The Intelligence Cycle

Direction

You’ve probably read about our Intelligence Collection Plans, a practise that we go through with every new client as part of their onboarding process. This allows us to dig into your intelligence requirements.

We aim to understand:

• If there are any gaps in your current intelligence collection
• The geographical areas you operate in and any plans for future expansion
• Any properties or assets across the globe you’ll be monitoring
• Where your people and employees regularly travel
• If there are particular routes they take, accommodation that they stay in or places they visit
• Groups of interest, including activists, terrorists and extremists
• Historical threats to your business or the industry as a whole

Collection

Both our manual collection and our datamining development is guided by the information identified in your Intelligence Collection Plan to deliver relevant, timely and valuable data that’ll help you make better decisions.

Our source list, which is constantly growing, currently sits at around 12,500 active open-source channels. With new social media platforms and ways to communicate emerging all of the time, our analyst team are crucial for keeping on top of these trends and digging into areas our datamining can’t reach.

Processing

This phase of the intelligence cycle is key to turning information into intelligence and consists of the data being collated, evaluated, analysed and interpreted by our team of analysts.

Regardless of if the incident was identified by our team, or picked up by our datamining technology, each new piece of information is:

• Accurately geo-located
• Graded based on the reliability and credibility of the source
• Reviewed and verified to eliminate false information
• Analysed to determine patterns, trends of connections
• Structure in a way that’s easy to interpret and act upon

This ensures accurate data that’s not only insightful but practical, too.

Dissemination

The final stage of the intelligence cycle is the timely delivery of intelligence to those who need it.

Intelligence must be disseminated in a way that’s appropriate for the user, highlighting the key facts and our interpretation, comment or assessment.

This is why we emphasize the way incident data looks within our threat intelligence platform. Our award-winning user interface and powerful visualisation tools are vital to helping you digest the information at speed.

Alongside providing a clear collection plan, the intelligence cycle ensures that the data is not only relevant but reliable. And it’s one of the most important modules within our intelligence training programme too; driving consistency and quality across the team.