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The cost of looking the other way

En los centros de operaciones de TI de la región, hay un enemigo silencioso que crece cada día: la fatiga por alertas. Lo que en inglés se conoce como alert fatigue está llevando a muchos equipos a desensibilizarse frente a miles de notificaciones que llegan sin parar. El resultado es preocupante: incidentes críticos que pasan desapercibidos, tiempos de respuesta más largos y un costo financiero que, según analistas globales, puede multiplicarse en millones de dólares.

Cuando la alarma deja de sonar

En teoría, las alertas son el sistema nervioso de cualquier infraestructura digital: advierten cuando algo no anda bien y permiten actuar a tiempo. En la práctica, la saturación ha convertido a muchos equipos en rehenes de sus propias herramientas. Firewalls, sistemas de detección de amenazas, plataformas SIEM, observabilidad full-stack, aplicaciones de negocio… todos generan notificaciones, muchas de ellas redundantes o directamente irrelevantes.

Un estudio global citado por Splunk indica que en ciberseguridad más del 50% de las alertas son falsos positivos. Los analistas reciben cientos de notificaciones diarias, la mayoría sin impacto real en el negocio. Con el tiempo, se instala un hábito peligroso: desconfiar de las alertas, ignorarlas o posponer la atención. El “algoritmo del pánico” termina entrenando a los equipos a reaccionar tarde.

El costo de mirar hacia otro lado

The consequence is not only technical. According to recent data from Gartner and Forrester, alert fatigue can increase the mean time to resolve incidents (MTTR) by up to 50%. In critical industries such as banking, retail or telecommunications, this delay translates into direct revenue losses, regulatory fines and, above all, reputational damage.

Splunk and Oxford Economics estimate that downtime costs the Global 2000 nearly $400 billion annually, with an average of $49 million per company in lost revenue alone. In this scenario, ignoring a critical alert is no longer a technical error but a financial risk.

An amplified problem in Latin America

Alert fatigue is not exclusive to the region, but in Latin America it is combined with factors that aggravate it:

  • Technical talent turnover: equipment changes frequently, making it difficult to keep monitoring systems calibrated.
  • Limited resources: many operations teams are small and must service multiple platforms at the same time.
  • Reactive culture: the “fire-fighting” mentality prevails over prevention and continuous improvement.
  • Technological fragmentation: hybrid and multi-cloud infrastructures without a unified traceability model multiply redundant alerts.

The result is a vicious circle: saturated equipment misses critical signals, which generates new crises that, in turn, trigger even more notifications.

From avalanche to spotlight: how leaders respond

The good news is that there are practices and technologies that are breaking this cycle. Several multinationals in the financial and retail sectors are already showing encouraging results by applying intelligent observability models:

  • AIOps and machine learning: algorithms that filter and prioritize alerts according to real risk and business impact.
  • Dynamic thresholds: instead of fixed rules, systems learn patterns and adjust alert sensitivity in real time.
  • Event correlation: consolidate redundant notifications so that teams receive a single alert with context, rather than twenty fragmented ones.
  • Focus on user experience (UX): measure which alerts really affect customers and prioritize them over internal metrics that generate noise.

Splunk documents cases where these practices have reduced the volume of manual alerts by 70% and shortened response times by 30%, freeing teams to focus on what matters.

More than a technical challenge, a resilience issue

The root of the problem lies not in technology, but in culture and governance. Organizations that understand alert fatigue as a strategic issue – not just an operational nuisance – are the ones that succeed in transforming their operations. Observability ceases to be “monitoring with dashboards” and becomes an enabler of business continuity.

In a context where digital transformation is accelerating and cyber-attacks are growing in volume and sophistication, ignoring the phenomenon of alert fatigue is not an option. The technological resilience of companies in Latin America depends on moving from noise to focus: less alerts, more context, smarter decisions.

What's next for companies in the region?

The question is no longer whether your teams receive too many alerts, but how many critical ones are going unnoticed today. The answer requires rethinking strategy: calibrate, automate, prioritize and, above all, align observability with business objectives.

At FactorIT we help organizations break this cycle of fatigue, applying observability practices and automation models that give back control and focus to the teams. Because in the digital era, the most dangerous alert is not the one that sounds, but the one that is ignored.

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