I got this question last week from one of the largest financial institutions: “When you’re looking at millions of CSPM alerts, do you actually investigate them or just treat them as hygiene issues and assign them to the cloud team?” Honestly, it’s a fair question—and one a lot of teams are probably asking themselves.

All alerts are not equal. Yet somehow, every alert becomes the SOC’s problem. Every day, SIEM and CNAPP tools flood the SOC with alerts — but take a closer look, and they generally fall into four categories:

Most SOCs worry about false positives — the noisy alerts that eat away analyst time and slow down response. But what if the real killer isn’t the noise you hear, but the silence you don’t?