The Hidden Costs of the Feed Economy

Organizations invest heavily in threat intelligence. They license multiple feeds, integrate platforms, build and staff dedicated teams. The spending is substantial. Yet the return on that investment remains unclear. Over the past decade, threat intelligence evolved into what we call the Feed Economy — a system built around signal accumulation, where more feeds indicate maturity, and broader coverage suggests strength.

When we recently surveyed 100 security professionals across 35+ industries in 6 countries — the majority from organizations with 10,000+ employees — the results confirmed what many suspected: the systems they've built within the Feed Economy model aren't delivering the outcomes they expected.

The hidden costs of the Feed Economy are real, measurable, and systemic. In this blog, we'll take a look at where those costs come from and why organizations are ready for a different approach.

The Cost of Volume

Most organizations operate multiple threat feeds — some respondents manage up to 53 (!) different sources. Yet this expansion hasn't solved the core problem. Our survey found that 71% of organizations report significant overlap across their feeds. And when asked where their threat intelligence process breaks down most often, 100% of respondents identified the same issue: connecting the flood of signals to real threats.

The cost of this focus on volume is substantial. Organizations spend money on duplicate intelligence instead of integration. 84% still rely on manual or reactive processes because they're managing too many feeds to automate effectively. One survey respondent observed: "The challenge is that most feeds overlap heavily, adding volume without truly advancing our ability to predict or prevent attacks."

True to its name, the Feed Economy incentivizes...adding more feeds. Organizations keep buying because they believe volume equals better defense. Yet budgets allocated to overlapping sources are budgets not spent on correlation, validation, or prevention capabilities. The math doesn't work: more spending, same level of risk.

The Cost of Manual Processes

Organizations are less able to prevent threats because their threat intelligence processes are not sufficiently automated. Our survey found that only 31% of organizations have fully automated ingestion and blocking. 52% pair automation with manual oversight, and 66% evaluate new feeds through ad-hoc processes rather than systematic approaches.

The cost of these manual processes is significant. 68% of respondents spend 1 to 2 hours weekly validating indicators alone. Another 17% spend several hours daily on this work. One security leader described the burden: "Our threat intelligence process is heavily manual. We retrieve additional insights from our TI team during active incidents, which makes triage and response extremely inefficient."

The Feed Economy relies on manual processes to function. Validation happens after the fact, when threats are already operational. This creates a hidden cost: organizations grow headcount to keep pace with feed volume instead of investing in integration and correlation. The result is not only expensive and slow — it leaves organizations stuck in reactive mode.

The Cost of Mismeasurement

Organizations track response metrics closely. Our survey found that 91% measure Mean Time to Respond and 89% measure Mean Time to Detect. Meanwhile, only 12% track any prevention-focused metrics, and zero percent measure whether threats were stopped before they became operational.

Survey respondents claim to value accuracy (89%) and relevance (82%) when selecting feeds. Yet their organizations evaluate success by response speed, so that's where resources flow: detection platforms get funded, containment processes get refined. Prevention doesn't even show up on the scorecard. One security director captured the gap: "We would love to have a prevention KPI as well — one that talks about what was prevented, not just how fast we cleaned up."

As long as organizations keep buying detection tools while the fundamental problem — preventing attacks in the first place — is never systematically addressed, the Feed Economy will continue to extract this hidden cost.

The Cost of Missed Visibility

Our survey found that half of organizations cite detection gaps as their primary barrier to attack prevention — they simply don't see the attacks until it's too late. Yet only 33% blame resource constraints. The implication is clear: most have the budget and headcount to act earlier. What they lack is visibility into early-stage attack activity.

Only 65% of survey respondents said their feeds actually provide actionable context. Yet even when the data is present, they lack the confidence to act on it before an attack unfolds. One respondent described the reality plainly: "I don't know I'm under attack until something bad happens."

This visibility gap has a cost. Threats that could be disrupted during setup instead reach operational status. Organizations detect them only after attackers have begun moving through their systems. The Feed Economy is like checking the rearview mirror to avoid what's ahead. Yet prevention requires looking forward, not behind.

What Organizations Actually Want

Finally, our survey identified five consistent priorities among security leaders. Actionable context ranks highest at 82% — security leaders are looking for data that's ready to act on without additional enrichment. 78% prioritize earlier visibility into emerging threats. 74% want to eliminate duplicate intelligence across their feeds. 68% seek automated systems to rank threats by urgency. 65% want to measure what they actually prevent, not how fast they respond.

These requests point to a fundamental shift in how organizations want threat intelligence to operate. One security architect stated it directly: "We want to catch infrastructure setup early rather than just measuring how fast we react to a breach."

This shift matters because it reveals the inherent weakness of the Feed Economy. Security leaders aren't asking for more feeds or better tools within the current model. They're asking for a different approach entirely — one built around prevention instead of volume, early action instead of fast response.