Escaping the COTS trap

Commercial off-the-shelf software (COTS, meaning ready-made software products sold online or in stores) initially seems attractive because it deploys quickly and costs less than custom development, but organizations often get trapped when they want to switch platforms, as their systems become deeply entangled with the vendor's technology. AI-powered security tools are creating a new type of lock-in by relying on proprietary training data, vendor-specific threat intelligence feeds (collections of indicators showing cyber attacks), and specialized hardware, making it expensive and difficult to migrate away.