Measuring ROI in Cyber Threat Intelligence

A key part of career success lies in your ability to measure and communicate the impact of your work. That’s especially true in fields like Security Prevention or Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI), where proving value isn’t always straightforward.

I genuinely believe that every organization can benefit from CTI. However, using just generalized figures, like the average breach cost avoidance from IBM’s annual reports can be misleading. These figures are typically aggregated across industries and company sizes, rarely reflecting the specific context of a single business, its data sensitivity, or its threat landscape. An “industry average” provides an incomplete view of a company’s reality.

Cyber defense also suffers from the “prevention paradox”: the primary goal and greatest success of a CTI program is to prevent security incidents from occurring. However, this success, most of the time, is just invisible: it’s negative evidence. It is fundamentally difficult to assign a concrete value to an attack that was avoided or a data breach that never happened. Stakeholders, particularly those in finance and executive leadership, are used to measuring ROI based on tangible gains, such as increased revenue or reduced operational costs.
Cybersecurity investments, by contrast, especially in the defensive and prevention area, are often justified by the absence of negative outcomes, a concept that can be difficult to translate into a traditional ROI calculation. This paradox often leads to the perception of cybersecurity as a pure cost center, as its benefits are not immediately apparent.

Preventive successes also decay rapidly in institutional memory. Humans tend to focus more on recent, vivid problems than on distant or invisible future risks. \ A single, spectacular breach can override years of quiet diligence, while a long run of incident-free quarters is quickly normalized as the “expected” state. The CTI team therefore operates under a biasing asymmetry: its work becomes most visible precisely when it fails, and increasingly invisible the longer it succeeds.

That’s why this paper aims to explore practical methods that go beyond global averages. A review of existing academic literature reveals a lack of frameworks specifically tailored to measuring CTI ROI. To address this gap, the paper proposes a model that combines multiple factors to offer a more realistic and actionable approach to evaluating the return on investment for CTI programs, introducing a new metric called the Threat Intelligence Effectiveness Index (TIEI).

Overview of the paper:

1. Introduction to core CTI principles and why CTI can bring value
2. Methodologies for calculating ROI from a CTI program
3. Use cases with industry-specific metrics and real-world numbers across three sectors
4. Challenges and limitations in measuring CTI ROI
5. Conclusion

If you’re interested in reading the full paper, you can find it here.
Thank you :)