6 Minutes And A Prayer: The Math Your SOC Doesn't Want You To See
Security Boulevard, Wednesday, March 4th, 2026
Your analysts are gambling with alerts, and the math proves it.
The cybersecurity industry has quietly agreed to avoid doing one very simple calculation: dividing the number of daily alerts by the number of analysts available to work them, then comparing the result to the time actually required for a proper triage. When you run that math, the story it tells is uncomfortable. Every CISO needs to hear it.
The 20-minute standard nobody meets
Industry research consistently puts proper alert investigation at 20-40 minutes per alert. IDC puts it at 30 minutes for a false positive alone. IBM's Cost of Data Breach research and Cybersecurity Insiders both land in the same range. Not a glance at the alert. Triage it. Normalize the data, correlate against threat intel, check asset criticality, examine user behavior baselines, and make an informed disposition decision.