Is your physical risk technology only acting from alert triggers?

Is your risk tech able to help you predict and prevent risks?

You only have to open your eyes and ears to recent global situations to realise that not everything happens in the blink of an eye. Some crises build slowly, not everything just happens in a moment. Most risk technologies, especially in the physical security space, have a few main modes in the way they utilise risk intelligence:

• Alerts ... where events 'trigger' a notification with some additional information. Some providers connect the dots with other alerts and provide some level of categorisation and severity.

• Advisories ... deeper analysis for a given location (area, city, region, country etc.) that might break down in to the different areas of threat (social, crime, health etc.). For the most these advise around safety and security for people in those localities and maybe written with the workforce as the intended audience.

• Reports ... higher focus on specific situations, such as geopolitical changes, upcoming threats etc. using more of a reasoned approach to provide historic trends and forecasting potential outcomes. Aimed at the security professionals, these can differ wildly from one provider to another on their focus and predictions.

However, for the most only alerts tend to be used by risk platforms to invoke policy (via workflows, actions etc.) and this may not be serving you as well as you may think. If you need to focus more energy on prevention and reduction of risk, it will be down to you to analyse the advisory and report data to implement policy and think about what scenarios you should try to simulation to test any potential mitigations. This is still not where we need to be ... or should be.

The future of security operations (and the GSOCs themselves) will need to absorb a wider set of intelligence, predictions and analysis to continually produce and improve a corporation wide risk register. Alerts will not help you predict and prepare ... you need a fundamentally different approach and mindset if you truly want to declare yourself as resilient.

Now we are in 2026 ... it is time to expect your risk software providers to support a more forward looking solutions, both in data and analytical capability.