3 Decisions CISOs Need to Make to Prevent Downtime Risk in 2026

Beyond the direct impact of cyberattacks, enterprises suffer from a secondary but potentially even more costly risk: operational downtime, any amount of which translates into very real damage. That’s why for CISOs, it’s key to prioritize decisions that reduce dwell time and protect their company from risk.

Three strategic steps you can take this year for better results:

1. Focus on today’s actual business security risks

Any efficient SOC is powered by relevant data. That’s what makes targeted, prioritized action against threats possible. Public or low-quality feeds may have been sufficient in the past, but in 2026, threat actors are more funded, coordinated, and dangerous than ever. Accurate and timely information is a deciding factor when counteracting them.

It’s the lack of relevant data that doesn’t allow SOCs to maintain focus on the real risks relevant here and now. Only continuously refreshed feeds sourced from active threat investigations can enable smart, proactive action.

STIX/TAXII-compatible Threat Intelligence Feeds by ANY.RUN allows security teams to focus on threats targeting organizations today. Sourced from the latest manual investigations of malware and phishing done by 15K SOC teams и 600K analysts, this solution provides:

• Early threat detection: fresh, extensive data expands threat coverage for attack prevention.
• Mitigated risk of incidents: being informed about the most relevant malicious indicators minimizes the chance of incidents.
• Stability in operations: destructive downtime is prevented, ensuring the company’s sustainability.

TI Feeds deliver quantifiable results across SOC processes

By delivering relevant intel to your SIEM, EDRXDR, TIP, or NDR, TI Feeds expand threat coverage and offer actionable insights on attacks that have just happened to companies like yours.

Result: Up to 58% more threats detected for a reduced chance of business disruption.

2. Shield analysts from false positives

As a CISO, one of the most effective things you can do to mitigate burnout and improve SOC performance has more to do with analysts’ daily operations rather than overall management.

Analysts show better results when they can stay focused on real threats and actually do the job that matters. But false positives, duplicates, and other noise in threat data drain them. It slows down response and increases the risk of missed incidents.

Unlike other feeds with largely outdated and unfiltered indicators, ANY.RUN’s TI Feeds deliver verified intel with near-zero false positive rates and real-time updates. IPs, domains, and hashes are validated and 99% unique.

TI Feeds promote early detection with fresh indicators available via API/SDK and STIX/TAXII integrations

Integrating TI Feeds into your stacks means:

• Taking resource-efficient action against threats for breach mitigation
• Avoiding workflow disruptions and costly escalations
• Achieving better SOC team performance, morale, and impact

Result: Higher productivity across SOC analyst Tiers with 30% fewer Tier 1 to Tier 2 escalations.

3. Shorten the gap between knowing and doing

Mature SOCs move from detection to response fast. This requires context: something that’s missing from ordinary threat intelligence. Without sufficient insights into malicious behavior, the investigation across multiple resources takes too much time and energy, heightening the chance of operational downtime.

How TI Feeds benefit SOCs across tiers

TI Feeds address the gap between alert and action. With behavioral context sourced from real sandbox analyses done globally by 15K+ security teams, it shortens MTTD & MTTR, helping businesses:

• Reduce breach impact at scale by enriching indicators with real-world attacker behavior from active campaigns.
• Prevent incident escalation caused by uncertainty and slow validation during early investigation stages.
• Maintain operational continuity by accelerating investigations before attacks affect core business processes.

Result: 21 min faster Mean Time to Respond and lower incident response costs.

Conclusion

Prioritizing relevant threat intelligence, filling operational gaps, and improving the entire workflow from triage to response directly impacts performance rates across SOCs. For CISOs, this translated into a clear priority: take targeted action to reduce dwell time by empowering analysts with actionable, relevant, and unique threat intelligence feeds, enabling fast and confident decision-making.

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