In today’s world, safety and business teams face an unprecedented set of challenges. Identifying emergent threats and communicating faster during emergencies and other critical events is crucial to protecting your employees and your business.
In this Q&A, Continuity Insights sat down with Sara Pratley, Vice President of Global Intelligence with AlertMedia to discuss threat history and using this data to better prepare for future business-critical emergencies.
Can you give us an overview of Threat History?
Threat History is a new feature within our Global Threat Intelligence solution that provides businesses with access to verified, historical data about a wide range of physical threats in any location of interest around the world. At a high level, this information gives organizations the ability to better anticipate and prepare for unplanned events through improved post-event reporting and risk assessment.
Features within AlertMedia’s Threat History include a customizable map that offers a visualization of a company’s people, locations, and threats that happened in a particular region and timeframe; enhanced reporting capabilities that include the option to export a raw data report of all threat summary information; and the option to search by keyword to narrow in on specific topics of interest.
How is looking at past events useful to Business Continuity & Security leaders?
Many of our customers have expressed how challenging it is to quantify risk around their locations because this data is typically piecemeal and spread across a range of disparate systems, making reporting cumbersome. Our Global Threat Intelligence solution already helps organizations identify and respond to emergent threats near their people and business more effectively with actionable, analyst-verified intelligence. However, the jobs of Business Continuity and Security teams don’t stop at risk identification. There is growing pressure to better prepare for future threats as well. By providing these teams with access to verified historical data, they can more quickly and easily pull weekly security briefings for leadership teams, improve post-event reporting and analysis, and evolve their response plans based on trends that may have occurred in the past.
What are some of the ways organizations have indicated they plan to use Threat History data?
We’ve found four use cases to be of primary interest to organizations, but perhaps the most pressing in today’s climate is the ability to perform post-event analysis. Threat History gives security teams more contextual information about what happened during a given timeframe, when the company was initially alerted, the location of the event, and any possible exposure to their people and locations.
In addition to post-event analysis, organizations find Threat History particularly useful in delivering daily, weekly, or monthly reports on events that may have been impactful to the business. Similarly, organizations can use Threat History to conduct better travel risk assessments. Before sending an executive team member to a new region, security teams can assess recent activity in a given area to determine whether it’s safe for travel.
Lastly, organizations can use Threat History to perform annual risk assessments that examine physical and infrastructure risks to an organization, breaking data down by region, facility type, and more. Business leaders can then use these assessments to make more informed decisions, such as where additional investment might be required to protect a particular facility or whether one location is less likely to introduce risk than another.
What can you share about future use cases and/or capabilities your team is exploring?
From a use case perspective, we believe Threat History can play a more active role in insurance negotiations. For example, as severe weather events continue to increase in size and severity, organizations might need to reconsider their business insurance policies. Threat History could help identify trends in the occurrence of incidents to negotiate better annual rates during the time of renewal.
In ters of future capabilities, we also plan to rolling out expanded reporting features later this year. In addition to pulling raw threat data from the map view of Threat History, organizations will also be able to pull reports from a list view, which will make the categorization of incidents more efficient. There are some other features up our sleeve as well, so be sure to stay tuned to find out.
Learn more threat history and download the new Global Threat Intelligence Guide at AlertMedia.
