Think about the burglar alarm systems that are common in residential neighborhoods. In the eye of the passive observer, an alarm system makes a lot of sense. They watch your home while you’re asleep or away, and call the police or fire department if anything happens. So for a small monthly fee you feel secure. Unfortunately, there are a few things that the alarm companies don’t tell you.

1) Between 95% and 97% of calls (depending on the time of year) are false alarms.

2) The police regard calls from alarm companies as the lowest priority and it can take anywhere between 20-30 minutes for them to arrive. It only takes the average burglar 5 minutes to break and enter, and be off with your valuables.

3) In addition to this, if your call does turn out to be a false alarm, the police and fire department have introduced hefty fines. It is about $130 for the police to be called out, and if fire trucks are sent, they charge around $410 per truck (protocol is to send 3 trucks). So as you can see, one false alarm can cost you well over $1,200.

With more than 2 million annual burglaries in the U.S., perhaps it’s worth putting up with so many false positives in service of the greater deterrent? Yes, provided we can sort out the false alarms which sap the first responder.

The same is true of information security. If we know which alerts to respond to, we can focus our time on those important alerts. Tuning the system to reduce the alerts, and removing the false positives so we can concentrate only on valid alerts, gives us the ability to respond only to the security events that truly matter.

While our technology does an excellent job of detecting possible security events, it’s our service, which examines these alerts and provides experts who make it relevant using context and judgement, that makes the difference between a rash of false positives and the ones that truly matter.