What is strategic intelligence? 

Strategic intelligence is insight gained from multiple sources that informs future strategies, policies and plans.

This intelligence can be used by decision-makers in a variety of contexts to make informed decisions and allocate resources effectively, such as:

• Government tactical and strategic intelligence: Governmental organisations use strategic intelligence to formulate policy and military plans on national and international levels. It is often used together with tactical intelligence, which is more reactive and centres on managing and resolving ongoing incidents.
• Business tactical and strategic intelligence: Businesses use strategic intelligence to understand the competitive landscape, looking forward. Combined with tactical intelligence, which helps businesses operate effectively in the present, it can improve business performance and processes.
• Cyber threat and strategic intelligence: Strategic intelligence provides a big-picture view of cybersecurity threats, allowing organisations to understand the overall threat landscape and make strategic decisions to mitigate risks.

What is geopolitical or political intelligence?  

Political intelligence – or geopolitical intelligence – is meaningful information acquired from analysing data about political, social, and economic events and trends around the world.

This can include data about everything from trade relations, supply chains, sanctions and economic policies, to public health issues, political conflict, terror risks, cyberattacks and war.

Geopolitical intelligence helps organisations understand and manage political threats that impact the locations where they operate or hold assets.

This type of intelligence allows organisations to anticipate, rapidly respond to, and mitigate location-based risks to physical assets, personnel, and sensitive data, as well as understand how those threats could impact their organisation overall.

Who needs strategic and geopolitical intelligence? 

Geopolitical intelligence is primarily used for business and government/defence purposes:

Businesses. Geopolitical intelligence can help protect business assets and reputation, enable an organisation to react more quickly to market shifts, and identify areas for improvement. Examples of this include intelligence on an industry and key like information about market trends, product launches, C-Level leadership, mergers and acquisitions and stock price changes.

Government and defence. Government and defence organisations use geopolitical intelligence to view world events and critical actors more holistically. This enables them to anticipate both risks and opportunities, and protect locations, information, assets and high-profile employees worldwide.

Types of geopolitical and political intelligence and how it’s used

Governments, businesses and organisations need geopolitical intelligence in order to understand how political risks in other countries may threaten their own financial and operational stability.

Foreign policy and conflicts. Shifts in power in one region can have a significant impact on another, so having visibility on the changing power dynamics of key players and regions is critical. These insights help ensure organisations can act to reduce risk and achieve their overriding goals.

Cyberthreats. Threat actors are known to exploit natural disasters, pandemics, terrorism or other geopolitical events to launch cyber-attacks.

In addition, Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) activity is often driven by nation-states seeking to undermine another government. These weaponised cyber attacks target critical infrastructure like water, power, fuel and communications.

Geopolitical intelligence helps organisations understand the cyber risks facing them and make informed decisions about how to allocate resources and protect their interests.

Economic risk. Countries with struggling economies are more likely to experience political unrest and social instability. In turn, this can affect the safety of physical assets and personnel.

Economic instability in one region may also have a global impact on trade, spending and the currency market. Intelligence on economic trends enables organisations to spot potential risks and opportunities.

Societal risk. This includes factors like changing demographics, protests and riots, disease outbreaks and terrorism. These factors can directly affect the operations and personnel of organisations around the world.  Political intelligence can help shape strategic decisions such as finding alternate supply chains or increasing security around key assets and people.

Legal and regulatory risk. Global regulations governing health, the environment, data privacy, tax and more are changing all the time. Intelligence on these changes is directly relevant to organisations locally and globally, impacting where and how they operate.

How can you equip your organisation to utilise strategic and geopolitical intelligence? 

Silobreaker delivers the strategic and geopolitical intelligence needed to tackle issues that could compromise your organisation’s operations or threaten national security and stability in regions that impact you.

Our team can quickly ascertain the data you need to deliver on your specific geopolitical and strategic security intelligence requirements, fully automating the collection and aggregation of this information.

Silobreaker streamlines the whole intelligence cycle with a single workflow to compile, analyse, create reports, and communicate to decision-makers in a fraction of the time – in hours and minutes, not days.

All of this enables organisations to make confident, intelligence-led decisions that reduce risk, faster.