Stop Training Engineers to Ignore You: Cloud Security Alerting at Scale
Paul Benoit
fwd:cloudsec North America 2026 · Day 1
In the dynamic and ever-expanding landscape of cloud infrastructure, effective security alerting at scale presents a formidable challenge for even the most sophisticated organizations. This talk, "Stop Training Engineers to Ignore You: Cloud Security Alerting at Scale," delivered by Paul Benoit, a Cloud Security Engineer at Block, delves into the intricate problems and hard-won solutions associated with operationalizing security alerts across thousands of cloud accounts and engineers. Benoit highlights that while smaller organizations might navigate these issues with manual effort, the sheer volume and complexity at enterprise scale can quickly overwhelm security teams and, crucially, desensitize the very engineers who are meant to resolve these issues.
AI review
Benoit delivers an honest, practitioner-grounded war story about cloud alert operationalization at Block — real problems, real solutions, no vendor gloss. The content is solid and transferable, but it's incremental engineering wisdom rather than novel research; most of the individual components (ownership chains, circuit breakers, FP suppression) are independently known, and the value is in seeing them assembled and battle-tested together.