Digitizing the world opened up a plethora of opportunities for companies, consumers, and machines. Unfortunately, it also brought along a new type of exhaustion — data fatigue.
Behind every architecture and system, there’s a team managing the psychological toll of living with the constant stream of real-time, nonstop data. When data is created and requires immediate responsiveness from every interaction, API call, transaction, or click, there is no downtime. Antony Falco, Chief Operating Officer at Hydrolix, has first-hand experience with this kind of unremitting data pipeline.
Hydrolix is a streaming data lake capable of ingesting tens of millions of events per second for companies across all industries, ranging from global banks to live broadcast networks. Yet when it comes to using that data effectively, Falco discusses the people who shoulder the responsibility for making sense of it all — the analysts, engineers, and operators.
The Pressure of the Perpetual Waterfall
Technology solves many problems, but when most architectures weren’t built for the volume of data they receive, systems drown in data that becomes increasingly difficult to separate into “signal” and “noise.” Falco explains that, “it’s too easy to start making compromises, like sampling data or summarizing logs to get to a decision. Fatigue and anxiety follow.”
And the data burnout isn’t just a result of how much data exists. Falco describes that many data professionals also feel the effects of analysis paralysis. “Humans are good at snap judgments,” he says. “The fatigue comes from how long it takes to reach them because of the friction points between you and the data you need to decide.”
When data is buried in storage, summarized beyond usefulness, or simply unavailable, even small decisions can become draining. “Good data enables fast decisions,” Falco explains. “Quick decision-making reduces fatigue. Decision fatigue happens when data is slow, obscure, or hard to access.”
Spotting the Warning Signs of Burnout
It doesn’t start with exhaustion, notes Falco. “The earliest signal is when people stop using data altogether,” he says. “I’ve seen managed security teams declare ‘alert bankruptcy,’ ignoring 80% of alerts because they can’t keep up.”
This type of corner-cutting isn’t incompetence; it’s how overwhelmed teams survive. “When people start guessing or making arbitrary calls just to move on, you’ve lost the value of streaming data,” he adds. “The business is paying for visibility it can’t use.”
The solution doesn’t exist within the data; it requires improved systems and tools that remove friction. “Leaders should ask their teams how they reach conclusions. If they can’t show a clear data trail, either the tools are failing them, or expectations are misaligned.” People usually want to do the right thing, so when leaders help their teams eliminate or address friction points, better-quality decision-making should follow without added stress.
Another invaluable way to ease exhaustion is to set realistic expectations. With the rise of real-time analytics came a false sense of urgency, even when the stakes aren’t high. “The push for real-time decision-making can push this unnecessary need,” Falco admitted. “It’s not that the data is wrong, it’s that not every metric needs an instant reaction.”
Modern architectures enable customers to transition from global views to raw logs in just a few clicks, thereby reducing stress and accelerating resolution. Agentic workflows can handle ticketing or automated actions, freeing humans for higher-level judgment and keeping “urgent” vs. “minor” events in check.
At Hydrolix, these principles are put into practice. The platform supports live event monitoring at an enormous scale, such as the Super Bowl LIX, the Olympics, and financial systems, while keeping data searchable and human-readable. “By removing friction,” he said, “you remove fatigue.”
Building Systems That Protect Teams
Asked how else Hydrolix prevents burnout within its own teams, Falco’s answer is refreshingly practical: design around human limits. “We focus on user experience. Our system alerts on millions of events per second, but the raw data is still just a few clicks away. Alert, decide, move on.”
It’s a philosophy grounded in empathy. When the Navy Federal Credit Union adopted Hydrolix, diagnosing incidents went from 20-person bridge calls to a two-click investigation. “That’s the difference between burnout and confidence,” Falco said. “Between fatigue and decision satisfaction.”
If automation is supposed to ease the cognitive load, why do so many teams still feel overwhelmed? In Falco’s words, “Automation only reduces stress if the data feeding it is high-quality. If your models are trained on short-term or incomplete data, they’ll fail and people will stop trusting them.”
Technology, like anything else in life, requires trust. If you experience a loss of confidence, feelings of stress follow. “Edge AI and automation are only as good as data’s completeness and retention. Lose the rare events that matter most, and your automation misses them. Then the human anxiety returns.”
The Responsibility of Leadership
Enterprises often overlook the fact that scaling technology doesn’t necessarily mean scaling people in the same way. “Once you move to real-time streaming, you hit human cognitive limits fast,” Falco says. “You can’t just add more analysts the way you add more servers.”
Instead, leadership must create an infrastructure and culture that enables success without exhaustion. “Feed teams incomplete or unfiltered data, and you’re setting them up to fail,” he warns. “Empower them with the right systems, and you build a culture of confidence, not burnout.”
When asked for an example of how effective the right systems can be, Falco recalls an early-career experience during a live-streaming Super Bowl experiment, when a major advertiser pulled out mid-campaign because engineers couldn’t diagnose a database crash in time. “Another brand went ahead, and their site went down. People called it ‘so popular it broke the internet.’”
That experience showed how a lack of real-time visibility created a missed opportunity and stress, and “the difference between a calm control room and chaos is real-time insight. Without it, stress escalates. With it, teams stay composed.”
Performance Without Panic
So, what’s the right balance between using data as a competitive advantage and protecting the people who interpret it? Falco’s answer is deceptively simple: better tools make both possible.
Falco says, “The right systems surface answers in seconds so teams can handle millions of events confidently. It’s like flying a modern jet instead of Lindbergh’s first transatlantic flight: same mission, less stress, better equipment.”
It’s a powerful analogy for a data-drenched world. Progress shouldn’t come at the expense of people, especially the people making sense of it all. The goal isn’t just to work faster, but to make clearer, data-driven decisions and to energize a workforce to keep it moving.
