Make sure you don’t have more intel than you need: Next is the matching phase: the most sophisticated TIP may be overkill if you have a small infosec department with limited skills or have a relatively simple computing environment. According to this 2025 report from Greynoise, threat feeds must match your own environment in terms of diversity, the level of complexity of potential threats to the diversity and complexity of your clouds and endpoints.This includes being able to view threats from both the virtual and physical elements of your computing and applications infrastructure, as various analysts have written about. “Understanding the threat landscape is more than just looking at the threats, it involves understanding the external and internal factors that directly influence or enable the threats to materialize,” Stuart Peck, who has worked for numerous security vendors and wrote.
How you manage your post-incident workflow: The better TIPs can orchestrate any number of responses and mitigations to stop the threat and remediate the problems that result from a compromised computing element. “The value of threat intelligence is directly tied to how well it is ingested, processed, prioritized, and acted upon,” wrote Cyware in their report. This means a careful integration into your existing constellation of security tools so you can leverage all your previous investment in your acronyms of SOARs, SIEMs and XDRs. According to the Greynoise report “you have to embed the TIP into your existing security ecosystem, making sure to correlate your internal data and use your vulnerability management tools to enhance your incident response and provide actionable analytics.”The keyword in that last sentence is actionable. Too often threat intel doesn’t guide any actions, such as kicking off a series of patches to update outdated systems, or remediation efforts to firewall a particular network segment or taking offline an offending device.Being actionable is also a matter of paying attention to the timing of two different metrics. First, this intel should be able to shorten the time between detection and remediation, as exploits become operational faster. Second, the intel should shed some light and understanding about what threats are happening in real time and which ones can be thwarted or quickly stopped. Having actionable intelligence enables the visualization of a potential threat. A 2023 report from ThreatConnect states that “the ability to take action on intelligence directly within a dynamic visual environment is critical to making analysts more efficient and effective when doing their analysis. Visual analysis allows analysts to see patterns and find connections that may be difficult in other mediums like tables of data.”Another part of making visual analytics is how the threat dashboards display this information in a way that can be helpful and actionable. The best dashboards can show real-time trends or anomalies. For example, a dashboard can point to when a server is under a DDoS attack or when a set of resources residing on one network segment is taken offline. Part of the visualization process is also making sure your organization has defined success measures of a TIP, usually in the rate of detecting threats and reducing subsequent incidents.All of these elements are important in making threat intel part of your security operations, something that Recorded Future’s Esteban Borges wrote about in 2024 when it comes to triaging this intelligence into one of three basic categories:
Strategic, or higher-level insights and identifying trendsTactical, or the more mechanics behind a particular threat andOperational, providing more real-time or near-real-time analysisThis is a delicate balancing act, to be sure, because realistically you need to touch on all three categories to properly defend your infrastructure. Part of the challenge here is to prevent siloed specialty mindsets from making the appropriate remedial measures. “I’ve seen time and time again when the threat intel or even the vulnerability management team will send out a flash notification about a high priority threat only for it to be lost in a queue because the threat team did not chase it up. It’s just as important for resolver groups to act as it is for the threat team to chase it,” Peck blogged. As an example, having a single phishing attempt could be a tactical issue, until your TIP flags similar events that show persistent evidence of a targeted attack that could mean operational changes to counter these attempts. Context matters and TIPs can help provide this.
Understand how AI-enhanced tools work: Some of the TIP vendors manage their workflows using AI-enhanced tools and other automated techniques. Given that AI is so popular, this means you must understand how this automation is constructed and what its limitations are. For example, one limitation may be how the AI software learns from consuming data from your threat feeds. Like any use of AI, the devil is in the details. Drawing on years of investigations for Dutch law enforcement, Niko Dekens called this the “slow collapse of critical thinking due to AI. AI-based tools should trigger suspicion, not satisfaction. Analysts need to question AI’s claims and compare its output to real-world source behavior.” That is an important distinction that needs to be kept top-of-human-mind.If all this seems like a lot of work, that is because it is. TIPs aren’t simple products either to evaluate or to use, and managing threats means you must consider all entry points to your infrastructure, applications, and servers.
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