How a Major UK Government Organization Enabled “Defend as One” Through Unified Threat Intelligence with Cyware

A major UK government organization, at the center of a public sector and industry cybersecurity ecosystem, was responsible for sharing timely, relevant threat intelligence in support of the UK Government Cyber Security Strategy’s “Defend as One” initiative. Manual processes, fragmented systems, and one-way communication made this sharing slow, inconsistent, and difficult to scale. To meet both operational and compliance requirements, the organization turned to Cyware to modernize its threat intelligence and collaboration model. The result was a move from fragmented distribution to real-time, bi-directional intelligence sharing – strengthening collective defense across the ecosystem.  

The Reality of Defending an Ecosystem  

Operating as a critical hub within the “Defend as One” initiative, a major UK organization is responsible for collecting, analyzing, and distributing large volumes of threat intelligence to a broad range of industry dependents – each with different levels of cyber maturity and risk exposure.  

For this organization, intelligence sharing is both a security necessity and a compliance requirement. However, before Cyware, its existing processes were manual and decentralized. Threat data lived in disparate systems, intelligence was distributed largely via email, and feedback loops were limited.  

As such, analysts spent significant time aggregating, formatting, and circulating intelligence. That left less time for collaboration or strategic analysis. Awareness among stakeholders was inconsistent, and responses were often delayed.  

When Fragmented Sharing Undermines Collective Defense 

For this organization, the challenge wasn’t a lack of capable analysts or threat data. It was the difficulty of sharing the right intelligence with the right stakeholders at the right time – at scale. 

The organization was collecting threat data, but failing to consistently normalize, enrich, or tailor it for recipients. Intelligence largely flowed outwards, with limited ability for stakeholders to respond, contribute context, or share what they were seeing on the ground. This one-way model limited shared situational awareness and weakened the overall value of the intelligence being produced.  

As many public sector teams experience, fragmented sharing creates friction at every step. Analysts spend time manually compiling information. Stakeholders receive intelligence that may be useful, but not always timely or contextualized. Feedback loops are slow or non-existent.  

In the “Defend as One” model, this fragmentation is a structural risk. Collective defense depends on consistent, contextual, and continuous information exchange across organizations. Static reports and email-based distribution cannot support the coordination required at a national scale.

The Role of ISACs in National-Level Threat Sharing

Information Sharing and Analysis Centers (ISACs) play a critical role in collective defense. They operate as trusted intelligence hubs across industries—facilitating structured threat exchange, analysis, and coordinated response among members.

Globally, mature ISACs manage large-scale ingestion of structured feeds, normalize intelligence into standardized formats (such as STIX/TAXII), and enable secure collaboration across public and private sector stakeholders. Because they sit at the center of industry ecosystems, ISACs must operate platforms that are scalable, secure, interoperable, and capable of bi-directional sharing.

For government organizations evaluating modernization strategies, ISAC technology choices carry significant weight. If a platform can support the operational demands of major global ISAC communities, it signals proven capability at the ecosystem scale. 

Why ISAC Validation Mattered 

To assess its options, the organization consulted its industry ISAC. It was discovered that, as with all major global ISACs, the ISAC was already using Cyware to manage large-scale threat intelligence analysis and collaboration.  

Seeing Cyware operating successfully within trusted intelligence-sharing communities proved to the organization that the platform could support Defend as One requirements. The ISAC formally recommended Cyware, prompting a full evaluation.  

Following a market analysis, Cyware emerged as the only platform capable of delivering unified threat intelligence management, sharing, and collaboration at the scale required.  

Unifying Threat Intelligence and Collaboration 

Having chosen Cyware as its vendor, the organization opted for Cyware Intel Exchange and Cyware Collaborate to support day-to-day operations. These products enabled the team to: 

• Ingest structured commercial feeds and unstructured intelligence from government and industry sources 

• Automatically normalize and enrich incoming data 

• Curate threat intelligence into collections aligned with stakeholder needs 

Cyware Intel Exchange provided a consolidated research environment for analysts, while Cyware Collaborate enabled real-time, bi-directional communication – closing the gap between intelligence producers and consumers. Cyware worked closely with the organization’s internal teams to build use cases, workflows, and rules aligned to operational and compliance requirements.  

