Everbridge : The Value of Hyper-local Risk Intelligence

Every enterprise has a unique risk profile. This is based on a wide range of factors including geographic disposition, sector, the scope of security and resiliency plans, organizational size and structure, supply chain, and much more. Without the right customized tools tailored for your organization in place, it's challenging to stay ahead of threats and disruptions to your people, places, operations, and digital systems.

To create a resilient organization, robust risk intelligence and situational awareness are essential in managing and mitigating the impact of critical events. In fact, the entire Critical Event Management (CEM)process starts with risk intelligence.

What is Risk Intelligence?

Risk intelligence is the result of a systematic process wherein raw data is collected, analyzed, assessed, and transformed into relevantand reliable knowledge. This knowledge empowers decision-makers and operators to take action for the benefit of their organization.

Great, comprehensive hyper-local risk intelligence empowers your organization with a common operating picture that displays all reported risk events but alerts you only to relevant risks that impactyou. Only what's important.

At Everbridge, risk intelligence comes from a combination of thousands of trustworthy data sources and the work of a team of experienced analysts. Thedata sources provide a layered, contextual perspective for our expert analysts, who work in theRIMC (Risk Intelligence Monitoring Center)around the clock, to identifyincidents that may impact your company, your employees, and your assets.

A multi-tier filter process eliminates 'noise' and narrows down the number of source-based reports for analysts to review manually. Analysts and systems discard unrelated or less informative reports while allowing priority reports to pass through. Then, our team of analysts, with the help of some automated and semi-automated processes, manually evaluate the timeliness, accuracy, and location of each incident report. A robust set of reporting guidelines and tools assist analysts in helping to decide whether the incident should be reported to you. If so, you'll receive an alert.

Risk Intelligence is More Than AI, and it's Not Just Social Media Monitoring

It's essential to employ a hyper-local risk intelligence systempowered by humans and AI to reap the most value for your organization. AI can only do so much. If an organization is only using AI, they are likely to receive missing details, inaccurate and imprecise reporting, unreported events, and no path to robust integrations.

To that end, keep in mind that speed needs to be balanced with quality. It's better to give our team a little time to process the information so that you get more accurate, actionable information than a barrage of possibly meaningless alerts. Because of the error rate for AI-only-based risk intelligence, alert fatigue easily sets in. In addition, do you really want to make a major decision based on a tweet?

If there are, on average, 42,000 risk events per month, one can assume 10% of these events are incorrect/concerning due to inaccurate geocoding, misinformation/disinformation, or simple non-actionability. This shows that the number of incidents to disregard can be as significant as the ones to pay attention to.

'Hyper-Local' Means 'Hyper-Relevant'

By leveraging Everbridge's risk monitoring intelligence solution, you can capture (and adjust) your notifications based on your risk tolerance and the nexus of incident severity and proximity to identified assets. You'll also receive situation reports, special event briefings, and custom reports tailored to the business impact alerts may have on your organization or location.

Setting up your risk intelligence profile with Everbridge is simple:

• Determine the risk categories that may impact your organization
• Identify the assets you want to monitor

Then:

• Get alerted with actionable intelligence on hyper-local and locally global events, small or large, with the potential to impact your organization

The Importance of Hyperlocal Reporting for Critical Event Management (CEM)

Everbridge is able to capture and convey risk events that present localized disruptions - sometimes only a few city blocks, such as water main breaks, one-alarm fires, suspicious packages. In a major metropolitan area like Manhattan, Tokyo, or Paris, an operator typically doesn't need to know if that event occurred more than 10 blocks away from an asset. Solutions that drop the event in the city center or in a general neighborhood are not generating an actionable or relevant feed. They are creating noise and work for your team who need to now go do their own sense-making to determine if this reported event is likely to impact your organization.

The accurate and precise geolocation of a critical event is the lynchpin of Everbridge's Critical Event Management platform. The location an analyst chooses, whether it be a specific point, an administrative boundary, or a polygon, ultimately impacts which Everbridge customers get notifications. Analysts are expected to take great care in assessing, selecting, and clearly conveying a critical event's impact area. To do this, analysts are supplemented by process-driven technological solutions so that they have a world of context at their fingertips.

To clarify: it is useful to know that a disruptive event is occurring in Paris, but much more so to know that it is occurring in the 11th Arrondissement, or better yet to know that it is on Boulevard Voltaire, between Cite de Phalsbourg and Rue de Belfort.

Especially if your operations are right in that area, or perhaps more so if you have no interest in any activity in that neighborhood.

How hard can it be? Only a small fraction of social media signals contain precise geolocation data. Teasing out the exact location of an event can be challenging. Most solutions relying on AI or algorithm solutions rely on heuristics and best guesses that frequently place the event blocks if not miles from where the event actually occurred.

Our team uses a variety of tools and techniques to geo-orient the signal. We start with a simple yet sophisticated automated process: our tools evaluate a given signal's metadata to assess how three distinct gazetteer/mapping services place the event.

If all three services are in concert, we double-check the text of the signal to ensure the information in the text comports with the identified location and we move on to the next step in our validation process.

If there is no uniform consensus, our analysts dig deeper into the source material to identify landmarks, street names, addresses, business names, or any other indicator of the location.

In each of these instances, it is highly unlikely that systems relying solely on algorithms would be able to precisely and accurately place these risk events leaving operators and decision-makers with more work to do.

Everbridge is equipped to monitor activities around the globe wherever your company operates and wherever your people are. Let us help you identify threats that have the potential to become critical events that disrupt normal business operations and put your people at risk.