At best, a new cybersecurity alert should trigger immediate action. But we all know in practice that work is not always clear cut. A new alert can find itself as just the latest un-addressed number in the inbox. In an inbox-zero case, the latest new alert is the most urgent task. But in a backed-up, bottleneck situation, it may be treated as the least urgent — because the previous alerts are older. There are more alerts than can be dealt with. And, so people can start to ignore new alerts. Security alert fatigue is real — and a real problem we can assuage with the right tools.
The Impact of Alert Fatigue
A survey from IDC and FireEye found that more than one-third of IT security managers and analysts ignore security alerts when their queue is full. And this impact ripples out across the operation. More than a quarter (28%) of all alerts are never addressed, according to the 2020 State of Security Operations study from Forrester Consulting.
Alert fatigue is crushing the productivity of security experts. It’s also driving up stress levels, according to the survey. A pervasive sense of fear of missing incidents sets in and adds to stress and burnout. That drives down job satisfaction and makes the chronic industry skills shortage worse, which in turn contributes to alert fatigue. The human toll is the most important, but may be the least known, factor in the alert fatigue crisis. The people who work in a security operations center (SOC) are by far the main factor that determines the organi ..
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