French Security Teams Detect Breaches Just Fine. So Why Are They Still Facing Downtime?

When a lateral movement incident hits a French organization, the average fallout is more than six hours of downtime and nearly $200,000 in operational cost.

Those incidents aren’t happening because teams fail to detect threats. According to the 2025 Global Cloud Detection and Response Report, most French organizations do detect lateral movement.  

The problem is how long it takes to understand what’s happening and contain it.

Budgets are rising, detection confidence is high, and tools are plentiful — but French teams are overwhelmed by alerts. They’re forced to manually correlate data across environments.  

They can see connections but often lack the context needed to act decisively. Detection happens, and containment comes later than it should.

That’s the real issue facing cloud security teams in France today. Without clearer insight into attacker movement and risk, alerts pile up and response slows. And without containment strategies in place, breaches spread quickly before teams can intervene.

Budgets and confidence are rising...

Let’s start with the good news.

Ninety-three percent of French IT and security leaders expect their cloud security budgets to increase over the next 12 months.  

Most of those increases are incremental rather than dramatic. This suggests a security mindset focused on steady, sustained investment rather than a reactive one.

That shows up clearly in confidence metrics:

• 89% of French leaders say they are confident in identifying active cloud threats in real time
• 97% say they are confident they can contain a breach before it spreads
• 96% say they understand the blast radius and full impact of incidents

On paper, French security teams looks well positioned. But unfortunately, cyberattacks don’t get contained from confidence.  

...but they still face alert overload

French organizations receive an average of 2,336 security alerts per day, one of the highest volumes of any country surveyed. Seventy-one percent of security leaders say they receive more alerts than their teams can effectively investigate.

These stats alone aren’t surprising. Alert volume is a global problem.

What is notable is why French teams struggle.

When asked about the biggest challenges that caused missed or delayed response over the past year, France stood out in two critical areas:

• 53% cited tool or technology limitations, higher than the global average
• 25% cited difficulty correlating data across cloud and on-premises environments, the highest of any country surveyed

This is the heart of the issue.  

French teams don’t lack tools but lack integration, context, and coherence across those tools.

False positives are a symptom, not the root cause

Sixty-four percent of French leaders say they receive too many false positives. Teams spend nearly 14 hours per week investigating alerts that turn out to be nothing.

But false positives are a symptom of a deeper problem. In France, the top causes of false positives are:

• Inadequate context in alerts
• Legacy or ineffective detection technology
• Tool sprawl across overlapping platforms

In other words, alerts fire, but they don’t explain themselves.

Security teams can see connections. They can see activity. What they can’t see quickly enough is what matters, why it matters, and what to do next.

That gap shows up repeatedly across the French dataset.

Lateral movement gets detected but too often too late

Lateral movement is where breaches turn into business crises.

In France:

• 88% of organizations detected a lateral movement incident in the past year
• Only 38% detected it during the incident because of detection tools
• ‍43% detected lateral movement during the incident, but not thanks to their tools

That last data point is critical.

It suggests that human investigation, intuition, and after-the-fact correlation still play an outsized role in understanding attacker behavior.

Downtime from these incidents averaged 6.1 hours, with an estimated cost of nearly $193,000 per incident. These point to operational, reputational, and financial losses as a result of breaches.

Alert fatigue is blocking containment

When French leaders were asked about their biggest operational challenges in detecting lateral movement, two answers dominated:

• 41% cited alert fatigue
• 40% said they could see connections but lacked actionable insight

This is where confidence quietly erodes.

Teams believe they are capable. But when alerts stack up and context is missing, response slows. Investigation becomes reactive, and containment happens later than it should.

The result is a security posture that detects threats but struggles to control outcomes.

French teams expect AI to close the detection gap

Forty percent of French leaders say increasing AI-driven capabilities is a top security priority for 2026. They see AI as a way to:

• Improve detection accuracy
• Reduce alert fatigue
• Speed investigation and response
• Identify behavioral anomalies that humans miss

But AI alone doesn’t solve a context problem.

If you feed AI fragmented telemetry, siloed alerts, and incomplete visibility, it will only accelerate noise.

What French teams need is AI grounded in a unified view of their environment, one that understands relationships, behaviors, and risk, not just events.

What these findings mean for French security teams

The French data tells a consistent story.

Security teams are doing many things right. They are investing well, deploying modern detection tools, and investigating incidents seriously.

What’s holding them back is context collapse. This involves too many tools sending out too many alerts.

Without a way to prioritize those alerts, teams are spending too much manual effort to connect the dots and stop threats before they spread.

This points not to a failure of strategy but a failure of architecture.

Where Illumio Insights fits in

Illumio Insights was built for this exact moment.

It doesn’t try to replace every detection tool in your stack. Instead, it focuses on what most tools struggle to deliver: clear, actionable understanding of attacker movement and blast radius in real time.

Insights brings together hybrid cloud telemetry to show:

• How attackers move laterally
• Which paths matter most
• What assets are truly at risk
• Where containment will have the greatest impact

For French security teams drowning in alerts but starving for clarity, this shift matters.

Insights reduces the need to manually correlate signals across tools. It prioritizes risk based on behavior, not volume. And it gives teams confidence not just in detection, but in decisive containment.

Seeing breaches isn’t the same as stopping them

French security teams can see breaches, but what slows things down is everything that comes after.  

They’re facing too many alerts, wrangling too many tools, and spending too much time trying to piece together what’s actually happening while attackers keep moving.

The data shows that detection is no longer the hard part. Understanding what matters, how it connects, and where to act first is.

That’s why the next step for better cybersecurity for French teams is getting clearer context. They need a view of the environment that makes attacker movement obvious and containment decisions easier.

This is where Illumio Insights helps.

Insights brings clarity to lateral movement and blast radius across hybrid environments. Teams can spend less time connecting dots and more time stopping breaches before they spread.

Prueba Illumio Insights gratis to see what changes when context comes first.