Real-time Alerting 101: How It Works and Why It’s a Business Imperative

From geopolitical instability and cyber attacks to severe weather and economic volatility, businesses worldwide are facing relentless risk. Due to this unpredictable and complex risk landscape, organizations have to contend with a myriad of multidimensional challenges and opportunities.

And many of those challenges come down to not having enough information—or not having it at the right time to make important decisions quickly. This is why enterprises need more than ever an early and clear line of sight into emerging risks and crises, with additional context to inform their decisions as an incident unfolds.

Dataminr’s real-time alerting solutions do just that. Our real-time alerts provide organizations with the earliest indications of critical events and potential threats, giving  them more time to assess and direct the right resources quickly and efficiently.

And with Dataminr’s ReGenAI, a new form of generative AI, security leaders and teams can gain rapid understanding of an evolving event so they can quickly determine the impacts on their organization, thus being better able to protect their employees, assets and reputation. 

Watch Video: Dataminr Launches ReGenAI

Who is real-time alerting for?

Real-time information benefits all organizations, regardless of industry or size. It ensures both security and business leaders receive the necessary information, in real time, to: 

• Swiftly assess whether a potential crisis will impact their organization
• Determine the safety of employees, customers and assets
• Gauge any enduring impacts on business continuity
• Quickly seek the right course of action

Not only does this enable security leaders and teams to stay ahead of crises and threats, it all but eliminates the chance that senior leadership will find out about potential crises or threats before they do. The worst scenario for any security team is to learn about a risk or event after it has occurred, causing delayed reactions or forcing the business to scramble to recover. And as critical events often trigger multiple layers of internal processes and triage, having real-time information ensures better outcomes.

This is true for security operations of all types and scales—small and nascent, large and established, centralized or decentralized.

Watch Video: Dataminr Pulse for Corporate Security: Solution Overview

How does real-time alerting work?

To understand how real-time alerting works, let’s take a look at our real-time alerting solution, Dataminr Pulse for Corporate Security. Think of it as your first layer of crisis response. Here are a few quick facts about what Pulse is and how it works:

• Integrated with ReGenAI, a new form of generative AI that distills multidimensional events into concise event briefs, then automatically updates and regenerates those briefs as events unfold. This ReGenAI harnesses Dataminr’s AI platform, which processes billions of units of public information daily
• Leverages over one million public data sources, including social media, news outlets, blogs, Internet of Things (IoT) sensors, audio transmissions, and the deep and dark web
• Has a diversity of global, regional and hyperlocal data in 150-plus languages and multiple formats to ensure our real-time alerts are as relevant and actionable as possible 
• Detects a vast range of early indicators of risk that are often difficult to manually search for and identify
• Delivers alerts in close proximity to the time at which events occur or risks emerge, often within seconds or minutes 

The goal of our real-time alerts is simple: to help you discover and contextualize the earliest, most comprehensive signals about high-impact events, threats and emerging risks. They are a catalyst for your security workflow, enabling you to maximize the time needed to assess risks and accelerate responses in critical, time-sensitive situations. In addition, the alerts are tailored to your industry, business needs and priority assets—ensuring you receive only the information that is most relevant to you. 

But that’s not all there is to real-time alerting. What makes Dataminr Pulse even more valuable is its geovisualization, risk management and two-way notification capabilities that help you operationalize and act on the alerts you receive. The result is improved safety and protection against potential risks, threats and major disruptions for: 

• Your people: Execs, employees, customers and contractors—regardless of their work location, be it from the office, at home or traveling on business 
• Facilities and events: Premises across the globe, including data centers, retail stores, warehouses, stadiums and arenas

And better operational resilience, which is a mission-critical priority for all organizations. 

Examples of businesses benefitting from real-time alerts

Airstrike on Iranian consulate 

In April 2024, Dataminr alerted customers to an Israeli airstrike targeting the Iranian Embassy in Damascus, Syria. The alerts were delivered almost an hour before major news outlets began their reporting. As the crisis evolved, customers were notified about the military launch in real time via dynamic event briefs that regenerated multiple times every hour, enabling businesses and governments to respond effectively to emerging risks. Watch video to learn more. 

Baltimore bridge collapse

When a cargo ship crashed into the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore, Maryland, and caused it to collapse in March 2024, Dataminr alerted customers to the incident within minutes of its occurrence and more than one hour ahead of major media reports. 

The real-time information provided our customers with a detailed, up-to-the-minute understanding of the extent of the damage, the impact on transportation routes and the progress of repair efforts, enabling them to adapt their supply chains to the situation and ensure the continuity of operations. Watch video to learn more.

Sierra Nevada risk management during AT&T network outage 

When telecom company AT&T suffered from a nationwide wireless network outage in February 2024, Sierra Nevada’s crisis management team was alerted as soon as it happened. A majority of Sierra Nevada workforce are AT&T users and thus were affected by the outage. 

Through Dataminr’s real-time information, the team knew about the disruption before other people in the company and was able to swiftly activate response plans to ensure employees could continue to have connectivity until AT&T service was restored. Read on to learn more. 

Why is real-time alerting a business imperative?

As businesses look to strengthen their security posture and business resilience to prepare for future crises, security leaders and teams must always remember that an unexpected event can happen anywhere, at any moment, significantly affecting people and business operations.

Forward-thinking companies understand the importance of AI-powered real-time information in staying ahead of and mitigating such unexpected events and unforeseen risks. They also recognize that real-time information is the catalyst for their business continuity functions and workflows.

We know that the risk landscape is expansive and ever-evolving. About 95% of Dataminr’s public data sources didn’t even exist when the company was founded in 2009. In the next decade, one can only imagine the number and types of public information sources from which we’ll be able to extract data.  

To keep pace with the changing information landscape, it’s vital that organizations have the right technology—which includes  having access to real-time data pulled from public sources as risks and events occur and unfold.

The challenges chief security officers (CSOs) face today—from geopolitical tensions and increasingly dangerous and unpredictable weather to staffing issues and more sophisticated attacks—are expected to continue in the near future. As they prepare to tackle them, CSOs’ number one objective will remain the same: To keep pace with new and emerging risks to keep their people and organizations safe—and ensure the business is resilient enough to withstand unforeseen risks.

This insight article has been updated from the original, published on June 21, 2022, to reflect new events, conditions and/or research.