Improving Cybersecurity and Productivity: How Threat Intelligence from Recorded Future Drives ROI Through Increased Efficiency

Cybersecurity teams face a constant onslaught of critical and potentially catastrophic challenges: from defending against sophisticated ransomware attacks to preventing coordinated nation-state campaigns. To make their challenges worse, teams often struggle with a lack of visibility, alert fatigue, limited resources and manual processes.

Threat intelligence has emerged as a critical solution to these challenges, providing the context and actionable insights needed to prioritize effectively and respond proactively. Rather than adding to the noise, threat intelligence cuts through it, enabling security teams to work more efficiently, focusing on what matters and responding to it quickly.

To understand how customers of Recorded Future leverage threat intelligence to act more efficiently, we partnered with third-party research firm UserEvidence to collect quantitative ROI data and qualitative feedback to create our newly published report: How Recorded Future Drives ROI for Cybersecurity Teams.

The report reveals that by automating manual workflows, streamlining investigations, and enabling teams to focus on what matters most, Recorded Future customers are reporting time savings of over 100 hours per week—translating to approximately $290,237 in annual productivity gains for the average organization. In this blog post, we explore the report’s findings and what our customers have to say about improving efficiency.

The Growing Need for Cybersecurity Efficiency

Security teams across industries are feeling the strain of increasing responsibilities with limited resources. This imbalance often results in:

• Burnout among team members tasked with manual, repetitive processes
• Operational inefficiencies that slow response times
• Difficulty prioritizing among a constant stream of alerts
• Challenges in demonstrating value to organizational leadership

These challenges create a significant productivity gap that affects not just the security team, but the entire organization's resilience against cyber threats.

"Threat intelligence will always improve your visibility. The important part is to do it without overburdening your team. How can we add new threat intelligence use cases without creating a whole load of extra work and alerts to deal with?" explains Jason Steer, CISO at Recorded Future.

Measuring the ROI of Recorded Future's Efficiency Gains

Recent research conducted by UserEvidence paints a compelling picture of how Recorded Future transforms security operations. In a comprehensive survey of security professionals using the platform, the data revealed remarkable efficiency gains realized by teams, for example:

• Teams save an average of 11 hours weekly on alert triage, investigation, and response
• Threat analysis, hunting, and reporting time reduced by 11 hours weekly
• Brand abuse mitigation efforts streamlined by 8 hours per week
• Spending 7 hours less per week on vendor and supplier evaluation processes

When translated to financial impact, these productivity improvements add up to approximately $290,237 in annual savings for the average organization implementing Recorded Future. Later in this article, we’ll break down the full picture.

As one Senior SOC analyst and Threat Intelligence Analyst at an Air Freight & Logistics company reported: "We automated 70% of manual workflows with Recorded Future, cutting investigation times by 50%. This led to a 40% increase in threat detection efficiency and a 30% reduction in response times, enhancing our overall security posture."

Valentin Vanlaeys, Threat Intelligence Lead at Proximus Ada, shared similar results: "Thanks to Recorded Future's valuable and actionable data, we cut our intelligence hunting, reporting, and analysis by 80%."

How Recorded Future Transforms Security Operations

Common Challenges Security Teams Face in Productivity

Before: Manual Processes Amidst High Urgency

Without Recorded Future's automated intelligence capabilities, security teams shoulder the burden of time-consuming manual workflows that may look something like this:

1. Finding relevant data sources across open-source intelligence feeds, blogs, news outlets, social media, and forums
2. Collecting unstructured and complex data from these sources
3. Sifting through the data to separate signal from noise
4. Analyzing the information to identify potential threats
5. Compiling and distributing reports

These processes – along with manual alert triage, investigation, and response – aren’t just frustratingly manual for team members. They also delay or slow down organizations’ response times.

Security teams are inundated with alerts, some of which are noise and some of which are relevant and urgent. If they don’t have actionable threat intelligence, they can’t efficiently gain an understanding of the priority or criticality of each. And when it comes to addressing a security threat, time is of the essence.

After: Actionable Intelligence and Automation with Recorded Future

Recorded Future helps teams efficiently capture, compile, and analyze threat data, turning it into actionable intelligence that teams would otherwise need to triage, investigate, and respond to manually. This frees the security team to focus their energy on responding to high-priority threats and hunting new ones. Rather than struggling to address everything that seems important, they can think strategically about protecting their organization.

With the Recorded Future Intelligence Platform, teams can shift from reactive to proactive security postures:

• Intelligence-driven automation across security workflows accelerates identification, investigation, and prioritization of threats
• Streamlined workflows reduce investigation time by providing immediate context
• Resource optimization allows skilled analysts to focus on strategic initiatives rather than routine tasks

As one Information Security Specialist at an Industrial Conglomerates Company noted: "We use Recorded Future's risk lists to block malicious IPs with a risk score of 65 or higher. As a result, we automatically make an average of approximately 5 million blocks per day, resulting in a time savings of about 40 hours per month for our team."

