The vendor dependency trap is crippling security teams. AI is democratizing building capabilities that were once vendor-exclusive. Develop these five critical skills now before your competitors do.
The Vendor Dependency Trap We’ve All Fallen Into
Security teams have been slowly surrendering their technical sovereignty for over a decade. What started as a pragmatic response to cloud migration has evolved into a crippling dependency on vendor ecosystems. The modern security department has transformed from builders to buyers, from creators to consumers, from engineers to administrators.
Look around your security team. How many true builders do you have? Not people who can configure a SIEM or tune an EDR—actual engineers who can create solutions from scratch when nothing on the market fits your needs. For most organizations, that number hovers dangerously close to zero.
This isn’t accidental. The SaaS revolution promised to free security teams from infrastructure management so they could focus on “more strategic work.” But what actually happened? We traded infrastructure management for vendor management—endless procurement cycles, integration challenges, and budget battles that consume more time than the technical problems they supposedly solve.
The result is security teams staffed with specialists who know vendor platforms but lack fundamental building skills. We’ve created security departments full of people who can tell you every feature of CrowdStrike or SentinelOne but couldn’t write a basic detection algorithm if the pre-built ones fail. Teams that can recite security policies but can’t automate their own GRC workflows when commercial tools fall short.
This overweight vendor dependency has quietly become our industry’s Achilles’ heel—and the ongoing AI revolution is about to expose it.
The AI Inflection Point That Changes Everything
The emergence of AI represents the most significant shift in security capabilities since cloud computing. But unlike cloud, which centralized power in the hands of vendors, AI is democratizing the ability to build and create—putting power back into the hands of security teams willing to seize it.
Through capabilities like tool calling, agents, and API integration, AI is collapsing the technical barriers that once made custom development prohibitively expensive for most security teams. Tasks that once required weeks of engineering effort can now be accomplished in hours. Integration challenges that demanded specialized knowledge can now be solved through conversational interfaces with AI assistants (albeit with its own downsides).
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⚠️ WARNING: For Security Leaders Only
This exclusive content isn’t for those comfortable staying in the technical trenches. Each week, I will send you proven leadership frameworks and exclusive deep dives that can catapult you from ‘security guy/girl’ to a confident leader—but only if you put in the work and dedicate a bit of time.
