Networking
THE DEATH OF
NETWORK TOOL SPRAWL
Network teams are finally calling time on fragmented, overlapping toolsets. As organisations push for leaner operations and clearer visibility, the era of juggling multiple dashboards is giving way to unified platforms that cut cost, complexity and risk, as Jordan Hobday, Regional Sales Director – UK&I of Netgear, explains.
I
Jordan Hobday, Regional Sales Director – UK&I of Netgear
f you manage IT for a small or mid-sized business, the chances are that your network didn’t arrive fully formed. It grew — one tool
at a time, one vendor at a time, one problem at a time. A WiFi solution here. A security product there. A monitoring dashboard wedged in somewhere, it was never quite supposed to fit. Nobody planned for it to end up this way, but here we are. Tis is tool sprawl, and it’s costing SMEs far
more than most realise. Not just in licence fees and overlapping subscriptions, but in time, focus, and the sheer mental load of keeping it all running. Te irony is that most of these tools were never built with smaller businesses in mind. Tey were designed for large enterprises with dedicated and sizeable IT departments, substantial budgets, and the capacity to absorb complexity. Tey don’t simplify operations for SMEs so much as compound them. Te operational impact is real. When your IT environment is fragmented across multiple
32 | May/June 2026
dashboards and alert systems, visibility suffers, and issues are harder to spot and slower to fix. Stretched IT teams – sometimes just two or three people – end up in permanent reactive mode, firefighting rather than building. And when something goes wrong, troubleshooting becomes its own problem: trying to identify which tool is responsible, and whose support line do you call first? Financially, the picture isn’t much better.
Multiple vendors mean multiple pricing models, renewal cycles, and training requirements. Onboarding a new team member in this kind of environment takes time you don’t have, and the risk of misconfiguration goes up with every additional system in the stack. Te result is that you end up working harder just to stand still.
Why the cloud is the natural next step Cloud-based IT infrastructure has been the go-to answer for enterprise organisations for years. What’s changed is that it is now genuinely
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