Enhance your Decision Making by using the Intelligence Cycle

What is the intelligence cycle? In the most basic terms, the intelligence cycle is an important step that we can utilize in most security organizations to convert raw data into polished intelligence for judgment. The procedure is a five or six-step way of imparting clarification to a changing and unclear situation. In this blog post, we are going to cover these steps of the cycle of intelligence so that we can enhance decision-making capabilities more efficiently.

Benefits of intelligence cycle

Among the several advantages of its use are greater good judgment of the surroundings and the demarcation of clearly understood task attempts. Furthermore, the intelligence cycle is also ongoing and does not need complete mastery of one phase before moving on to the next. In reality, the cycle works best when the result of one phase feeds the next while also improving the prior.

Let’s have a look at the steps in intelligence cycle:

• Requirements/Planning: The requirements phase entails identifying, prioritizing, and refining uncertainties about the operating environment that the security team must address in order to achieve its goal. It contains critical duties relating to the entire intelligence effort’s organization and management. The outcomes of this stage are not usually dictated by authorities, but by characteristics of the user’s activities and the intelligence player’s skills. As shortcomings in information are discovered and highlighted, analysts will move on to determining how to fix these holes and developing a plan for how they will obtain the data they require. This will then lead to the collection phase.

• Collection: That’s the phase when the majority of the hard labor takes place. It is also the phase at which current developments in artificial intelligence (AI) and automation have altered the playing field. The collecting task includes web searches, surveys, determining sources, and tracking. New technologies automate information search, organization, and presentation in user-friendly interfaces.

• Processing: Data is sifted and examined in this stage to discover pieces of information that have the following elements:

  • Timely: Can be related to the specific issue in terms of timing.

  • Actionable: Recommends or leads to appropriate remediation.

  • Consistent: Reduces doubt about a problem. This is the stage at which the security expert’s abilities are most important since the capacity to connect data with concerns necessitates a thorough awareness of weaknesses, their indicators, and remedies.

• Analysis and production: This is the process of studying, assessing, understanding, and combining raw data and information to create final intelligence products for existing or expected goals and uses. The products are designed with the demands of the stakeholders in mind. Following the completion of the analysis, it may be determined that more collecting effort is necessary to fill in some data that was not contained in the first collection. The goal is for this product to offer the stakeholder an overview of the topic area so that they may make judgments from the existing facts.

• Dissemination: Ideally, the analysis would result in remedies or groups of solutions aimed to avoid problems. These options, whether policies, scripts, or configuration modifications, must be presented to the appropriate persons before they can be implemented.

• Utilization/Feedback: Once intelligence has been shared, more questions may be asked, leading to increased preparation and guidance of further gathering activities.

Experts evaluate the effectiveness of their inputs and outputs at each stage of the cycle, but specifically soliciting feedback from users is critical to enabling the security staff to enhance its operations and better match products to meet customers’ increasing intelligence demands. This phase also allows analysts to evaluate their own analytical performance and consider ways to enhance their techniques for gathering information, connecting with internal and external partners, and conveying their results to decision-makers.

Summary

Like in any intelligence activity, we should adhere to a logical procedure built over time by individuals in the organization. As we have learned from the blog page, the intelligence cycle provides us with the intelligence capability we need in our decision-making processes and actions in security operations.

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