2020 Year in Review: Ontic by the Numbers

With the unexpected changes that 2020 brought across the physical security threat landscape, it’s no secret that clients depended on Ontic more than ever to keep people and assets safe — and make nothing happen. The platform was a clear MVP right up there with new banana bread recipes and closet cleanouts.

Let’s reflect on some numbers from the past year to see how our protective intelligence platform and team of experts helped protect over four million U.S. employees and countless customers — both in person and while remote.

Knowing More Unknowns

Ontic recently conducted a study on the State of Protective Intelligence and surveyed chief legal, compliance and chief security officers to learn how they have approached security in 2020 and challenges they expect in the coming year. 71% of Security, Compliance, and Legal Executives agree that in the past year the lack of unified protective intelligence has resulted in missed threats and physical harm to their company’s employees, customers and human assets.

Ontic was built to enable our clients in corporate security to proactively address physical threat management to protect employees, customers and assets. The platform provides a comprehensive view of potential threats while surfacing critical knowledge needed to do their job. Here are a couple of highlights of how we delivered on our mission of serving intelligence to those who protect in 2020:

• Completed 13 integrations with new data providers, and our client’s software and on premise hardware providers — ensuring Ontic is the comprehensive solution for all information to protect people and assets. Having this safety net of relevant threat data prompted our clients to find critical information, such as:
  • Over 2000 criminal activity hits related to persons of interest (POIs) were flagged in Ontic for our clients.
  • An average of 58 vehicle sightings per client belonging to persons of interest.
• Ever experienced FOMI? The Fear of Missing Information is real and we know that because 90% of Ontic clients log into the platform on a daily basis. We make it easy for our clients to quickly adopt our platform, and we take pride in knowing that they depend on the information they discover to perform their job and find the critical knowledge they need to keep people safe.

Without Ontic, these POIs would have been identified days or weeks later — if at all — giving these threat actors ample time to get in closer proximity to their target and pose a more immediate threat.

“When I have a time sensitive or high visibility case, I rely on Ontic to provide results as quickly as possible so I am providing my leadership with the most accurate and real time updates.” — Security Services Manager at a Fortune 100 Retail Company

Managing the (Seemingly) Unmanageable

78% of Security, Compliance, and Legal Executives share that the dramatic change and expansion of the physical threat landscape this past year has created an exponential increase in data and pre-incident indicators that are unmanageable. Trusting one source to present and surface critical knowledge has allowed our clients’ physical security teams to be the eyes and ears of their company versus being buried in the data. If you’ve ever had more browser tabs open than you can count along with multiple failed password attempts, you know the value of a unified source firsthand. Here are a few ways we’ve addressed this challenge:

• This breadth of data helped Ontic collect approximately 81K social signals per client, based on an average of 8 threat topics monitored. (most popular topics include: C-suite negative mentions and mentions of weapons, protests, cyberattacks)
• Based on these signals, clients were able to update POI profiles and create new entities to watch within the platform. On average, our clients typically:
  • 3x the number of entities that they actively monitor within 90 days of implementing the Ontic platform. A majority of these entities are dynamic; they are regularly updated with user inputs, automation, and Ontic research.
  • 964 Be on the Lookout (BOLO) reports were produced, taking only a couple of minutes to complete and saving security professionals hundreds or even thousands of hours of time. Without Ontic, creating a BOLO report typically takes 2-3 hours to gather information, assemble into a document, and manually verify it’s up to date. That’s a lot more time for security professionals to be focused on doing their jobs versus the administrative wrangling of creating shareable documents.
• And last but not least, we know that it may have felt hard to stay productive during a global pandemic. Maybe you’ve heard that masterpieces like Shakespeare’s King Lear and Newton’s Theory of Gravity were all created during quarantines. Well, our Product and Development teams took that inspiration to heart: in 2020, we listened to client feedback, executed on our product vision and innovated to incorporate over 120 new features and 575 product enhancements — and we’re just getting started!

Whether it’s something as big as preventing an act of violence on your watch, or as small as the number of Post-it Notes saved on an annual basis (we’re estimating anywhere from at least 5K to an infinite amount), we’re proud of how we have helped our clients keep their employees and customers safe in 2020.