Digital Risk Protection (DRP) is continually gaining momentum and attention across CISOs and security professionals, mainly because it is emerging out of the threat intelligence umbrella.
DRP, an operational security function, was once classified under Threat Intelligence (TI), but now has been elevated as an emerging security function by experts like the Gartner Hype Cycle and other research analysts. The security teams can rely on these while addressing multiple external cyber threat use cases. Many firms get tremendous value from DRP each day, and to optimize its benefits, firms need to differentiate it from TI.
As confirmed by Gartner, DRP solutions are benefitting from the tremendous growth supported by a broad range of required threat detection and response services. As per Gartner predictions, the targeted audience for digital risk protection services will mount up by 10% till the end of 2025, up from 1% today.
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The primary reason behind this is DRP’s effectiveness at accelerating both the depth and breadth of protecting digital assets from the host of external threats. But while DRP adoption grows constantly, some perceived market overlap will exist between DRP and TI, and businesses should focus on this.
DRP is an operational process that combines detection, intelligence, and mitigates attacks across all external digital risk landscapes. While traditional TI focuses on gathering intelligence with an eventual end result of leveraging the data to defend resources against external threats, DRP focuses on promptly identifying and mitigating the threats targeting corporate assets outside the network’s protective walls.
As a result, it acts as the immediate line of defense for monitoring the systems, protecting the reputation and integrity of the brand, avoiding malicious account takeovers, monitoring and protecting against existing social media threats, and also tackling data leaks detection.
Effective DRP demands a balance of cutting-edge, automated curation of relevant technologies combined with expert human analysis to derive value from the huge amount of intelligence required to search and mitigate the existing threats that could cripple the business. This operational approach aids threat detection and promptly mitigates existing risks to maintain business resiliency.
While DRP investigates, detects, and mitigates active external threats to allow enterprises to promptly stop the bleeding, TI focuses on such a methodical process of gathering intelligence to help prevent and predict threats from impacting internal resources. This includes gathering and analyzing vast data sets over a longer period of time to enforce strategic decision-making.
While the process is usually thorough and labor-intensive, it allows businesses with the capabilities, vision, and scope to identify and gradually mitigate threats occurring in real-time. However, as TI helps identify all existing hosts of threats, it’s a partial solution that ultimately relies on additional program maturity and security investments to mitigate threats and derive value.
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As the evolution of cyber threats unnecessarily stretches security budgets to cover a continuously expanding threat landscape, it’s understandable why the security teams are constantly coping with the decision of how to best protect their business.
Digital Risk Protection is adaptable, flexible, and immediately actionable as a comprehensive solution, providing the operational focus required to quickly identify and mitigate external threats.
Also, DRP is not dependent on the maturity of the security program or the size of the business. In fact, depending on the severity of the individual threats, DRP is too flexible to piece security protection functions together, to continually add functions as the security strategy matures, mitigating the cost of entry and making it an increasingly manageable process to combat external threats.
Businesses across any size, maturity, or phase of security preparedness can easily derive value from DRP, regardless of the peculiarity of the external threats they focus on mitigating.
