For years, cybersecurity strategy followed a clear mantra: “Unify the stack.” CISOs wanted fewer vendors, more integration, and single platforms to manage everything — even if that meant sacrificing best-of-breed capabilities. Platformization promised efficiency: fewer tools, lower costs, simpler operations. On paper, it made perfect sense.
But as the cybersecurity landscape grows more complex and data-driven, this “one-platform-to-rule-them-all” model is starting to show its limits. Platforms can integrate — but they rarely understand. They centralize data — but often fail to turn it into meaningful context.
The Rise of Agentic Cyber Reasoning
Enter the Agentic Era, powered by the Model Context Protocol (MCP) — a new connective framework that changes how systems interact and share intelligence. Instead of pulling all data into one massive data lake like Databricks, MCP allows AI agents to securely access and reason across data where it already resides — whether in CrowdStrike, Okta, etc.
In this new model, workflows become fluid and intelligent. Agents no longer need to ingest terabytes of telemetry; they can query, correlate, and decide directly across connected systems.
A New Division of Roles
This separation between cyber data producers and AI reasoning agents reshapes the entire ecosystem:
- AI developers focus on creating reasoning engines — not managing infrastructure.
- Control-point vendors become trusted data providers, enriching the ecosystem with high-fidelity signals, detections, and insights.
- Integration friction disappears as MCP acts as the universal translator — eliminating the endless cycle of API mapping, custom connectors, and data duplication.
- Vendors with rich, contextual data (like network detection and response platforms) become more strategic, while those with generic or shallow data risk fading into commodity status.
- Traditional aggregators (such as XDR platforms) may lose relevance as orchestration and reasoning move above the vendor layer.
The End of Platform Lock-In
In a federated, agentic model:
- Integration is seamless.
- Data remains distributed, yet contextually unified.
- Vendor boundaries blur, and value shifts from collecting data to interpreting it.
The focus moves from aggregation to orchestration — from static dashboards to adaptive cyber reasoning. Instead of massive centralized platforms or data lakes like Databricks, cybersecurity will rely on intelligent agents that crawl and reason across systems in real time, generating unified insights without heavy data movement.
The Future: A Federated, Context-Aware Security Fabric
The MCP model signals more than a technical shift — it represents a philosophical one. The future of cybersecurity will not be owned by a single platform but shared across a federated, intelligent fabric where:
- Policies, detections, and automations live above the vendor layer.
- AI agents provide real-time reasoning and context.
- Security teams gain unified visibility without sacrificing independence or agility.
In short, the platform era is ending — and a new age of federated, context-aware cybersecurity is beginning. An age where intelligence flows freely, tools collaborate effortlessly, and understanding — not aggregation — becomes the true measure of cyber maturity.
