In unpredictable situations, time is of the essence, and rapid responses can be the difference between managed outcomes and unmitigated disaster. As a result, increasingly corporate security units are adopting real-time alerts from publicly available datasets to enable them to assess risks, understand how the business will be affected, and create appropriate responses with maximum efficiency, says Jonathan Barrett, SVP EMEA and APAC at Dataminr.
While many geopolitical events can be challenging—and sometimes impossible—to predict, managing their impact through disaster recovery and business continuity planning is crucial for organisations to avoid a potentially drastic toll on staff and resources. One example is the explosion of Shell’s Vondelingenweg refinery. Almost 10 hours before mainstream news media issued reports on the explosion—the largest in Europe—the first real-time alerts were already informing corporate security teams overseeing business operations in the region. The facility would remain suspended for the following week, resulting in a price surge in gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel across north western Europe. Businesses that received early, real-time notifications about the event had additional time to adjust operations and better ensure their organisation was able to run as smoothly as possible in the face of fuel shortages.
Era of Big Data
Information has always been critical in risk management, but with the proliferation in data in recent years, real-time alerts have become a powerful tool for corporate security. Geo-political risk analysis once relied heavily on the study of historical incidents, but the latest technologies enable assessments to be dynamically updated in real-time as events occur. Real-time alerting solutions collect information and insights from publicly available data sets such as satellites, aircraft, shipping forecasts and drones. They analyse social media channels such as Twitter and Facebook and interpret the data stream using artificial intelligence (AI) methods such as machine learning and natural language processing.
The speed and volume of data have cut the timeframes for responding to crises from days to hours and even minutes, while, importantly, providing an organisation’s stakeholders access to the same information used for crisis communications. It is vital in such situations, for disparate teams to frame coordinated responses and implement plans effectively.
“Trip Wires”
Understanding what is relevant in the massive volume of public data can be a challenge. At a recent Dataminr event, more than 61 per cent of senior executives said their corporate security teams struggled to identify the most relevant data points on breaking incidents. However, real-time alerting tools now have a level of sophistication to cut through the mass of data and surface only actionable and relevant information that demands attention. Predetermined “trip-wires” can be laid around keywords and phrases, or set according to geography and industry, among other variables, to allow the technology to pinpoint the right signals and push alerts to users in real-time. Having access to a relevant and unbroken flow of information is a must for modern and effective corporate security teams, particularly in emerging markets where the geopolitical landscape can change rapidly.
Corporate resilience is critical to businesses and requires deft organisational knowledge of awareness to threats, as well as an early warning—via real-time alerts—across departments. The essential component of threat intelligence? To ensure you’re able to access the right information—both cyber and physical—at the right time, as there’s an intrinsic link between both components.
