Alert fatigue is becoming a security risk

There was probably a time when every security alert got your full attention.

Something appeared in the console, you investigated it, worked out what had happened, and moved on.

Eventually, that changes.

After you’ve seen the same warning for the fiftieth time, and it’s turned out to be harmless on every previous occasion, your brain starts treating it differently.

You still look at it.

But not with the same sense of urgency.

Most monitoring platforms become noisier as the environment grows.

New platforms bring their own alerts, existing products become more capable, and very little gets switched off along the way.

Before long, hundreds of notifications are competing for the same attention.

Some deserve it, others don’t.

The problem is that they all arrive in much the same way.

That makes it difficult to judge what’s important without stopping to investigate.

Monitoring isn’t something you configure once and leave alone.

As the environment changes, the monitoring needs to change with it.

Otherwise, the volume gradually increases until important alerts have to compete with everything else that’s appearing on the screen.

Finding time to keep refining it is another matter.

It rarely climbs above project work, support issues or whatever operational problem has appeared that morning.

So, the alerts keep arriving and the dashboards become busier.

People learn which notifications they can probably ignore because history suggests nothing important will come from them.

And the risk starts to creep in.

Finding time to improve monitoring usually means taking time away from something else.

But if you have co-managed support, it doesn’t have to.

When more of the operational workload is shared, there’s more opportunity to review the systems that support your team every day, including the monitoring that’s there to help you spot problems before they become incidents.

Every alert is asking for a decision.

The fewer unnecessary ones you receive, the easier those decisions become.

If you’d like to see how co-managed support could create more operational capacity for work like this, let’s talk. Get in touch.