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Security tool sprawl can impose recurring costs on managed service providers (MSPs), but the available evidence does not establish that those costs exceed ransomware losses. The distinction matters: surveys describe demand for help and operational friction, while a fair cost ranking would require comparable dollar figures for the same providers, period, and loss categories.
What the evidence says about unmanageable security tools
Barracuda’s MSP Customer Insight Report 2025 found that 52% of surveyed organizations turn to an MSP for security support when their number of security tools becomes unmanageable. Among manufacturing respondents, the figure was 60%. These are customer-reported reasons for seeking MSP help—not estimates of MSP spending, the share of MSPs affected, or a comparison with ransomware losses.
Barracuda also describes tools from different vendors that may not integrate, making security harder and more expensive to manage and potentially increasing risk. The finding is a useful signal of customer demand and management friction, not a measured industry-wide financial total.
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How tool sprawl can add to an MSP’s operating costs
The costs can recur even when no security incident occurs. ITPro’s account of tool sprawl in the channel describes practical sources of friction for MSPs supporting customers across different security platforms:
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- Platform spending: Separate products can mean separate licensing and administration costs. The actual total depends on the MSP’s stack and customer agreements; the cited account does not provide a universal cost figure.
- Integration work: Connecting tools—or compensating when they do not work smoothly together—takes staff time and can complicate day-to-day operations.
- Staff expertise and training: Technicians need to learn and maintain knowledge of the platforms they support. A broader mix can increase that burden.
- Workflow friction: Moving between interfaces and systems can slow work. The accumulated effect may be operationally significant, but it is not quantified as a comparable dollar loss in the cited material.
Other vendor-published findings point to similar operational concerns without settling the financial comparison. Sophos’s 2026 MSP Perspectives Report describes fragmentation in technology and automation as a source of inefficiency. Its landing page identifies a survey of 800 MSP partners across seven countries; it does not provide a quantified tool-sprawl-versus-ransomware cost comparison.
Heimdal and FutureSafe’s State of MSP Agent Fatigue 2025 survey covered 80 North American MSPs in the first half of 2025 and reports integration problems and alert fatigue. It is a bounded, vendor-sponsored survey, not a census of MSPs or a measure of the financial effect across the industry. Coro’s summary of CRN research describes rising operational costs and low satisfaction with security-tool return on investment, but does not provide enough methodological detail to derive a comparable industry-wide cost estimate.
Why ransomware remains a serious cost and risk
Ransomware costs can include investigation, containment, incident response, recovery, restoration, downtime, and support for affected customers. The evidence cited here does not supply a matched financial benchmark for these costs, so it cannot be directly compared with recurring tool-sprawl expenses.
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The consequences may also extend beyond an MSP’s own operations. NIST’s Improving Cybersecurity of Managed Service Providers explains that businesses rely on MSPs for IT and cybersecurity, and that an MSP’s vulnerabilities can increase the vulnerabilities of the businesses it supports. The UK government’s research on UK managed service providers describes MSPs as valuable targets because attacks may affect third parties, cause reputational damage, and exploit providers’ data holdings and third-party access. These sources establish the supply-chain stakes, not a ransomware loss total.
Why the headline’s cost ranking is unproven
One reported comparison can be easy to misread. ChannelPro’s 2026 coverage of a CyberSmart survey says respondents were more likely to identify inflation and rising costs (46%) than ransomware and malware (41%) as greater threats to customers. Those percentages reflect perceptions of customer threats. They do not measure security-tool spending, ransomware losses, or which costs are larger for MSPs.
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A defensible comparison would need matched figures that define:
- Who and where: the MSP population, sample size, and geography covered.
- When: the same measurement period for recurring tool expenses and incident losses.
- What counts: whether tool costs include licenses, integration, training, administration, and workflow delays—and whether ransomware costs include response, restoration, downtime, and customer support.
- Whose losses count: whether the comparison is limited to the MSP or includes downstream customer effects.
- How figures were obtained: disclosed accounting, survey estimates, modeled amounts, or perceptions should not be treated as interchangeable.
Without those details and comparable totals, adding the categories together—or declaring one larger than the other—would imply more certainty than the evidence supports.
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What MSPs can conclude
Tool sprawl is a credible source of persistent operating burden: platforms, integration demands, staff knowledge, and fragmented workflows all consume resources. The reports cited here document customer demand for help and describe inefficiency, but they do not establish a universal cost or show that tool sprawl costs more than ransomware. Ransomware remains a consequential risk precisely because an MSP incident can affect the businesses that depend on it.
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