What is situational awareness and how can it protect your people and assets?

Originally a military term, situational awareness is the concept of being aware of what is happening around you. Situational awareness has become an essential practice in organisations of all sizes where there are assets or people that must be protected.

Situational awareness is a proactive approach to minimising risk. By anticipating, identifying and understanding the impact of potential threats in your business surroundings, organisations can prevent loss of property, business, investments and in some instances, life.

Situational awareness is often regarded as a mindset. And whilst some may not consider themselves to be operating in high-risk or dangerous areas of the world, profound social instability, failure in governance and deepening polarisation between opposing political and cultural views, amongst many other things, now constitutes new threats in new places.

In order to be situationally aware and ‘master the mindset’, organisations and individuals alike must first accept the presence of threats in everyday life or business activities. There are a range of tools, platforms and services that can help companies in their conscious effort to be more proactive and monitor their surroundings.

In today’s data-driven environment, situational awareness is evolving. Experts and security professionals have access to more information than ever before; so not only can threat intelligence providers, like Intelligence Fusion, notify you of breaking incidents as soon as they occur, but we can also analyse and interpret historical data in order to track past trends and anticipate likely scenarios.

By having such a vast and comprehensive insight into your threat landscape, threat intelligence services can help organisations build a robust framework for tackling threats and mitigating risk. They can also, therefore, help you achieve a higher return on investment by lowering incident handling and response times.

An intelligence data feed from Intelligence Fusion can better your ROI even further with the unrivalled integrity of our data. We help businesses achieve fewer false alarms than any other threat intelligence service, with accurate geolocating to provide tactical value. We’ve also created extensive incident categories and filtering options so that users can cut through the noise and focus purely on the threats that are relevant to their organisation.

Risk is always a component of business and organisations want to ensure that any risk to their operations and assets is professionally mitigated, preventing loss of property, business, investments and convenience.

Accurate situational awareness can help businesses anticipate and prepare for any disruptions to business; maintaining day to day operations in challenging or uncertain circumstances. By expecting potential threats, and understanding the impact of each one, situational awareness can help you develop an effective plan of action that minimises risk and cost when the scenario plays out. The risk management strategy should be easily implemented as soon as you are notified of the threat’s presence.

This is why the integrity of the threat intelligence, and the speed in which the incident alerts are delivered, is instrumental to decision makers, particularly when managing real-time emergency situations.

Your people are your organisation’s most valuable asset. Ensuring their safety is not only part of your Duty of Care obligations as an employer, but it’s also beneficial to your business activities and reputation.

Global business is growing rapidly and corporate travel is becoming a common and more frequent requirement for many roles, and so, employers must be aware of where there people are at all times, monitoring any potential threats that they may be exposed to. Yet with threats so numerous and varied across the world, many organisations are being overwhelmed – and it’s here where a threat intelligence solution can play a pivotal role.

Whilst there aren’t many threat intelligence providers that offer an all-encompassing solution to monitoring potential threats, Intelligence Fusion is an exception. Many security departments and risk managers purchase several different data feeds in order to try and create a piece of technology that meets their requirements. However, an intelligence data feed from IF offers the world on one platform.

Our global coverage leaves no stone unturned; collating intelligence from a spectrum of sources, we report on threats and risks of every nature allowing organisations to have a complete view of the world and the environments in which they operate. We collect almost 10,000 incident reports per month (and increasing), so that no matter where in the world your people or assets are located, IF’s intelligence data feed can enhance your situational awareness and help drive decisions based on emerging risks.

If you’d like to find out more about intelligence data feeds and the benefits that they can have on your business beyond situational awareness, we recommend reading our comprehensive Guide to Intelligence Data Feeds available to download for free here.