Incidents that put employees, customers and assets at risk are rising at an alarming rate, disrupting business operations and testing the resiliency of organizations’ corporate security regardless of maturity level, size or industry.
In fact, 60 percent of C-level executives believe occasional or regular large-scale disruptions will likely continue to be the norm, making the case for robust corporate security support—like that of Dataminr Pulse—that helps safeguard the long-term success and security of an organization.
Having the right information in real time—that is, to be the first to know when an incident happens and maintain real-time visibility as it unfolds—and pairing that insight with action empowers corporate security leaders and their teams to:
- help save lives and ensure the safety of employees and assets
- minimize business disruptions
- stay ahead of emerging risks and high-impact events
- respond more quickly and efficiently
- proactively mitigate risks
Many corporate security leaders are already aware of and seeing these benefits at their own organization. However, we at Dataminr understand that they also want to be able to demonstrate, justify and realize the tangible value of real-time data in order to gain executive buy-in.
One of the ways they can get senior leadership on board with these investments is to showcase their return on investment (ROI). The good news is, we can now quantify the business benefits and value of Dataminr Pulse: a total of $1.17 million over three years—an ROI of more than 400 percent and a payback period of less than six months—according to a new study commissioned by Dataminr and conducted by Forrester Consulting.
The study explores the potential ROI businesses may realize by deploying Dataminr Pulse. The data is derived from interviews with key decision makers at global, multibillion-dollar businesses—those that have significant experience using our real-time alerting solution.
The study also identified several other benefits organizations experienced, but could not quantify. Here, we’ll take a look at the five quantifiable benefits that drive the ROI for Dataminr’s corporate security customers.
No. 1: Minimize or avoid business disruption
Business continuity planning is one of the biggest challenges organizations face today. Access to real-time information helps them to quickly identify and mitigate potential risks and disruptions before they occur or soon thereafter—allowing them to maintain business continuity and strengthen resilience.
The study found that organizations’ most actionable incidents are usually first identified by Dataminr—and sometimes only by Dataminr. And, that our critical real-time alerts are often delivered more than 45 minutes before other solutions and/or sources. This enables corporate security leaders to avoid or minimize the impact of business disruption, thus safeguarding their organization’s productivity and revenue generation.
For example, enterprises with mobile and field workers have enough lead time to relocate these employees when an incident occurs, thanks to our alerts and insights.
“We have over 90% of field personnel back at work,” said a chief security officer of a data analytics and technology company. “Without Dataminr we would probably have 70% or less back at work.”
No. 2: Avoid corporate security labor and reduce software costs
Most—if not all—businesses look for ways to minimize unnecessary costs of labor and the tools they need to employ. Effective technology solutions should empower modern corporate security teams to do more with less and improve efficiency by automating processes. The study found this is where the relevance of Dataminr’s alerting and our global coverage have proven to be highly valuable:
- Diminishes the overall alert volume and the number of false-positive alerts that threat analysts need to review
- Allows corporate security teams to reduce or eliminate other corporate threat intelligence software, which decreases their overall annual spend on security and risk management software by 10 percent
- Lets regional security teams only receive alerts specific to their locations, thus reducing the volume of alerts the central security team needs to review. This allows corporate security teams to provide 24/7 support to regional security without having to increase staffing
Overall, corporate security teams found our alerts help boost their total capacities by 20 percent.
No. 3: Reduce or avoid reputational damage
Uncoordinated responses to reputational crises have the potential to negatively and/or permanently impact a business’ reputation, and furthermore—its bottom line. Having a clear and early line of sight into potential crises helps corporate security and communications leaders to close the gap between an event’s onset and its discovery by key internal stakeholders. Their organization can then act faster and communicate more effectively.
Most importantly, the study found they can use Dataminr alerts to deliver more proactive responses, eliminating or reducing the magnitude of reputational damage and associated recovery cost by as much as 25 percent.
“Speed to action and control of the narrative is absolutely critical in this information age where things can get sensationalized or people can get misinformed very quickly,” said a crisis and risk manager in the manufacturing sector. “There is tremendous value in our knowing events within our industry almost immediately.”
No. 4: Reduce duplicative or unnecessary effort
Gaining senior leadership’s trust is particularly vital to security operations. It empowers corporate security and risk teams to make faster decisions, be more decisive in their response plans and reduce duplicative efforts. The latter often occurs when executives take action without conferring with their security and risk leaders.
And in order to gain that trust and build credibility, corporate security leaders need to demonstrate that they can identify, and respond effectively and quickly, to incidents before executives hear about them. I’m proud and excited to say Dataminr’s real-time alerts have been found to help these leaders deliver on that.
“I have sought to be the trusted advisor for five CEOs in my career,” said a chief security officer of a data analytics and technology company. “By enabling me to provide information that can’t be found anywhere else, Dataminr has made it easier to get that trust.”
Through the insights and context gleaned from our real-time alerts, these corporate security leaders can avoid unnecessary or redundant efforts by informing executives of incidents—as they occur and unfold—and the actions taken to mitigate risks.
This is evident as interviewees in the study cited historical incidents, where leadership would engage other internal or external resources to respond to crises—at times with some level of unnecessary escalation.
“Dataminr helps us as a company by eliminating any perceptions that security moves slow,” said the global head of security operations of an enterprise software company. “We are at a point where our leadership will not take any security-related actions on their own due to our very close relationship with them as their trusted advisors.”
No. 5: Avoid labor cost to provide coverage unavailable in other solutions
When a business enters and/or has exposures in an emerging-market country, it’s crucial that it deploys adequate tools to help with collecting, translating and consolidating data of the new market.
The global coverage from Dataminr’s 250,000+ public data sources and its translation capability enable corporate security leaders to do just that. They don’t have to augment their other tools or require more labor and cost to attain the desired coverage—a need study participants said they could not have met without Dataminr. The benefit for this capability alone is worth more than $122,000.
“Dataminr caught a major international incident off of a single tweet [in a foreign language and from an emerging-market country]. We were able to piece together that it was true via an industry-specific tool that we use,” said the crisis and risk manager of a manufacturing firm.
“We activated a team within five minutes of the tweet. The team was able to work on things for over an hour before mainstream media started covering it.”
Beyond these quantifiable impacts, organizations said the real-time information Dataminr delivers also yields several unquantified benefits that are just as—if not more—valuable. These include saving lives, protecting and maintaining employee wellbeing and satisfaction, and detecting COVID-19 outbreaks.
I believe this in-depth study serves as an important validation of the work we do at Dataminr and the ways in which we generate value for our enterprise customers. It’s an essential tool that will help corporate security leaders build strong business cases as they look to increase investments in their security and enterprise risk management programs.
Explore the full study to learn more about the ROI your company can realize by using our real-time alerting solution Dataminr Pulse.
