56% of Large Companies Handle 1,000+ Security Alerts Each Day

The rising volume of security alerts is creating problems for operations teams struggling to handle them. More than half (56%) of large companies handle at least 1,000 alerts per day.

A new report on the state of SecOps and automation polled 427 IT security stakeholders, all of whom are responsible for corporate security at organizations with more than 1,000 employees. Seventy percent said the volume of security alerts they receive on a daily basis have more than doubled in the past five years. Most (93%) said they cannot address all alerts in the same day; 83% said staff has alert fatigue.

Researchers point to several drivers behind the increase. The primary reason is constant change to the type of security threats that must be blocked (67%), followed by the addition of new tools to monitor for these threats (60%), overall growth of business applications and services (57%), increase in cloud infrastructure (55%), and growth in user endpoints to monitor (52%).

Nearly all respondents agree the high alert volume is a burden. Most (68%) said they worry that important problems will be lost in a flood of minor issues, 66% are concerned about wasting time on chasing false positives, and half fear their team members will feel overwhelmed by alerts.

How many alerts is too many? Of businesses with more than 10,000 employees, 56% said they chase more than 1,000 alerts per day. Overall, 39% of all respondents said they handle 1,000 alerts per day. The same percentage experience between 100 and 1,000 alerts daily, researchers report.

Read more details and check out the full report here.

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