Threat Intelligence Overload: Why Security Teams Struggle to Act on Data
Editor’s Note: This article is part of our RSA Conference 2025 content series, highlighting the operational realities facing today’s cybersecurity leaders. We’ll be on-site at RSAC 2025 and invite you to connect with us to explore how secure real-time collaboration can help close the gap between threat and response.
The Challenge: Too Much Data, Too Little Action
Security leaders today are swimming in threat data. Between feeds, alerts, dashboards, and vendor reports, it’s nonstop — and it’s only growing. In fact, one recent report found that the average security operations team receives 4,484 alerts every day.
However, when action is required, this wealth of data often fails to translate into decisive, coordinated responses.
It’s not a visibility problem — it’s an actionability problem; that same report also found that security teams ignore 67% of the alerts they see.
Data alone doesn’t drive resilience. What matters is how quickly and effectively teams can use threat data to collaborate, prioritize, and respond under pressure.
Unfortunately, for many organizations, that’s where things break down.
The Disconnect Between Intel and Response
In theory, threat intelligence should enable rapid decision-making across the incident lifecycle. In practice, it often resides in silos — passed between security analysts, IT teams, and business stakeholders through fragmented channels like email, spreadsheets, or disconnected tools. According to one recent study, 72% of organizations struggle with siloed security and IT data.
This gap between detection and collaboration is the real threat.
Consider a typical cyberattack timeline:
- A threat actor gains access
- Suspicious activity is detected
- Intelligence teams escalate the alert
- Response teams are looped in — often too late
- By the time a coordinated plan is in motion, the attacker has already moved laterally, encrypted files, or exfiltrated sensitive data
The breakdown isn’t just technical — it’s operational.
Delays in cross-functional communication, lack of shared context, and slow decision cycles cost precious minutes when the stakes are highest.
Siloed Tools Make Fast Collaboration Impossible
When responding to high-severity threats, teams need more than data — they need structured, real-time collaboration to operationalize that data.
But most organizations still rely on generic communication tools that weren’t designed for mission-critical scenarios. As a result, email threads get buried, chat tools become noisy and unstructured, and meetings consume time that should be spent on action.
Meanwhile, attackers aren’t waiting.
And neither is the data.
What the Research Tells Us: We Have a Sharing Problem
According to a 2024 report from the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General, participation in CISA’s Automated Indicator Sharing (AIS) program has dropped by more than 50% in just two years — down from 304 agencies in 2020 to only 135 in 2022.
Why? The report cites over-classification, lack of context, and limited usefulness of the data being shared as core contributors.
In other words, even when intelligence is technically being exchanged, it’s often not operationally actionable. Add to that the difficulty of sharing intelligence across agencies and jurisdictions — especially in disconnected or low-trust environments — and the gap only widens.
Our take: Threat intelligence doesn’t matter if it doesn’t reach the right people at the right time in the right format. Without structured, real-time collaboration, even federally sanctioned threat-sharing programs struggle to deliver value.
The issue isn’t just what’s being shared — it’s how teams are able to act on it.
Meanwhile, the commercial sector is facing its own intelligence overload. The 2024 Global Threat Intelligence Report from NTT DATA, for example, reveals that manufacturing has now overtaken tech as the most targeted sector globally.
The report highlights a major shift: Attackers are exploiting operational complexity and communication gaps to hit organizations where coordination is most difficult.
What’s more striking is this: Despite record investments in threat detection technologies, response timelines haven’t improved. Teams are still struggling to translate alerts into action — often because collaboration happens too late in the incident timeline.
Our take: If detection is faster but response coordination stays slow, the gap between intelligence and impact only grows.
This isn’t a tooling problem; it’s a workflow and communication problem. Organizations that can operationalize intelligence — not just collect it — will be the ones that stay ahead.
The Fix: Structured Collaboration That Matches the Speed of Threats
The research is clear: Both government and commercial sectors are collecting more intelligence than ever but they’re failing to convert it into coordinated action.
When agencies disengage from national sharing programs because the data is “too classified” or lacks context — or when private sector teams drown in alerts with no path to resolution — the message is the same: The collaboration layer is broken.
And when collaboration breaks down, so does resilience.
That’s why it’s no longer enough to invest in better detection or more threat feeds. To close the response gap, organizations need a structured, federated way to move intelligence across teams and turn it into action — securely and in real time.
Here’s what that looks like:
- Persistent, secure channels that bring security, IT, legal, and leadership into the same workspace from the moment a threat is detected.
- Structured workflows that escalate, track, and coordinate incident response — without losing context or switching platforms.
- Federated sharing frameworks that allow trusted data to move between agencies, departments, or third parties — while maintaining control over access and visibility.
- Deployment flexibility that ensures continuity in degraded, disconnected, or high-compliance environments.
Put simply: Threat intelligence must be paired with mission-ready collaboration platforms — engineered to work as hard as the people using them. These solutions must be purpose-built for environments where timing, trust, and security are non-negotiable.
That’s where platforms like Mattermost enter the equation.
We enable teams operating in the most sensitive, mission-critical environments — public sector, defense, energy, and beyond — to coordinate faster, act smarter, and stay in control, no matter the circumstances.
What Does This All Look Like in Practice?
With a secure collaboration platform built for mission-critical work sitting at the heart of security operations (SecOps), teams bring together security data, threat intelligence, and conversations — enabling them to work faster and smarter, resolving issues more rapidly.
By consolidating alerts, automating workflows, and enabling real-time communication, a secure collaboration platform helps security teams coordinate swiftly and effectively when every second counts, reducing downtime and improving response times.
Threats evolve rapidly, and organizations need a streamlined way to share insights, escalate issues, and take immediate action. With a collaboration platform designed for integrated SecOps workflows, security teams can stay ahead of cyber threats, minimize risks, and protect critical systems with greater efficiency and confidence — all while maintaining compliance and retaining full ownership of sensitive data.
How does this all translate to the real world?
By automating incident response with a secure collaboration platform, a top-three global financial institution reduced mean time to respond by 90%, cutting response times from 20 minutes to 2 minutes.
That’s the power of structured collaboration.
From Noise to Actionable Intel — That’s the Mission
At RSA 2025, many conversations will focus on the evolving threat landscape.
However, the more pressing challenge is operational: how to transform overwhelming amounts of threat intelligence into coordinated action when every second counts.
Cybersecurity isn’t just a technology problem. It’s a collaboration challenge — one rooted in how people communicate under pressure. Solving it starts with equipping your people with the tools they need to respond as one cohesive unit — even during crises.
Let’s Talk at RSA!
We’ll be at RSAC 2025, meeting with cybersecurity leaders. If you’ll be there, too, I’d love to hear how your team is tackling these challenges firsthand — and show you how Mattermost is helping organizations like yours stay connected when it matters most.
If your team is drowning in data but struggling to act, let’s connect. Because threat intelligence is only valuable when it drives action — and that starts with communication.
