How Materal Saves Your Security Team Time

When we talk to our customers about the benefits they get from Material and why they stick with us, we hear a wide range of answers. The dedication, expertise, and availability of our team. The blind spots we provide that no other single tool can. The simplicity of using our interface.

But there’s a common thread that comes up over and over again: the automation across the platform saves them time and toil while improving their security. One of the best lines we’ve heard was “I love how easy Material’s interface is to use… but what I love even more is how infrequently I have to look at it.” 

The difference between managing a tool and solving a problem is everything. And yet, so much of our industry still doesn't get it.

The usability crisis we’ve simply accepted

The security industry has a usability problem. We've normalized products that are incredibly powerful… but painful to use. Complex dashboards that require tribal knowledge to interpret. Workflows that demand six clicks and three browser tabs to accomplish what should be a single action. Alert fatigue so severe that teams tune out the noise just to survive.

We tell ourselves this is just how security software works. The sophistication of the modern tech stack simply requires that level of complexity. That power users don't need hand-holding.

But here's what we've learned after thousands of customer conversations: even the most technically sophisticated security practitioners don't want to waste time wrestling with their tools. They want to solve problems and protect their organizations. Everything else is friction.

The best security teams we work with aren't looking for more superfluousfeatures—they're looking for more results with less toil. They don't need another dashboard to check; they need clarity on what actually matters. 

Why traditional security tools miss the mark

Security vendors have historically built products by stacking capabilities. More detections. More integrations. More dashboards. More, more, more.

Nearly every security vendor pitch includes some variation of “we give you visibility into X." And that often comes off great in a demo. But in reality, without the right tooling and operations behind it, "visibility" often means you're now staring at another feed of alerts, manually triaging disparate signals, and trying to figure out which of the 47 "high severity" findings actually deserve your attention today.

As one security analyst at Lyft put it, addressing phishing responses with their previous vendor felt like "shooting a fly with a bazooka." A bloated feature set that was complex to integrate, expensive to maintain, and somehow still let phishing attacks slide through while generating mountains of false positives.

This is the trap of building security products from a features-first mindset rather than an outcomes-first mindset. You end up with tools that detect a mountain but solve a molehill.

What security teams actually want

Over the years, we've had the privilege of working with some of the best security teams on the planet, teams who've trusted us with their email and cloud office security. When we listen to what they tell us they want, a few themes emerge consistently:

1. Automation That Actually Works

Not the "we'll send you an alert and you can click this button to maybe do the thing" kind of automation. Real automation that reduces toil without requiring constant babysitting. Real automation allows you to control exactly what gets automated and how, so that it becomes a truly set-it-and-forget-it workflow.

“With Material, we have a mightier team. It gives us the ability to take away some of the toil on my team with the automation that Material brings,” said Lisa Hall, former CISO at Safebase. “The security team doesn’t need to just check every email and do all the data mapping across multiple tools. It’s so much easier.”

From email threat detection and remediation, to end-to-end user report response automation, to improper file sharing correction, to risky configurations and behaviors and more: Material doesn’t just throw up another blinking red light: it solves the problem. 

“The differentiator was the auto-remediation feature. We could define the policy and remediation before needing a manual validation to happen on the platform. There was less guesswork and unpredictability,” said Brad Chivukula, VP of Engineering at Collective Health.

When a Material customer’s employees report a phishing email, Material doesn't just flag it for review. It automatically speed-bumps access to similar messages across the entire organization as our proprietary ML models analyze over 2000 signals about the email and then responds appropriately–including responding to the user. One employee's vigilance becomes instant protection for the entire organization, rather than adding to an analyst’s backlog. That's automation that respects both security and productivity.

2. Context, Not Just Alerts

Security teams don't need more data—they need better signals. They need tools that understand the difference between "technically suspicious" and "actually dangerous." They need context that helps them make decisions quickly and with the confidence to move the operational needle and actually accomplish the necessary change.

“None of the info in the Material dashboards is irrelevant,” Jake Bilyak, IT DevSecOps Engineer at HackerOne told us. “There’s almost always something actionable we can do with the information presented. Everything is relevant, and there are use cases for the info we’re getting.” 

When we built our new Overview Dashboard, we deliberately avoided the temptation to throw every possible metric at users. Instead, it surfaces the insights that actually matter: the threats and anomalies that warrant attention, with clear paths to investigation and remediation. No archaeology required.

“ I think with any security product, the fewer dashboards you have to look at every day really helps. Material does a good job in making it quick and easy in and out to check on something: ‘Okay, we're good, let's go’,” said Aaron Clukey, Director of Information Security & IT at Alto. “I don't spend a lot of time in here because the detections are good – it's easy for me to come in and triage and close it out.”

3. Workflows That Feel Natural

The best security tools disappear into the background. They integrate with how teams already work rather than demanding they learn a new pattern of clicks and configurations.

“Previously, our security team would jump between this, that, and the other platform to investigate phishing reports,” said Nico Waisman, the Former CISO at Lyft. “I'd regularly have at least four different windows open to accomplish one task. Whereas with Material, it's a freaking breeze."

As our design team discussed in a recent post, we know that investigations don’t follow a straight line. We designed Material to make it easy for analysts to pivot, dive deeper, move laterally, and find the content and context they need–without dead ends and distractions. 

That's not about having fewer features—it's about having better design. It's understanding that cognitive load matters, that every extra click is friction, and that even sophisticated users appreciate thoughtful UX. 

The technical foundations that enable great experiences

Here's the thing about building security products with great UX: it's not just about pretty interfaces. The best user experiences are built on top of rock-solid technical foundations.

Take search, for example. We recently wrote about how Material's data platform transforms security investigations from time-consuming archaeology into near-instantaneous queries. But the reason that matters isn't just speed—it's that instant search enables different workflows. It’s the robust data platform that search tool is able to scan to produce results nearly instantaneously. When search is fast enough, you can build features that weren't possible before. You can show real-time context. You can power automated responses. You can make the interface feel alive and responsive.

Or consider our approach to phishing detection. We combine AI-powered sender reputation modeling with hundreds of expert-written heuristic rules, user-reported signals, and alerts from email platforms. That layered approach enables Material to catch threats with fewer false positives—which means less noise, less toil, and more trust.

The technical architecture matters because it's what makes great UX possible at scale. You can't optimize away fundamental architectural limitations with clever UI design.

Security That Gets Out of Your Way

The path to a stronger security posture isn’t paved with more dashboards, more alerts, or more features to manage. It’s built on a foundation of trust, automation, and a relentless focus on outcomes.

The ultimate goal of a security product shouldn’t be to demand a practitioner's constant attention, but to earn their trust so profoundly that they can focus on what matters most. It’s about creating tools that are so effective at handling the noise that they only surface the signals, so intuitive that they feel like a natural extension of a team's workflow, and so automated that they actively reduce toil instead of adding to it.

This philosophy is at the core of everything we build at Material. We believe that a world-class user experience backed by a powerful and intelligent technical architecture enables us to give security teams their most valuable resource back: their time.