From One-Way Distribution to Real Collaboration 

The organization experienced the impact immediately. Prior to adopting Cyware, intelligence sharing was largely transactional. With Cyware, stakeholders gained access to a fully branded collaboration platform via the web and mobile devices, driving increased engagement.  

Instead of passively receiving alerts, stakeholders could interact with intelligence in real time, ask questions, share observations, and provide feedback directly to analysts. Self-serve analysts replaced static reports, enabling intelligence to be consumed in ways that matched operational needs.  

This shift strengthened trust, improved satisfaction, and created shared situational awareness across the “Defend as One” ecosystem.  

Business Impact and Broader Outcomes  

After implementing Cyware, the organization spent less time manually distributing threat intelligence and more time collaborating on findings. It could curate industry-specific intelligence at scale, enable bi-directional sharing across government entities, and support faster, more coordinated responses.  

Critically, other government organizations chose to participate in the collaborative threat-sharing effort as a direct result of the platform’s success, expanding the collective defense community and increasing its community.  

Conclusion 

This organization’s journey shows what “Defend as One” can look like in practice.  

By replacing manual, fragmented processes with unified threat intelligence management and real-time collaboration, it eased compliance and turned intelligence sharing into an operational capability.  

As threats continue to move at machine speed, public sector organizations cannot rely on static reports or siloed reports. Real resilience comes from intelligence that is shared, contextualized, and continuously refined – across the entire ecosystem.  

You can find out more about how Cyware supported this government organization’s intelligence sharing efforts in the full case study.  

To see how Cyware can help your organization operationalize threat intelligence and enable real-time collective defense, book a demo today. 

Frequently Asked Questions

1. What is Collective Defense in a cybersecurity context?

Collective defense is a collaborative strategy where organizations across both public and private sectors work together to identify, understand, and respond to cyber threats. Instead of every entity defending its own perimeter in isolation, they share real-time data and resources. This creates a network effect where a threat detected by one member informs and protects the entire community.

2. How does threat intelligence sharing support the "Defend as One" initiative?

The UK Government’s Defend as One strategy relies on the principle that the government’s collective data is more powerful than the sum of its individual parts. Threat intelligence sharing operationalizes this by ensuring that localized insights (like a specific malware strain seen in one department) are instantly normalized and distributed to all other departments, preventing the same attack from succeeding twice.

3. What is Unified Threat Intelligence Management?

Unified threat intelligence management is a centralized approach that consolidates disparate data streams, including commercial feeds, open-source intelligence, and internal alerts, into a single, cohesive operational view. By automatically normalizing and enriching fragmented data, it eliminates manual silos and transforms raw information into actionable insights. This enables organizations to move beyond passive data collection to a bi-directional ecosystem where intelligence is shared, analyzed, and integrated across security stacks in real time, ensuring a faster and more coordinated response to evolving threats.

3. What are the risks of manual or one-way intelligence sharing?

Traditional methods, such as sending PDF reports via email, create several bottlenecks:

• Latency: By the time a report is read, the threat may have already evolved.

• Lack of Context: One-way flows don't allow recipients to ask questions or provide feedback.

• Scalability: Manual processes can't keep up with the thousands of indicators of compromise (IOCs) generated daily, leading to analyst burnout and missed signals.

4. What is bi-directional intelligence sharing, and why is it important?

Bi-directional sharing means that information doesn't just flow from a central authority down to stakeholders; it also flows back up. When a stakeholder can report an observation or upvote the relevance of an alert, it enriches the intelligence for everyone. This creates a feedback loop that helps central analysts prioritize the most critical threats based on what is actually happening on the ground.

5. How does a unified platform help with regulatory compliance?

Major government organizations often have legal mandates to protect data and share threat information. A unified platform like Cyware automates the logging, normalization, and distribution of this data. This provides an auditable trail of intelligence activities, ensures that sensitive data is handled according to pre-defined workflows, and proves that the organization is meeting its "duty to share" under national security strategies.