91% Of CISOs Value Threat Intelligence, But Only 26% Act On It – Here’s How To Fix The CTI Decision Gap + Video

Introduction:

The 2026 SANS Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI) Survey has delivered a wake-up call to the cybersecurity industry. For the first time, the survey included a dedicated module capturing responses from 67 CISOs and CSOs, revealing a stark disconnect: while 91% of security executives recognize CTI as valuable to their organization’s cybersecurity strategy, only 26% report that it significantly influences their decisions. This gap between recognition and action isn’t about intelligence quality—it’s about how intelligence is packaged, prioritized, and delivered to decision-makers who need clear, actionable guidance rather than raw data feeds.

Learning Objectives:

Understand the structural barriers preventing CTI from driving executive decisions, including resource constraints and maturity tracking gaps
Learn how to align CTI production with CISO priorities—specifically exploited vulnerabilities and adversary TTPs
Master practical techniques for translating technical intelligence into decision-ready packages that influence budgets, strategy, and risk posture

You Should Know:

The CISO-CTI Disconnect: Why 91% Approval Doesn’t Equal 91% Influence

The survey data tells a compelling story. CISOs’ top priorities for the next 12 months are intelligence on vulnerabilities being actively targeted by attackers (79%) and specific adversary TTPs (77%). Incident after-action reports (78%) and threat landscape reports (89%) also rank highly for situational awareness. Yet business-focused intelligence ranks last at 41%—a gap the report attributes to under-production, not lack of demand.

The structural picture is equally telling. Most formal CTI teams operate with fewer than four full-time employees, even as the list of use cases they are expected to support expands. Lack of time and lack of funding are the top barriers to effective CTI implementation, each cited by 44% of respondents. Perhaps most concerning: 57% of programs do not track maturity over time, and 49% do not gather systematic feedback on effectiveness. Programs that cannot demonstrate improvement cannot defend their budgets with data.

Step-by-Step Guide: Auditing Your CTI Program’s Decision Influence

Map your intelligence outputs to executive decisions. List every CTI report, briefing, or alert your team produces. For each, identify the specific decision it is meant to inform—budget allocation, risk acceptance, vendor selection, or patch prioritization. If you cannot name a decision, the intelligence is not decision-ready.
Conduct stakeholder interviews. Extract Priority Intelligence Requirements (PIRs) from the executives and operational leaders who consume your intelligence. Ask them: “What keeps you up at night? What would make you change a decision?” Document their responses and map your production against them.
Measure feedback systematically. Implement a structured feedback loop for every intelligence product delivered. Use a simple 1–5 scale: “Did this intelligence change your understanding of risk?” and “Did this intelligence influence a specific action?” Aggregate this data monthly to identify which products drive decisions and which do not.
Track maturity year over year. Adopt a maturity model—such as the Cyber Threat Intelligence Capability Maturity Model—and assess your program annually. Document improvements in people, process, and technology. Without this data, budget defenses are built on opinion, not evidence.
Validate and prioritize before delivery. Never send raw intelligence to executives. Every report should include: (a) validation against your environment, (b) prioritization based on active adversary activity, and (c) a clear recommendation.

2. Building Decision Packages, Not Intelligence Briefings

The SANS survey identifies four shifts that move CTI teams from being appreciated to being influential. The most critical is this: structure intelligence products around the decisions executives are actually making. Executives don’t need to know about every threat your team is tracking—they need to understand which risks require action now, where to allocate budget, and what to tell the board.

Will Glass, Intel 471 Senior Intel Collection Manager, illustrated this perfectly at the 2026 SANS CTI Survey panel: “If I can describe to you these couple of CVEs that are being used by this particular ransomware actor that tends to break in by using a CVE in our deployed VPN solution, now I’m speaking their language. I’ve identified hopefully a manageable number of CVEs that IT owners can get behind and decide this is important enough that I’m going to stay up all night to take down a system that’s in production so I can patch it”.

