Investigating millions of CSPM alerts — where do you even start?

I got this question last week from one of the largest financial institutions:

“When you’re looking at millions of CSPM alerts, do you actually investigate them or just treat them as hygiene issues and assign them to the cloud team?”

Honestly, it’s a fair question—and one a lot of teams are probably asking themselves.

My answer: Investigate first, prioritize with context, then assign—to the SOC if there’s an active threat, or to the cloud team if it’s more of a long-term hygiene issue.

Of course, doing that manually isn’t realistic. That’s where AI (done right) makes a difference—especially when it has deep understanding of your cloud environment.

Here’s how wethink about it at AiStrike:

1️⃣ Context matters.

What’s the asset behind the alert? Is it internet-facing? Prod or dev? What’s it connected to?

You can't treat amisconfig on a test box the same as one on a prod-facing app with customerdata.

2️⃣ Correlate with real-time activity/alert.

Take open ports as an example.

• Are we seeing any brute-force attempts or unusual activity on the systems behind the misconfigured security group?

• Is change in config change (hygiene) followed by an unauthorized activity (threat)

Combining misconfigurations to real-time signals helps evaluate the true exposure and urgency.

3️⃣ Don’t just wait for alerts—watch for emerging threats.

If there’s aknown campaign exploiting a vulnerability which exists on a system that isexposed due to the misconfiguration, then you’re already behind.

Threat-informed hygiene is way more effective than a checklist-based one.

Bottom line:

🔹 CSPMalerts →  potential exposures

🔹 If theexposure is being actively exploited → SOC issue

🔹 If not,it’s likely a hygiene issue → Cloud team, but still requires prioritization based on business risk

And one thing we’ve learned: most CSPM alerts boil down to the same few root causes. If you group by root cause, you avoid drowning your cloud team induplicate tickets and make remediation much faster.

At AiStrike, this is exactly what our cloud investigation agents do—they tie hygiene issues to real-time signals and threat patterns, then prioritize basedon what’s actually important.

It’s not aboutalert volume—it’s about knowing which ones matter right now.