Threat intelligence adoption grows but skills lag behind

A new study from Vulcan Cyber shows 75 percent of organizations have dedicated threat intelligence teams and two-thirds have dedicated threat intelligence budgets.

However, 73 percent of respondents say a lack of skills is their biggest threat intelligence challenge and is keeping organizations from making the most of their investments in threat intelligence resources.

The survey, conducted by Gartner Pulse, shows threat intelligence is clearly a crucial source for ongoing vulnerability detection and prioritization. In fact, 87 percent of decision makers say they rely on threat intelligence 'often or very often' for vulnerability prioritization. More than 90 percent of organizations rate their ability to respond based on threat intelligence as average or better.

"It is good that we're seeing such extensive adoption of threat intelligence feeds by so many different types of cyber teams," says Yaniv Bar-Dayan, CEO and co-founder, Vulcan Cyber. "It's even more encouraging to see the share of organizations that have dedicated teams and budgets to act upon those findings. Nonetheless, a concerted effort to scale our ability to respond with precision will be correspondingly more crucial as cloud-native environments grow more complex. Teams don't just need tools and people, they need skills and the ability to use the tools at their disposal to improve the security posture of their organizations."

Among other findings, organizations are using threat intelligence on an ongoing and frequent basis with 75 percent of respondents using it at least weekly. It's still primarily used for traditional cybersecurity actions like blocking bad IPs. However, 55 percent of respondents said their threat intelligence data is not predictive enough.

Youu can learn more about threat intelligence at a virtual CyberRisk Summit on December 6.

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