The Cost of Finishing: Measuring the True Cost of Threat Intelligence

Threat intelligence has proven its value. The harder question is what it actually costs to turn intelligence into action.

The Cost of Finishing examines a persistent gap in modern threat intelligence programs: 91% of respondents to the 2026 SANS Cyber Threat Intelligence Survey consider threat intelligence valuable, yet only 26% say it actually drives their decisions. Rather than treating this as a problem of insufficient data or collection, the whitepaper looks at what happens after intelligence is found—and why organizations struggle to measure the cost of turning findings into outcomes.

The report introduces three practical measures—finish rate, cost per finished outcome, and coverage dependency—that organizations can calculate using their own operational data. It explores why decades of automation have made collection and enrichment cheaper while correlation, judgment, production, and delivery continue to consume analyst time. The paper then examines three ways to change that equation: compressing correlation, encoding analyst methodology, and removing manual triggers. It also addresses the role of human oversight in agentic workflows and provides a 90-day framework for building a defensible cost baseline and measuring whether workflow changes actually improve efficiency.

➡️ Download the full whitepaper to learn how to measure the economics of your threat intelligence program and turn efficiency improvements into numbers you can defend.

Key Highlights:

• A practical framework for measuring finish rate, cost per finished outcome, and coverage dependency
• Why traditional CTI metrics often measure activity and throughput rather than business impact
• How analyst labor and specialized knowledge shape the true economics of threat intelligence
• Three levers for improving efficiency: compress correlation, encode methodology, and remove manual triggers
• How to account for human oversight and governance when introducing agentic workflows
• A 90-day approach for establishing a baseline, testing one change, and building an evidence-based efficiency case

Whether you’re a CISO, threat intelligence leader, SOC manager, security operations professional, or decision-maker responsible for cybersecurity investment, this whitepaper provides a practical way to understand what intelligence outcomes actually cost and where automation can make a measurable difference.