Integration is the inescapable topic in security technology: integration of disparate systems, integration with partners, and more recently, integration with web APIs that open up the entire digital universe. It’s an important topic and a cornerstone of how security systems deliver increasing value to customers.

Behind the scenes, however, there’s a disintegration of security platforms that has also advanced the state of the art. It’s been happening across enterprise software—and all software, really—for a long time. Capabilities that were once core to monolithic applications are now fragmented and dispersed across multiple third-party applications and X-as-a-Service components. The shift to public cloud computing services has only accelerated this trend.

Consider the following examples that are now architecturally prevalent:

• The identity database that was once central to access control systems has been supplanted by an exogenous Authoritative Party (e.g., AD, Okta, Google) while security systems become a Relying Party, no longer the primary system of record.

• The messaging and notification infrastructure that was once an intrinsic function of security software is now handed off to Slack, SMS, Signal, WhatsApp, Twilio, or one of many other messaging platforms.

• Native reporting systems that users labored to master are being displaced by generalized Business Intelligence platforms that merge physical security data with other sources to create more comprehensive situational intelligence.

• Even the event databases—so long regarded as the crown jewel on dedicated local SQL servers—are now hosted on remote cloud services like Aurora, Azure, Snowflake, and GCP.

Is this a good thing? Yes—these are all infrastructure building blocks that are better handled by companies and products that excel in those areas. This approach also makes enterprise security applications look more like other enterprise applications that also use these standard services. That’s a massive simplification for IT teams that are trying to manage application sprawl.

In addition to helping out the IT team, there are also benefits for the security applications that make them better in their own right:

• Relying on a pre-existing, authoritative corporate identity database means less duplication, fewer errors, automatic synchronization, and ultimately better security.

• Purpose-built messaging platforms are much more capable and flexible than home-grown, and they are already part of users’ lives, which improves convenience, message delivery, and response time.

• The advances in AI-driven reporting and analytics have been so dramatic that it would be foolish not to leverage them.

• Public database platforms are a big step up from the server-in-the-closet model because they have elegantly solved such tricky issues as multi-regional redundancy and load sharing.

The number and quality of integrations among security products and vertical applications have been a tremendous benefit to integrators and end users alike. But the story doesn’t end there. One layer down, the disintegration of the old monolithic approach has brought benefits that we almost take for granted today. How quickly we forget.