Announcing Threat History: Better Insight on Past Events to Anticipate and Prepare for Future Risks

With the threat landscape continuously evolving, security leaders rely on access to real-time threat information to help them identify risks to their organization and guide decision-making around how to respond. But it’s equally as important to analyze past events, which help identify and prepare for the likelihood of that same event happening again in the future.

That’s why AlertMedia today announced the general availability of Threat History, a new product feature within its Threat Intelligence solution aimed at helping security and operations teams better anticipate and prepare for unplanned events.

Threat History leverages customizable visualizations and reports of historical intelligence data curated by AlertMedia’s team of in-house analysts to enable organizations to conduct better post-event analysis, deliver cadenced executive reporting, and perform more frequent risk assessments.

Why We’re Introducing Threat History

Over the past year, we’ve seen an increase in both the number and severity of threats facing organizations. At the same time, the pandemic put a magnifying glass on an organization’s ability to recover in the face of disaster and disruption. To continue to survive in an ever-evolving environment, organizations need tools to help them better anticipate what events might face their business and their people in the future.

AlertMedia’s Threat Intelligence provides real-time, verified information about critical events close to employees, locations, or company assets—drastically accelerating response times and ensuring those impacted can make informed decisions. Our highly trained and experienced team monitors world events 24/7, identifies those that are most critical, assesses their impact, and helps our customers activate a response. With the addition of Threat History, we’ll now deliver a comprehensive solution to both accelerate the identification of current risks to your organization and a look back in time to see which risks you previously faced.

“Until now, understanding what has happened in our business locations and planning with historical risks in mind has been a very manual multi-source process,” said Blane Moore, Vice President of Enterprise Continuity, Security and Safety, Fairway Independent Mortgage Corporation. “AlertMedia has once again ‘upped the bar’ with the Threat History feature, allowing my team to easily access the data we need to understand how previous threats impacted our hundreds of locations, helping us plan our risk strategy and threat assessments for future risks, as well as ensuring the safety of our employees.”

We developed Threat History to help businesses better understand and address threats, in all their forms, today and in the years ahead. Threat Intelligence combined with Threat History gives security teams the ability to spot predictive indicators of risk and exposure to their people and assets and better understand the overall probability that they may be impacted by future threats.

How Threat History Can Help Your Organization

Over the past few years, the role of global security operations centers (GSOC) has changed. No longer are GSOC teams solely responsible for incident management and response, but rather an organizations’ complete security posture from top to bottom. From monitoring an increasing amount of data for frequent threat assessments to concerning themselves with the safety and security risks of employee travel, GSOCs do it all. And they increasingly need access to best-in-class technology that can help them do their jobs faster and more efficiently.

But even if your organization doesn’t have a GSOC, your security teams will find Threat History helpful in the following ways.

Faster post-event analysis

Post-event analysis is a crucial step in emergency management. But without the right information and context, improving your organization’s future response and recovery can be time-consuming and inefficient. Threat History provides security teams access to “inactive” or past threats alongside contextual information such as what happened, when the organization and its people were alerted, and possible exposure of people and locations so that teams can more quickly understand what worked and what didn’t, and making it easier to update future emergency response plans.

Improved security reporting

For security teams, reporting is a crucial piece to improving their organization’s overall security posture. With Threat History, teams can more efficiently deliver daily, weekly, or monthly reports on events that may have been impactful to the business, security leadership, or specific teams.

Additionally, Threat History’s improved reporting can help security teams secure budget approval for new security solutions by demonstrating the breadth and depth of threats they monitor and support in addition to just how many threats faced the business in the year or months prior.

Enhanced executive and employee business travel insights

While business travel isn’t expected to make a full recovery for the next few years, the Global Business Travel Association still anticipates we’ll see a surge in demand in 2022. But with frequently updated travel restrictions and geopolitics, security teams need the ability to assess recent threat activity in an area before sending an employee or executive on a company-sponsored trip. Using Threat History, security teams can better understand the frequency and duration of specific threats in a given region and outline those risks to executives and travelers.

More efficient risk assessments

Threat History aids and improves security and operations teams’ ability to perform annual risk assessments that examine physical and infrastructure risks to an organization, breaking data down by region, facility type, and more. These are used to determine whether to scale up or down security spending, adjust business continuity plans, and even whether it makes sense to expand to new regions. Threat History can also provide historical data for risk assessments to help identify trends in the occurrence of incidents for business disruption insurance policies or negotiating new annual rates.

Key Features of Threat History

In addition to the use cases outlined above, key features of Threat History include the following:

Visualized map and export

The Threat History visualized map and export feature provides companies with a visualization of all threats that happened in a certain region and timeframe, with the option to filter by category, severity, and keywords of interest. Companies can then export a report of all threat summary information, including location coordinates to support internal analysis.

Customizable reporting

In addition to the reporting options available within Threat Intelligence that curate need-to-know intel summaries to inform an organization’s response, Threat History further expands on those capabilities to provide teams with the ability to pull a customized report based on all locations and threat categories of interest in a certain timeframe.

Advanced search

For teams looking to produce post-analysis situation reports based on a singular incident or topic, past events can be searched by keyword, such as “fire” or “road closure”. Keyword search also helps security teams narrow in on specific topics of interest for executives or those who might be working on individual projects that require an understanding of risk associated with the project.

In Conclusion

AlertMedia’s Threat Intelligence combines the power of a highly trained and experienced team monitoring world events 24/7 with a modern emergency communication system designed to help you reach your people fast when nearby threats necessitate action. Now, with the addition of Threat History, security teams will gain greater visibility into previous critical events that threatened their organization to aid in planning, conducting post-mortems, and delivering improved reporting. To learn more, request a demo.