Putting National Security Threats in Context

Protective security professionals routinely deal with risks arising from a wide range of threats and work hard to mitigate these risks to their organisations. With others, we aim to help you keep up to date with an evolving threat picture, as well as providing advice and guidance on the risk management and mitigation tools available to protect your organisation. Understanding the threat is only the start of the process but sets an important context for decisions on how to protect your organisation. There are many sources of threat information but often this will take the form of some sort of threat assessment, either published by an official authority or provided by your own suppliers, contractors or partners.

For your wider business, though, the risks you manage are part of a much broader landscape of risks which are managed, tolerated and regulated in different ways. Comparing the threat assessments available on terrorism and state threats with other threats and risks may prove difficult where these draw use different terms, draw on different information sources and make different assumptions. This may include, for example:

• local and national crime information;
• safety issues and incidents;
• business data; and
• technical assessments.

It is important for you and your organisations to put the threats NPSA focuses on – terrorism and state threats – in this wider context to enable rounded, informed risk based decisions on protective security.

To help you get the best value from threat information and incorporate this as part of your organisation’s overall risk assessment process, today we have made public A Guide to Using Threat Assessments. While this is intended mostly to help organisations who receive government threat assessments, the general considerations and principles in this guidance may be helpful to your organisation when considering a much wider range of threat information from many differing sources.