Cowbell Achieves 90% Cost Savings With Recorded Future

Cyber insurance leader automates threat intelligence with Recorded Future, saving $9.5M+ in resources.

Goal

Automate and centralize threat intelligence to eliminate blind spots, accelerate risk decisions,without scaling headcount.

Challenge

Manual, fragmented data collection created intelligence blind spots and delayed critical risk decisions.

Outcomes

• $4.5-5M saved in infrastructure costs
• Fast, proactive security intervention
• Increased bandwidth for complex risk analysis
• Optimized resource allocation and efficiency through automation
• Enhanced policyholder protection and more competitive pricing

Challenge

Attackers increasingly use AI to automate exploit development, so even a minor delay in identification can lead to full-scale compromise within hours of a vulnerability disclosure. “It may be too late,” explains Cowbell’s Vulnerability Intelligence Lead Srinath Nandula.

Staying ahead requires identifying vulnerabilities early, getting that intelligence to decision-makers, and acting fast. But Cowbell's threat intelligence process was heavily manual, stitched together from fragmented open-source feeds.

“It slowed our work, both analysis and decision-making,” Nandula says. “Because we dealt with information from different sources, there were a lot of blind spots and it was hard to prioritize threats.”

Solution

Automation opens the door to faster action

Rather than trying to outpace attackers with a manual process, Cowbell set out to "find a trusted partner who could be a force multiplier," recalls Matthieu Chan Tsin, SVP and GM of Resiliency Services, one that could bring multiple intelligence functions into a single platform.

“Recorded Future checked all the boxes, not only because of the quality of its data, but also the team’s understanding of our intelligence needs,” Chan Tsin says.

The Recorded Future Intelligence Platform with the Cyber Operations (Threat Intelligence) product gave Cowbell the precision intelligence it needed. The Intelligence Graph^®, a continuously updated index of threats drawn from over a million sources, replaced the patchwork of feeds the team had been managing by hand. With Recorded Future AI analyzing that data, the era of manual collection and analysis was over.

Features like Advanced Query Builder, the Victimology Table, and Ransomware Actor Insights turned that intelligence into action, letting the team move faster than ever before.

Sharing intelligence with the help of AI

Automation didn't just speed up analysis. It changed how intelligence moves through the company.

“Recorded Future gave us the ability to create actionable outputs like reports and short summaries,” Nandula says. Contextualized reports and insights from Recorded Future AI put information directly in the hands of decision-makers.

The financial impact has been just as significant. "Recorded Future helped us reduce our threat intelligence costs by over 90%," Chan Tsin explains, savings that come from automating work that once required substantial staffing and infrastructure.

Before, answering stakeholder questions about the threat landscape meant days of research by the intelligence team. Recorded Future AI Sessions changed that. Authorized stakeholders across Cowbell can now query the Intelligence Graph in natural language and get actionable insights on their own, supporting faster, data-backed decisions.

Prioritizing what matters with custom alerting

A few hundred new vulnerabilities are disclosed every day, but as Nandula notes, “not all CVEs are important.”

With limited resources, his team needs to focus only on the vulnerabilities that actually matter to Cowbell. That's where Recorded Future's custom alerting, including playbook alerts, comes in.

“Vulnerability playbooks help us prioritize the specific technologies, behaviors, and industries relevant to our policyholders,” Nandula says.

Once Nandula defines those priorities, Recorded Future continuously monitors the latest intelligence on active exploitation and attacker intent and capabilities, alerting the team to relevant developments before they can impact Cowbell’s security. With monitoring offloaded and automated, Nandula and his colleagues can close the dozens of browser tabs they once relied on and stop spending time on CVEs that don't apply to their work.

Results

Smarter resource allocation

Had Cowbell continued tackling threat intelligence manually, keeping pace would have meant hiring significantly more specialist talent.

“Intelligence is a complex field,” Chan Tsin explains. “To be done well, the corporate structure has to understand what intelligence is and how it can be useful. At a tactical level, it requires a diverse, expert team.”

Instead, the Recorded Future Intelligence Platform acts as a force multiplier. Chan Tsin estimates it has saved Cowbell around $5 million on staffing alone, and closer to $9.5 to $10 million once infrastructure costs are included. Recorded Future spared Cowbell the massive headcount and expense typically required to make sense of such varied intelligence.

Staying ahead of evolving threats

The impact goes beyond the balance sheet. Recorded Future has enabled deeper, stronger analysis from the threat intelligence team and a broader understanding of threats, both within Cowbell and across the global landscape.

Most importantly, Recorded Future helps Cowbell stay on top of threats by tracking evolving multi-layered extortion campaigns.