Step-by-Step Guide: Creating Decision-Ready Intelligence Packages

Lead with the recommendation. Start every executive product with the action required. Example: “Patch CVE-2026-XXXXX on all internet-facing VPN appliances within 48 hours. This vulnerability is being actively exploited by ransomware group X against organizations in our sector.”
Support with evidence, not noise. Include only the intelligence that directly supports the recommendation—specific adversary TTPs, active exploitation evidence, and asset exposure in your environment. Omit generic threat landscape data that does not change the decision.
Build analytical traceability. Document the analytical chain from raw intelligence to recommendation. This enables you to prove ROI when defending budget and demonstrates the rigor behind your assessments.
Connect CTI directly to vulnerability management. With 79% of CISOs wanting vulnerability intelligence and 63% of CTI teams already supporting vulnerability management, this is the fastest path to influence. Integrate your CTI feed with your vulnerability scanner to produce prioritized patch lists based on active exploitation and asset criticality.
Use structured threat intelligence frameworks. Adopt MITRE ATT&CK (now used by 86% of CTI programs) as your shared language. Map adversary TTPs to defensive controls and communicate gaps in terms executives understand—not CVSS scores, but “adversary group X can move laterally using technique Y, and we lack visibility into Z.”
Operationalizing CTI: From Threat Hunting to Security Operations

The survey reveals that security operations (71%) has reclaimed the top CTI use case, overtaking threat hunting for the first time since 2022. This signals that intelligence is being embedded into daily defensive workflows rather than remaining a specialized function. CTI is no longer just about hunting for advanced threats—it is about informing every security operation, from alert triage to incident response.

Step-by-Step Guide: Embedding CTI into Security Operations

Integrate CTI with your SIEM. Feed threat intelligence indicators (IPs, domains, hashes) into your SIEM as threat intelligence feeds. Use these to enrich alerts with adversary context and prioritize based on threat actor activity.
Automate indicator matching. Use tools like MISP or OpenCTI to automate the ingestion, correlation, and distribution of indicators. Implement API-based enrichment so that every alert is automatically checked against your intelligence repository.
Build playbooks for common adversary TTPs. For each adversary group you track, create a playbook that maps their TTPs to specific detection rules, response actions, and containment procedures. Train your SOC analysts on these playbooks.
Implement feedback loops from incident response. Every incident response should produce an after-action report that feeds back into your CTI requirements. What intelligence would have helped detect or respond faster? Use this to refine your collection plan.
Measure CTI impact on SOC metrics. Track how many alerts are triaged faster, how many false positives are reduced, and how many incidents are contained more quickly because of CTI enrichment. Present these metrics to demonstrate CTI’s operational value.

4. AI in CTI: Augmentation, Not Replacement

Forty-five percent of organizations are using AI in CTI programs today, primarily for data summarization and report writing, with the human-in-the-loop model holding firm. AI is accelerating the analytical process—filtering noise, summarizing threat reports, and drafting initial assessments—but it is not replacing human judgment. The most effective CTI programs use AI to handle the volume so analysts can focus on the value: prioritization, context, and decision support.

Step-by-Step Guide: Implementing AI in CTI Workflows

Use AI for initial triage. Implement natural language processing (NLP) tools to automatically parse threat reports, extract indicators, and categorize them by adversary, sector, and TTP. This reduces the time analysts spend on data ingestion.
Automate report summarization. Use large language models to generate first-draft executive summaries from lengthy technical reports. Always have an analyst review and refine the output before distribution.
Implement AI-assisted threat hunting. Use machine learning to identify patterns in network traffic, logs, and endpoint data that deviate from normal behavior. Flag these anomalies for human investigation.
Maintain human-in-the-loop oversight. Never rely on AI for final decisions. Every AI-generated product must be validated by an analyst who understands the business context and can apply critical thinking.
Train analysts on AI tools. Ensure your team understands the capabilities and limitations of AI. They should know when to trust AI output and when to challenge it.