Jack Edens, IT Security Analyst at Dupaco Credit Union, adds: "Recorded Future was a game-changer for us, transforming how our team managed threats and stayed proactive. With their platform, we automated repetitive reporting tasks, which allowed us to move key resources onto critical issues, tightening our focus on real threats. This shift didn't just streamline our workflows; it gave us back nearly 50% in efficiency — significant when you're dealing with a constant flow of new data."

Real-World Productivity Improvements: By the Numbers

How Threat Intelligence Increases Productivity and Efficiency

Recorded Future customers achieve a more proactive, productive, and mature threat intelligence program, saving hundreds of thousands of dollars in productivity along the way.

Here are the activities where they save time and money and improve their processes:

Activity/Area	Weekly Time Savings
Alert triage, investigation, & response	11 hrs
Threat analysis, hunting, & reporting	11 hrs
Brand abuse mitigation	8 hrs
Vendor evaluation	7 hrs
Digital footprint analysis	8 hrs
Threat landscape analysis	10 hrs
Senior analyst efficiency	50 hrs

Perhaps most significant is the impact on senior analyst efficiency. The average security team at a billion-dollar company saves over 50 hours of senior analyst time per week using Recorded Future—approximately $70,000 annually—by shifting routine tasks to junior analysts. This allows experienced team members to focus on strategic initiatives and proactive threat hunting.

A Threat Intelligence Analyst at a Construction & Engineering Company explains: "Recorded Future has allowed us to take a more proactive approach to security, in particular with assessing threats to our tech landscape and setting priorities for eligible threat-hunting activities. Additionally, it has provided us visibility into spaces that we otherwise would be unable to attain such as dark web marketplaces for credential leaks."

Across all threat intelligence areas and including improvement to senior analyst efficiency, Recorded Future customers saved over 100 hours per week, or $290,000 over the year.

The Broader Business Impact of Recorded Future's Efficiency

The efficiency gains Recorded Future provides don't exist in isolation. They contribute to significant business advantages:

• Faster threat identification: On average, customers reported being able to identify new threats 65% faster with Recorded Future, which means they can more effectively mitigate potential damage from cyber attacks.
• Improved resilience: 1 in 2 Recorded Future customers report their organization has become significantly more resilient to cyber threats.
• Risk reduction: 57% of customers say Recorded Future has substantially reduced their overall cyber risk.

Unlock the Full ROI Potential of Recorded Future

The productivity gains highlighted here represent just one dimension of the ROI that Recorded Future's comprehensive threat intelligence delivers. To discover the complete picture—including how Recorded Future reduces business risk, mitigates brand reputation impact, lowers cyber insurance premiums, and prevents fraud losses—download our full ROI report.

[Download the Complete ROI Report: How Recorded Future Drives ROI for Cybersecurity Teams]

Learn how security teams are achieving a total ROI of 351.3% with Recorded Future through both productivity improvements and risk reduction, and discover actionable strategies to enhance your organization's security posture while maximizing the value of your security investments.

Nathalie Salisbury, Strategic Threat Intelligence Analyst at Novavax, summarizes the value perfectly: "Threat Intelligence from Recorded Future allows us to see the unknown and stay proactive to emerging vulnerabilities. We're able to predict things easier with threat intelligence that our other security tools just don't have insight into."

Get started: Assess and address the threats your business faces

Security teams have virtually countless potential vulnerabilities and risks to mitigate — while threat actors only have to succeed once, and their skill sets are advancing all the time thanks to AI. Leaders need to know which activities deliver the highest impact with the lightest lift.

If you’re ready to improve your overall threat intelligence, here’s how to get started:

1. Define your business’s security priorities. Work with security and business leadership to identify top concerns and the “crown jewels” that most need to be secured. Everything else you do should stem from these.
2. Assess threats in the context of risk to the business. When everything is urgent, nothing is. Not all vulnerabilities will be exploited, and not all threat vectors pose an immediate risk. Focus first on responding to the threats that could actually harm your people, assets, and business.

Once you’ve decided what’s most important to protect (and protect against), Recorded Future is here to help you respond to the threats that matter. With 96% of customers willing to recommend Recorded Future to a peer, the return on investment is clear.

Our comprehensive threat intelligence ensures that you can see all threats, see them first, and prioritize and act to remediate incidents before they impact your business. Give your team actionable insights and timely intelligence to get ahead of present and future attacks. Ask our team about the ROI that Recorded Future can bring to your unique business — book a demo with our team today.

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Research methodology: UserEvidence conducted two distinct surveys with Recorded Future customers (117 participants in July 2024 and over 170 participants in November 2024) to collect quantitative ROI data and qualitative feedback. All research was verified and authenticated according to UserEvidence's research principles: Identity verification, significance and representation, quality and independence, and transparency.