5 Questions to Ask Before Choosing a DRP Platform

The DRP market is crowded with vendors making the same claims. “AI-powered.” “Comprehensive coverage.” “Real-time alerts.” “Dark web monitoring.”

Strip away the marketing and you’ll find that platforms differ on dimensions vendors don’t volunteer in the first meeting. These five questions expose those differences fast.

1. What Data Do You Actually Collect — And How?

This is the question that makes vendors uncomfortable, because the honest answer reveals their architecture.

First-party collection means the vendor operates its own crawlers, API integrations, and monitoring agents that gather data directly from source platforms. They control what gets collected, how often, and at what depth.

Third-party collection means the vendor licenses data from aggregators or data brokers and adds a classification layer on top. They don’t control the collection — they’re buying someone else’s output and repackaging it.

The difference matters in practice. First-party collection is faster (no intermediary delay), more controllable (the vendor can adjust collection parameters for your use case), and more accountable (if data is missing, there’s one throat to choke). Third-party collection introduces latency, coverage gaps determined by someone else’s priorities, and quality uncertainty the vendor can’t directly resolve.

What to listen for

“We aggregate from multiple data providers” = third-party. “We operate our own collection infrastructure” = first-party. Both approaches can work, but you should know which one you’re buying — because it determines who’s accountable when intelligence is late or incomplete.

2. How Do You Classify Threats?

This is where most evaluations go wrong. Buyers focus on data sources (how many platforms do you monitor?) when they should focus on classification (what do you do with what you find?).

Raw data isn’t intelligence. A platform that surfaces 500 mentions of your CEO’s name per day and dumps them into a queue has given you a search result, not a threat assessment. The value comes from what happens between collection and alert.

Ask to see the taxonomy. How many risk domains does the platform classify against? How many specific threat scenarios? Can you map their taxonomy to your organization’s threat model?

A vendor with a published taxonomy — physical security threats, cyber risk indicators, reputation attacks, crime risk, legal exposure, environmental risk, and more — gives you something concrete to evaluate. A vendor whose classification is a black box labeled “AI-powered” is asking you to trust without verifying.

The red flag

If a vendor says “our AI handles classification” but can’t show you the categories, can’t explain how the model was trained, and can’t demonstrate how a specific threat scenario gets routed versus discarded — that’s keyword matching with a neural network wrapper. Not threat intelligence.

3. What Does Your Pricing Scale With?

Pricing models create incentives. The wrong model creates incentives that work against your security objectives.

Per-seat pricing makes every new user a budget event. Teams limit access to control costs. Intelligence stays locked in one or two accounts instead of flowing to the field. Security firms hit a growth ceiling because each new client requires proportionally more seats.

Entity-based pricing scales with monitoring scope — the people, brands, domains, and facilities you’re protecting. All users access the same platform at no additional per-user cost. Your monitoring scope drives the price, not your org chart.

The hidden cost question

Beyond the sticker price, ask about per-integration fees for SIEM or SOAR connections, API access charges, professional services requirements for onboarding, premium tiers for features that should be standard, and historical data retention limits. A “$50K/year” platform that requires $30K in professional services and $15K in integration fees is a $95K platform.

If the vendor won’t publish pricing on their website, they’re optimizing for negotiation leverage, not buyer transparency.

4. How Long Until We Get Our First Classified Alert?

Time to value is the most underrated evaluation criterion in DRP procurement.

Enterprise DRP deployments historically take 4-8 weeks of professional services — scoping calls, entity configuration workshops, integration sprints, UAT testing, analyst training. During those 4-8 weeks, you’re paying for a platform that’s producing zero intelligence. If you’re evaluating alternatives because your current vendor is in transition or was just acquired, that’s 4-8 weeks of zero coverage during a period of elevated uncertainty.

The question isn’t just “how long does deployment take?” It’s “what am I getting during week one?”

Platforms designed for rapid deployment let security teams configure monitoring entities, set alerting thresholds, and begin receiving classified intelligence within days. Not weeks. Not after a professional services engagement. Days.

What to watch for

If the vendor’s answer involves “implementation partner,” “professional services engagement,” or “typical 90-day onboarding,” you’re buying enterprise complexity, not operational speed.

5. Who Owns the Product Roadmap?

This question mattered before. After four years of DRP market consolidation, it’s essential.

The list of acquired DRP platforms keeps growing: ZeroFox (Haveli PE, 2024), Digital Shadows (ReliaQuest, 2022), IntSights (Rapid7, 2021), PhishLabs (Fortra, 2021), Proofpoint (Thoma Bravo, 2021), Liferaft (Securitas, 2026). In each case, the acquired platform’s independent development velocity slowed or stopped as engineering resources were redirected to serve the acquirer’s strategic priorities.

Ask directly: Is the company independently owned? Has it been acquired or taken private in the past three years? Who controls the product development roadmap — a product team focused on this platform, or a parent company portfolio team balancing competing priorities?

Why this matters for your three-year plan

DRP platforms are not commodity purchases. They become embedded in your security operations — alerting workflows, SIEM integrations, analyst processes, reporting structures. Switching costs are real. If you select a vendor today that gets acquired next year and deprioritized the year after, you’re back to evaluation in a market with fewer independent options.

Vendor independence doesn’t guarantee product quality. But it guarantees that the team building the product is focused on building the product — not on integration mandates from a parent company.

The Question Behind the Questions

These five questions share a common thread: they test whether the vendor is building a product for your security team’s operational needs, or building a business for their investors’ financial outcomes.

Both can coexist. But when they conflict — and post-acquisition, they always conflict — the investor’s priorities win.

Choose vendors whose interests are aligned with yours for the duration of your contract, not just through the first renewal.

---

DigitalStakeout is independently held, publishes pricing, deploys in days, and publishes the full classification taxonomy. Compare alternatives or see it live.