Introduction
When your security team is also your infrastructure team, your data engineering team, and your developer experience team, every alert costs more than just time. That's the reality for Pipe, a financial services company where a lean Internal Systems team handles everything that makes the business run, including protecting customer data they call the company's "crown jewels."
The team needed to increase detection sensitivity without burning out. They needed 24/7 coverage for a workforce spread across the U.S., Europe, and Australia. And they needed to do it without adding headcount. Here's how Dropzone AI made that possible.
What Security Challenges Did Pipe Face?
Pipe's lean team was stuck in a familiar bind: they wanted stronger detection coverage, but more alerts would mean more burnout. Here's what they were up against.
Why Was Alert Volume Becoming Unsustainable?
Pipe's Internal Systems team runs a lean operation by design. One engineer is always on call, monitoring alerts from their Panther SIEM, which aggregates detections from Wiz, Sublime Security, and other tools. The setup worked, but it came with tradeoffs.
The team wanted to increase alert sensitivity to better protect customer data, but doing so would mean more alerts hitting an already stretched on-call engineer. Each investigation meant dropping deep work to dig through multiple tools and internal systems. The interruptions piled up, stealing up to one-quarter of the team's focus.
The easy solution to scale might be to hire a security analyst, but any time you bring on a new team member it's a risk as well as substantial cost.
How Did Global Coverage Make Things Harder?
Pipe's developer team is fully remote, spanning the United States, Europe, and Australia. But the Internal Systems team is based on the U.S. West Coast. That mismatch created a specific pain point: "impossible travel" and login alerts from other countries would wake the on-call engineer at all hours.
The team didn't necessarily care that someone was logging in from another country or new IP address. They just needed to confirm it was actually that person. But verifying legitimate activity at 3 AM is exhausting, and doing it night after night is unsustainable.
How Did Dropzone AI Solve These Problems?
Pipe needed something that could think like an analyst and provide them with 24/7 coverage. They found both in Dropzone AI.
What Made Dropzone AI the Right Fit?
After evaluating AI automation solutions, Pipe chose Dropzone AI for its ability to investigate alerts autonomously and confirm user activity without human intervention.
"The AI interviewer was a big selling point for Dropzone," says Isaac Pedisich, Software Engineer at Pipe. "We're a fully remote company with operations worldwide. The AI interviewer autonomously confirms users about abnormal logins at all hours and makes 24/7 coverage much easier."
The AI interviewer reaches out directly to employees on Slack (Microsoft Teams is also supported) to confirm suspicious activity. "We don't care that someone's logging in from another country," Pedisich explains. "We just care that it's actually them. Dropzone asks, gets that confirmation, and we can go back to sleep."
Implementation fit naturally into existing workflows. Dropzone AI connects to Panther, which aggregates alerts from their security stack, and pushes investigation results into Slack. No playbooks to build, no code to write, no prompts to configure. "We already live in Slack," Pedisich says. "Dropzone fit right into our current processes. No new tools, no new workflows."
What Results Did Pipe See?
The impact was immediate and measurable.
Key Stat: Pipe reduced alerts requiring manual review by 75%, from approximately 100 per month to just a couple dozen, while achieving 24/7 coverage with zero overnight interruptions.
After deploying Dropzone AI, Pipe's team saw:
- 75%+ reduction in alerts requiring manual review, from ~100 per month to a couple dozen
- Up to 90% faster investigations for alerts that do escalate
- 25% engineering capacity reclaimed by minimizing on-call triage duties
- 24/7 alert coverage with zero overnight interruptions for global activity
With the added capacity, Pipe has actually been able to dial up alert sensitivity on their Panther SIEM, investigating lower-severity alerts that would have been ignored before. Dropzone handles each one automatically and surfaces only what matters.
What Does Effective Lean Security Look Like?
Pipe's experience shows what's possible when AI handles the repetitive work. The result is a fundamentally different way of running security.
How Does AI Change On-Call Work?
Before Dropzone AI, overnight alerts woke the U.S.-based team whenever someone logged in from a new country. Now, the AI interviewer automatically checks with the user, confirms it's legitimate, and closes the case. No middle-of-the-night interruptions.
"The Dropzone AI system doesn't get tired or skip steps," says Pedisich. "It's always methodical, and that means things are less likely to fall through the cracks."
Human investigation quality varied depending on who was on call and their focus level. Dropzone brings consistency that never wavers. Every investigation follows the same methodical process, fast, accurate, and unbiased, no matter the hour.
Can a Four-Person Team Run Enterprise-Level Security?
Pipe's Internal Systems team was built to be extremely lean and efficient. Dropzone AI extends their capacity without adding headcount or overhead, giving them the confidence and coverage of a much larger operation.
"Dropzone AI allows us to improve our security posture while remaining a lean and highly efficient team," says Pedisich.
Unplanned alert investigations and constant context switching used to derail entire days. With Dropzone managing investigations end-to-end, engineers stay in flow and projects move forward. Instead of reacting to alerts, the team focuses on improving systems and building what's next.
Conclusion
Pipe's Internal Systems team now runs security the same way they run everything else: efficiently, thoughtfully, and without unnecessary toil. With Dropzone AI handling alert triage and investigations, the team has reclaimed focus, consistency, and peace of mind.
What once stole sleep and productivity is now fully automated. Alerts are investigated around the clock, and engineers focus on building instead of chasing false positives. For a global company with a four-person team, Dropzone AI turned alert overload into calm control, scaling security without scaling headcount.
See how Dropzone AI can help your team eliminate toil and scale securely. Take our self-guided demo.
