The Next Step: What Can a Business Do With Open Source Data?
Business leaders should have access to all relevant information before making decisions. This ensures insightful, educated choices — not short-sighted mistakes.
And in the twenty-first century, those insightful choices need to include data derived from the Internet.
We just wrote a post explaining how open source intelligence (OSINT) solutions help companies around the world achieve greater insights by harvesting data. Now, we’re going to explain what your business can actually do with the open source data we harvest.
Challenges Solved with OSINT
OSINT technologies essentially filter out relevant information from the mountain of data available online.
It might be hard for you to imagine social media posts and news articles being relevant to your business, but we’ve helped financial groups, insurance firms, and risk management professionals, use OSINT for their strategic plans.
Let’s consider how someone in the pharmaceutical industry might use OSINT solutions to solve a major challenge: online fraud.
Pharmaceutical Fraud
The first step we take is to gather all of the information we know about the brand — this includes things like product names (including the different names a drug might go by in different regions), prices, authorized distributors and all of their information and any reports of previous counterfeit incidents.
Next we’ll find out which products the pharmaceutical company is most worried about, meaning which drugs have the highest counterfeit profit margin, and how much of a pricing variance there should be.
Once the business shares this information, we can start building an OSINT solution for this pharmaceutical company to minimize online fraud.
The program will include rules to ensure we categorize all open source data that contains the product names or model numbers — regardless of language or region. We can also build a pricing model to red-flag prices that don’t match what the company provided us.
The automation starts with filtering out legitimate distributors, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Things get really technical when we automate the identification and development of source lists, aggregating information from relevant sites, which over time generates millions of documents all structured for analytics.
Our program searches those millions of documents for the number of sites selling our pharmaceutical company’s products, broken down by location, frequency, price point, payment processor, sites linked by phone number or email address. The criteria here are nearly unlimited.
The best part?
Our pharmaceutical company hasn’t spent one second of time manually reviewing anything yet.
Find Your OSINT Solution
It’s hard to imagine so much work being done without overwhelming your employees with additional tasks, but OSINT solutions assist your business — not complicate it.
If you want to find out how we could automate and improve your business operations with OSINT solutions and data harvesting, contact us. We’re here to explain how the process works for your specific industry, so you can make well-informed choices and protections.
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