Mind the Context Gap: Why UK Security Teams Are Struggling to Investigate What Matters

Ask any UK security leader today what keeps them up at night, and chances are you’ll hear about how they’ve got the tools and the alerts, but they don’t always know what any of it means.

That’s not a knock on talent. It’s a signal that context — the ability to understand what’s actually happening in our environments — is still one of the biggest gaps in cyber defense strategies.

And it’s not just a hunch. According to new research from The 2025 Global Cloud Detection and Response Report, UK cybersecurity teams are spending more time chasing false positives, facing higher alert volumes, and detecting real incidents slower than nearly every other region in the study.

The root issue? A persistent lack of context.

UK security teams face an avalanche of alerts — with little to go on

There’s a signal-to-noise problem facing UK security teams.  

Security teams in the UK report receiving an average of 2,260 alerts per day. That’s higher than the global average of 2,020. Nearly 7 in 10 UK leaders (69%) say their team receives more alerts than they can realistically investigate.

Even more concerning is that UK organizations report some of the longest detection delays when those alerts signal something real. It takes them an average of 13.6 hours to detect an issue stemming from a missed alert, the slowest response time of the eight countries in the study.

Why so slow? One likely factor is time wasted chasing false positives. UK teams spend 15 hours per week, nearly two full business days, investigating alerts that turn out to be nothing. That’s the third highest in the report.

And these false positives aren’t just annoying but costly. In the UK:

• 26% say false positives regularly divert resources away from real threats
• 23% say they’ve caused missed or delayed responses to actual attacks
• 20% cite reputational damage as a direct result of missed alerts, the second highest globally

This shows that there’s not just an alert volume problem but a context problem. When you don’t know which alerts matter, you waste time, miss threats, and burn out your team.

Nearly 40% of traffic in the UK lacks context

It’s not surprising, then, that UK leaders report 38.4% of network traffic lacks sufficient context to support confident investigation and response, slightly above the global average of 37.9%.

That means more than a third of what’s flowing through UK production environments is essentially a black box.

And while UK leaders are relatively confident in monitoring north-south and hybrid workload traffic (88% each), confidence drops when it comes to:

• East-west traffic: 87% confident, but only 38% say they always investigate lateral movement when it’s suspected, meaning it’s often deprioritized until it’s too late. ‍
• Containerized environments: 85% say they’re confident, but we know from other regions that’s often optimism, not reality.

It’s easy to say, “We trust our tools.” In fact, 94% of UK leaders say their current detection tools accurately identify anomalous traffic.  

But when 91% also admit they’ve faced major challenges in responding to incidents, mostly due to limited context or tool-related issues, something’s clearly not adding up.

Contextual blind spots are costing UK businesses time and money

The lack of context slows detection, but it hits hardest when lateral movement is in play.

UK organizations are more likely than others to detect lateral movement during an incident using detection tools: 67% versus the 54% global average. That’s a positive sign for the tools.

But they still experience 6.1 hours of average downtime and an average cost of $230,804 per incident when lateral movement occurs.

So even when the detection works, the recovery is costly.

Also, when asked what their biggest operational barriers were to detecting lateral movement, UK respondents cited:

• Too many alerts causing fatigue (38%)
• Lack of actionable context (34%)
• Limited visibility into east-west traffic (27%)
• Inability to correlate behaviors across hybrid environments (32%)

In other words, the data exists, but the story doesn’t. Without the story, defenders are stuck reacting rather than responding.

UK leaders know what they need. Now it’s time to act.

To their credit, UK security leaders have a pretty clear view of what would help them close the gap.  

Their top three priorities heading into 2026 include improving cloud detection and response (39%), increasing AI/ML-driven capabilities (38%), and enhancing Zero Trust architecture (31%)

They also called out key improvements that would most boost their ability to respond to threats in the cloud. These include correlating alerts across multiple sources (33%), unified visibility across hybrid environments (31%), and better integration between detection and response tools (28%)

But the problem is that stacking more tools or adding more alerts won’t solve the problem. If anything, it will make things worse.

What UK teams really need is contextual observability: the ability to not just see what’s happening but understand it in real time. That means connecting the dots between traffic flows, asset criticality, user identity, threat indicators, and more.

How Illumio Insights closes the context gap

That’s exactly what Illumio Insights delivers.

Illumio Insights is the AI-powered cloud detection and response (CDR) solution that brings together observability, context, and breach containment. It helps security teams:

• Cut through alert noise with automated enrichment, so you know what’s urgent and what’s not. ‍
• Spot lateral movement early with real-time, east-west traffic visibility across cloud and on-prem environments. ‍
• Map threat paths and incident blast radius so you can understand and contain risk faster. ‍
• Correlate alerts across hybrid environments without needing five different tools or a team of data scientists.

If the report tells us anything, it’s that visibility isn’t the problem, observability is. Illumio Insights doesn’t just tell you something’s wrong. It shows you where, how, and what to do next.

And in a landscape where nearly every UK leader expects to increase their cloud security investment in the next year (91%), there’s never been a better time to make that investment count.

If we want to get better at detecting and responding to cloud threats, we need to start by filling the context gap. That means smarter detection, less noise, and more actionable insight.

That’s what Illumio Insights was built to do.

Experience Illumio Insights free today to see how real-time context can help you detect, investigate, and contain threats faster.