Cyber Threat Intelligence Buyers’ Guide 2025

State of the market: Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI) solutions collect, process, analyze, and present you with information that helps you respond to cyberthreats before they can cause harm. They can provide insights on how effective your security tools are, live threats in your environment, potential threats (including how an attack might occur and how likely it is to happen), and/or any information on any threat actors that may target your organization, including their preferred methods and the motives behind their attacks.

• The global cyber threat intelligence market was valued at USD 15 billion in 2025 and is expected to grow at a CAGR of 16.4% to reach a value of USD 37.2 billion by 2030.
• Growth is being driven by the increase in frequency and sophistication of cyberattacks, and by pressure from regulatory bodies for organizations to secure sensitive or personal data.
  • By equipping you with insights into attackers’ tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs), CTI tools can help you prevent and respond to potential attacks before they have the chance to cause damage. 
  • The finance, healthcare, and technology industries are major adopters of cyber threat intelligence solutions, as they’re highly regulated and handle sensitive data, thus are particularly vulnerable to cyberattacks. Governments are also adopting CTI solutions to gain information about nation-state attacks.
• As the market continues to grow, we expect to see CTI solutions invest in their response capabilities, using AI and automation to enable them to mitigate threats without human intervention. We also expect to see more CTI providers offering CTI-as-a-Service, which makes threat intelligence more accessible to SMEs and organizations struggling with the cyber skills gap.

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Why trust us: We’ve researched, demoed, and tested several leading cyber threat intelligence platforms, spoken to organizations of all sizes about their threat intelligence challenges and the features that are most useful to them, and interviewed executives from leading providers in the security monitoring space.

You can find our product reviews, interviews, and Top 10 guides to the best cyber threat intelligence products on the market in our Security Monitoring Hub.

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Our recommendations: Before we jump into the details, here are our top tips on how to get the most out of your cyber threat intelligence implementation:

• For overburdened teams: Utilize your solution’s automation capabilities, particularly when it comes to triaging alerts and automating threat response. This will improve response times, and free up your team to focus on complex threats and your overall security strategy.
• For SMEs: Consider opting for a managed CTI solution, particularly if you don’t have the expertise in-house to analyze threat intelligence feeds and decide what to do with the information the solution gives you.
• For effectiveness: When choosing a solution, ask about its integration capabilities. CTI tools work really well, providing they have complete visibility of your organization’s environment and external threats. So, look for a tool that integrates with your existing security tools and IT infrastructure, as well as external threat feeds.

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How Cyber Threat Intelligence solutions work: There are lots of different CTI tools on the market, each of which typically specializes in the type of threat data they gather and the intelligence they provide. However, regardless of this, they tend to work in a similar way.

CTI tools are typically deployed as a cloud-based service, but they’re often integrated into wider infrastructure security tools, such as SIEM solutions. They can also be deployed on-prem or hybrid for industries that require it.

Once deployed, a CTI tool gathers data from a variety of internal and external sources, including:

• Your network traffic and logs.
• Your endpoint and cloud telemetry, which includes EDR/XDR software, firewalls, intrusion detection/prevention systems (IDS/IPS), and cloud security platforms.
• Known malware samples, which they can reverse-engineer to detect similar threats.
• Open-Source Intelligence (OSINT), which includes publicly available data such as security blogs, social media posts, hacker forums, and news reports.
• Real-time threat feeds from government agencies (e.g., CISA, NIST) and cybersecurity vendors.
• Dark web marketplaces and forums, where cybercriminals discuss exploits, sell stolen data, or share attack techniques.
• Human Intelligence (HUMINT), which refers to security researchers who actively engage with cybercriminal communities.

After gathering this raw data, the CTI solution analyzes it to identify patterns, unusual or malicious behaviors, and known malicious IPS, domains, file hashes, and signatures. The solution also enriches the data by connecting different data points to determine whether they could indicate a co-ordinated attack, identifying whether found threats are linked to known cybercriminal groups or threat actors, and analyzing the severity, likelihood, and potential impact of each threat.

After analyzing the data, the CTI tool presents the information to you in the form of interactive dashboards and visualizations that show you threat trends, and reports that summarize potential threats, their TTPs, and recommended prevention or remediation options. Most CTI tools also alert you to critical or live threats in real-time. You can then use this intelligence to prevent or respond to cyberthreats, e.g., by adjusting your existing defenses so that they’re better positioned to block emerging threats.

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Benefits of Cyber Threat Intelligence: There are four main benefits to implementing a cyber threat intelligence solution:

1. Detect threats as early as possible.
   • CTI tools analyze vast amounts of data from numerous sources to identify patterns, anomalies, and indicators of compromise. This can help them spot a potential attack and warn you before the threat actor can cause too much damage.
   • “The whole idea is that you’re identifying the malware before you’re infected; you know enough about it from your own research and intelligence feeds to be able to recognize it and know how it’s going to move,” says Chris Jacob, Vice President of Threat Intelligence Engineering at ThreatQuotient, in an interview with Expert Insights. “This allows you to get one step ahead of the threat because those tactics and techniques aren’t going to change very often.”
2. Improve the efficiency of your security team.
   • By eliminating manual threat research, automatically detecting threats, and reducing false positives, a CTI solution gives your team the time and space they need to focus on critical threats and strategic initiatives.
3. Understand who your attackers are.  
   • CTI tools analyze attack pattens, tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs), then correlate that data to identify adversary groups, their preferred attack vectors, and the motivations behind their attacks (e.g., financial gain, espionage).
   • With this information, you can anticipate where your attacks are likely to come from and adjust your defenses as needed.
4. Achieve compliance with data protection regulations. 
   • Many CTI solutions can help you align with regulatory frameworks such as GDPR, NIST, and ISO 27001 by offering real-time risk assessments, automated incident tracking, and evidence-based documentation.
   • This not only helps you achieve compliance, but it also allows you to demonstrate due diligence during audits.