5. Navigating Legal and Regulatory CTI Sharing

Fifty-five percent of organizations lack legally reviewed CTI sharing processes, even as NIS2 and the Cyber Resilience Act impose new obligations in 2026. The report characterizes this shortfall as a structural risk, not an administrative oversight. Organizations that fail to establish formal sharing processes expose themselves to regulatory penalties and miss opportunities to collaborate on threat intelligence.

Step-by-Step Guide: Establishing Legal CTI Sharing Processes

Engage legal counsel early. Work with your legal team to review information sharing agreements, data privacy obligations, and regulatory requirements before sharing any intelligence.
Implement data classification. Classify all intelligence by sensitivity level (e.g., public, internal, confidential, restricted). Ensure sharing processes respect these classifications.
Use standardized sharing formats. Adopt STIX/TAXII for machine-to-machine sharing and structured reporting formats for human-to-human sharing. This reduces ambiguity and ensures consistency.
Establish information sharing agreements (ISAs). Formalize relationships with trusted partners, industry ISACs, and government agencies. Ensure these agreements include data protection clauses and clear use limitations.
Document every sharing activity. Maintain an audit trail of what intelligence was shared, with whom, when, and for what purpose. This demonstrates compliance and provides a defense in case of legal challenge.

What Undercode Say:

Key Takeaway 1: The CTI decision gap is not about intelligence credibility—it’s about packaging. CISOs value CTI but don’t see it translating into actionable decisions. The fix lies in structuring intelligence around executive decisions, not technical threats.
Key Takeaway 2: Resource constraints are real but not insurmountable. Most CTI teams operate with fewer than four FTEs. The solution is not more headcount but smarter prioritization—focusing on exploited vulnerabilities and adversary TTPs, which CISOs explicitly want.

Analysis: The 2026 SANS CTI Survey represents a pivotal moment for the threat intelligence discipline. For years, CTI teams have focused on proving their technical value—producing indicators, mapping TTPs, and hunting threats. The survey data makes clear that this approach is insufficient. The next challenge is converting technical recognition into strategic influence. This requires a fundamental shift in how CTI teams operate: from producing intelligence to producing decisions. Teams that embrace this shift—by building decision packages, connecting CTI to vulnerability management, and measuring their impact on executive outcomes—will close the gap. Those that don’t will remain appreciated but uninfluential, struggling to defend budgets and demonstrate ROI. The window for this transformation is narrow. With NIS2 and the Cyber Resilience Act imposing new obligations in 2026, organizations that fail to mature their CTI programs face not only operational risk but regulatory exposure. The time to act is now.

Prediction:

+1 CTI programs that shift to decision-oriented production will see budget increases of 20–30% within 18 months, as they can finally demonstrate ROI through measurable influence on security investments and risk reduction.
+1 AI-augmented CTI workflows will become the standard, reducing analyst time on data ingestion by 40–50% and allowing teams to focus on high-value analysis and decision support.
-1 Organizations that fail to establish legally reviewed CTI sharing processes will face regulatory penalties under NIS2 and the Cyber Resilience Act, with fines potentially reaching 2% of global annual turnover for non-compliance.
-1 CTI teams that continue producing generic threat landscape reports without connecting them to specific business decisions will see their budgets flatline or shrink, as CISOs redirect funds to capabilities that demonstrate clearer operational impact.
+1 The integration of CTI with vulnerability management will become the most high-impact use case, with organizations that operationalize this connection reducing their mean time to patch exploited vulnerabilities by 50–60%.
+1 Security operations centers that embed CTI into daily workflows will achieve 30% faster alert triage and 25% fewer false positives, making CTI indispensable to SOC operations.
-1 The 57% of CTI programs that do not track maturity over time will find themselves unable to defend their existence during budget cycles, as they lack the data to demonstrate improvement or justify continued investment.

▶️ Related Video (66% Match):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cINxmGOfnio

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