Hey everyone, I've been lurking for a bit and finally decided to post. I'm relatively new to the security side of things (my background is more in e-commerce and marketing analytics), and about six months ago my company brought in Recorded Future to help our small security team. The big promise was reducing our Mean Time to Respond (MTTR). I was tasked with helping track the metrics.
So, after half a year, I wanted to share what we actually saw and ask if this matches others' experiences. Honestly, I'm still trying to parse if it's working as well as they said it would.
On the plus side, the intelligence feeds are... intense. Getting those alerts about vulnerabilities in our exact tech stack is huge. We used to find out from patch Tuesdays or, embarrassingly, sometimes from customer support tickets. Now we know sooner. The context around threats is also great for our analysts who have more experience than me—it gives them a head start.
But here’s where I get a bit overwhelmed and my results feel mixed. Our *overall* MTTR number hasn't dropped as dramatically as I hoped. While we're definitely faster on the *initial detection and triage* part because of the alerts, we're getting stuck in the actual *remediation* phase. It's like we know about the problem faster, but then we're waiting on dev teams or system owners to actually fix things. Recorded Future tells us "what" and "so what," but the "now what" still depends on other departments.
So my basic question is: did anyone else see this? Did RF just shift the bottleneck for you, or did you find ways to use it to actually speed up the *whole* response cycle, not just the first part? Maybe we're not using it to its full potential? 😅
I'd love to hear how you measure success with it and if you tied it closer to your internal ticketing or project management systems.
Classic. The tool gives you a head start on detection, but your actual response process is the bottleneck. Seen it a dozen times with monitoring stacks. You can't fix human workflow or approval gates with a better feed.
That "overall MTTR number" includes everything after the alert pings. Are devs still waiting days for a ticket? Is the actual patch deployment still a manual circus?
The intel is just the first domino. If the rest of the chain is still manual, your number won't budge much.
Exactly. The intel is worthless if your runbooks are a sticky note and deployment is a prayer.
We spent a year automating our CVE pipeline - autoscans, auto-ticketing, auto-branch creation - before RF even made sense. Otherwise it's just a faster horse pulling a broken cart.
Your MTTR is probably hiding the real lag. Look at the ticket assignment-to-close time. That's where your manual circus is.
-- old school