scenarios, like a rigorous training regimen for a boxing match. Risk assessments identify emerging threats and changing business contexts that may require new protective measures or updated policies, with AI risk governance being the next on the docket.
The contrast between one-time deployment and ongoing governance is stark. Organizations that treat security as a project tend to see their protective measures degrade over time as configurations drift, staff turnover occurs, and new business requirements emerge. Those that embed security into continuous business processes maintain adaptive, resilient defenses that evolve with their threat environment. As the saying goes, security and even compliance is a journey–not a destination.
Continuous Assessments to Validate Effectiveness
Red team assessments and penetration tests regularly reveal that organizations with impressive security budgets remain vulnerable to relatively straightforward attacks. Again, the cybersecurity tools are working as designed, but they’re not effectively preventing the kinds of breaches that actually occur.
This isn’t a failure of the tools themselves. It’s a failure to validate that those tools are actually reducing organizational risk. Continuous assessment processes, including regular penetration testing, red team exercises, and security control validation, provide the feedback loops necessary to ensure that security investments translate into security outcomes. Without these validation mechanisms, organizations often discover too late that their robust security stack was configured incorrectly, poorly integrated, or simply inadequate for their actual threat profile.
This is also the reason why penetration testing has become embedded in regulatory mandates or incorporated into industry-accepted standards. Because the best security tools can always be circumvented, disabled, or rendered useless, and in those situations, your people become the last line of defense, with all getting battle-tested during penetration tests.
>> Related Read: Why CTEM Is the Future of Security & Easier Than You Think
When People, Processes & Technology Combine
The path forward isn’t about choosing between people, processes, or technology. It’s about recognizing that cybersecurity effectiveness emerges from their deliberate and masterful orchestration of those three pillars.
At Pellera, we work with organizations to maximize the ROI of their security investments by pairing tools with the right people and processes. If you’re rethinking how to get more value out of your security stack, let’s have a conversation.
