How a Corporate Security Team Replaced 4 Vendors with One Platform

A corporate security team at a mid-market enterprise was spending over $180,000 per year across four separate security monitoring vendors. Each vendor solved one piece of the puzzle. None of them talked to each other.

This is a common story. Here’s how consolidation changed the economics and the operational quality of their monitoring program.

The Four-Vendor Problem

The team was running a social media monitoring tool for executive threat detection ($45,000/year), a dark web monitoring service for credential breach alerts ($38,000/year), a brand protection platform for domain and impersonation monitoring ($52,000/year), and a standalone investigation tool for ad hoc OSINT research ($48,000/year).

Each addressed a legitimate security need. But the operational overhead of managing four vendors consumed almost as much time as the actual threat analysis.

Where the Time Went

Alert formats were inconsistent. One vendor sent email-only alerts. Another required portal login. A third delivered weekly PDF reports. There was no common taxonomy — what one vendor called “high severity” another called “critical” and a third didn’t severity-score at all.

The team couldn’t correlate signals across vendors. A social media threat against an executive (vendor 1) from someone whose credentials appeared in a breach database (vendor 2) operating from a domain mimicking the company (vendor 3) would appear as three separate, low-priority findings in three separate dashboards. The convergence — which represented a serious multi-vector threat — was invisible.

Vendor management consumed approximately 15 hours per week: login rotation, report reconciliation, contract management, quarterly reviews, and the constant context-switching between interfaces.

The Evaluation

The team established requirements for a unified platform: coverage across social media (750+ platforms), dark web, and domain monitoring in a single interface. AI classification across physical security, cyber, and reputational risk domains — not just sentiment analysis. Entity-based pricing that didn’t penalize their 8-person team with per-seat costs. API and webhook alerting for SIEM integration. And multi-workspace capability for segregating executive protection intelligence from general brand monitoring.

The Consolidation

They selected DigitalStakeout at the XTI 100 tier — $2,420/month for 100 monitored entities and 12 user seats. Annual cost: $29,040.

Previous combined vendor spend: $183,000/year.

The savings weren’t the primary driver — though $154,000 in annual cost reduction got finance’s attention. The operational improvement was more significant.

What Changed Operationally

Unified alert stream. All threat classifications — social media threats, dark web findings, domain impersonation, credential breaches — appeared in a single prioritized alert queue. Classification was consistent across all data sources (14 risk domains, 225+ threat scenarios).

Cross-source correlation. The platform automatically connected related findings across data sources. The social media threat + credential exposure + domain registration scenario that was invisible across four vendors now surfaced as a correlated, high-priority alert.

Analyst time reallocation. The 15 hours per week previously spent on vendor management shifted to threat analysis. The team’s effective analytical capacity increased by nearly 40% without adding headcount.

Faster response. Real-time alerting replaced weekly PDF reports. The average time from threat detection to analyst awareness dropped from days to minutes.

The Results After Six Months

The team reported higher quality threat intelligence (correlated, classified, and prioritized), faster response times to genuine threats, significantly reduced analyst frustration and turnover risk, simplified procurement and vendor management, and a net savings of $154,000/year — which funded additional security program investments.

The consolidation wasn’t about finding a cheaper tool. It was about replacing a fragmented, inefficient tool stack with an integrated platform that produced better intelligence at lower cost.

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