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Common Cyber Threat Intelligence challenges: There are three main challenges that you might come across when implementing a cyber threat intelligence solution. Here’s what they are and how to overcome them:

1. In order to provide you with detailed, trustworthy intelligence, CTI tools need to integrate with all of your existing tools, platforms, and applications. This can be complex to achieve. To ease this complexity, we recommend choosing a solution that supports native API integrations with as many of your existing resources as possible, and also allows you to build custom integrations if needed.
2. CTI solutions provide you with large volumes of intelligence, sometimes via multiple threat feeds, which can be both tiring and time-consuming for security teams to sort through. To reduce the volume of data produced and prevent burnout, we recommend regularly tweaking your detection and prioritization rules.
   • “Some organizations with an established security operations center find themselves receiving 1,000 alerts a day, but they can only get through 400 of them. So, they respond to whatever’s marked as highest priority, but it becomes like a hamster wheel that they can’t get off.” –  Chris Jacob, ThreatQuotient.
3. Aggregating data from multiple threat feeds and knowing how to use that information is complex and requires specialized expertise—which SMEs may lack. This can also be a challenge for larger enterprises that have a SOC, but may not have a team of cyber threat analysts. If this sounds like you, we recommend choosing a managed CTI solution, or “CTI-as-a-Service”, which allows you to benefit from personalized support throughout the implementation process, as well as the expertise of your provider’s threat analysts.

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Best Cyber Threat Intelligence providers: Our team of software analysts and researchers have put together a shortlist of the best providers of cyber threat intelligence solutions, as well as adjacent lists covering similar topics:

• The Top 11 Cyber Threat Intelligence Solutions
• The Top 11 Dark Web Monitoring Solutions
• The Top 6 Data Breach Alerting Software
• The Top 10 SIEM Solutions

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Features checklist: When comparing cyber threat intelligence solutions, Expert Insights recommends looking for the following features:

1. Data Collection: The solution should aggregate data from a range of internal and external sources.
2. Data Processing: The solution should process and re-format the data to make it easier to analyze. This might involve decrypting the data or decoupling it from sensitive or irrelevant information. It may also enrich the data by connecting different data points to determine whether they could indicate a co-ordinated attack, identifying whether found threats are linked to known cybercriminal groups or threat actors, and analyzing the severity, likelihood, and potential impact of each threat. 
3. Data Analysis: The solution should analyze aggregated data to identify known attack signatures and behaviors, and use AI and ML to identify patterns or anomalies that could indicate an unknown threat. When it identifies a threat, the solution should use other data points to provide relevant context, such as the potential impact of the threat and whether it can be linked to a certain threat actor.
4. Real-Time Alerting: The solution should notify you in real-time as soon as it identifies an emerging threat.
5. Risk Scoring and Prioritization: The solution should prioritize the threats it discovers based on their severity, likelihood of impact, and the potential disruption they may cause.
6. Threat Intelligence Sharing: The solution should support STIX/TACII for secure information exchange.
7. Incident Response: The solution should provide forensic insights and mitigation recommendations to help you respond appropriately and quickly to threats. Some solutions are starting to offer AI-powered, automated incident response. 
8. User-friendly interface:  Your solutions should deliver its findings clearly and concisely, using visualizations where possible to help you understand the intelligence.
9. Integration: You should be able to integrate the solution with your existing security tools (inc. SIEM, firewall, EDR/XDR, and SOAR tools), as well as any infrastructure you want it to collect data from.
10. Scalability: The solution should have the capacity to ingest and analyze larger amounts of data as your organization grows, to ensure no threat slips through the cracks unnoticed.

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Future Trends: As the CTI market continues to grow, we expect to see it undergo a few key evolutions:

CTI solutions will be able to automatically improve cybersecurity workflows in line with their findings—for example, adjusting firewall configurations to better protect against identified emerging threats. This will enable more accurate and effective threat mitigation.

Second, CTI solutions will continue to integrate AI and human expertise to create a more effective hybrid threat intelligence model.

Third, CTI providers will use recent advancements in AI and ML to develop better predictive models that consider a wider array of threat actors and attack vectors. This will allow their solutions to provide more accurate forecasts.

Finally, we expect CTI providers to increase their collaboration efforts and share their intelligence across different industries, helping to improve overall cybersecurity resilience globally.

• “The bad guys share all the time. So, we need to be sharing as well.” – Paul Reid, Global Head of Threat Intelligence at OpenText Cybersecurity. 

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Further Reading: You can find all our articles on cyber threat intelligence in our Security Monitoring Hub.

Want to jump straight in? Here are a few articles we think you’ll enjoy: 

• Shortlist: The Top 11 Cyber Threat Intelligence Solutions
• Interview: Paul Reid On The Importance Of Threat Intelligence In The Fight Against Cybercrime
• Interview: Chris Jacob On How Threat Intelligence Can Help Businesses Respond To Cyberthreats
• Blog: What Are The Three Types Of Cyber Threat Intelligence?

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