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Citizen safety is of prime importance for any nation. Threats to public security are constantly changing – as are the tactics and technology used to combat them. At the same time, many countries are also facing intense pressure to reduce expenditure, and are banking on security agencies and departments to achieve more with less.In an attempt to save costs, citizen safety and national security cannot be compromised. This creates a dual barrier for defense, police forces and other security agencies. Analytics can help government agencies in overcoming these challenges. Public security depends on an up-to-the minute understanding of the constantly changing threats, and on anticipating future risks so that agencies can act to prevent them. This can only be achieved through analysis of all available information. In order to harness this vast and growing resource, agencies need powerful solutions, capable of turning big data into usable intelligence.

A fundamental challenge which most government agencies face in their analytics journey, is with the quality of the data. As we know data comes from multiple disparate sources such as social media, elections database, regional data centers, etc. It is important to create a single-view of citizens and a unified version of truth. This helps government organisations in reducing duplicate entries, eliminating bogus entries and leveraging all relevant attributes of a citizen’s activity in a holistic manner. High quality database lays a strong foundation to an analytical framework.

Other important set of aspects to be considered are the accuracy, speed and accessibility of insights. Most analytical solutions work upon subsets of data, which introduces error in insights. Cyberspace and social media channels hold vast quantities of relevant data which cannot be looked over. It is therefore important to analyse data in its entirety and not just subsets. For instance, in-memory analytics technologies provide fast and accurate analysis of billions of rows of data, providing users with reliable insights and foresights. Today, government agencies have to react to situations in near real-time to minimise threat. It is therefore important to represent insights in a form that’s easy to understand and accessible on the go. This empowers decision makers and users with the power to explore data on their own and take fact-based decisions in real-time. SAS Visual Analytics provides government agencies with an opportunity to do just that. Data is presented in an interactive graphical format, which makes it easier for the users to explore data, derive insights, share reports and access dashboards from their mobile devices.

Defense, police and other security agencies face several challenges in ensuring national security and public safety. Information overload through multiple channels, is only adding to the problem. Sharing and exchanging information and intelligence between security partners – at central, state and local government level – and providing a common operating picture of the challenges and threats is at the heart of strengthening threat mitigation and response capabilities. With the help of techniques such as text analytics, government agencies can identify keywords and put context to content. They can extract intelligence from logs of documents, emails, claims, social content and much more. Analytics can also be used by officers at a station or sub-station level, where they can identify criminal links, record crime/events, case preparation, reporting, investigation management, etc.

Officers across different departments and locations can access appropriate versions of the derived intelligence and past cases, which helps in identifying patterns and replicating success. This not only frees-up investigation officer’s time, but also increases the overall investigation efficiency and accuracy. SAS’ public security solutions form part of a holistic framework that supports all of the key stages required to take informed and effective action. SAS offers deep domain knowledge, intelligence management capabilities and analytics expertise with a highly skilled workforce of subject-matter experts. For instance; one of the UK’s largest police forces required an inteligence platform to deploy across the entire enterprise. SAS intelligence management solution houses several million documents and structured records. The system is used on a daily basis by both officers and civilians, providing real-time intelligence 24/7 to protect the public.

The fight against terrorism, crime, cyberattacks and other activities that threaten life, property and systems depends on the quality of intelligence available. In particular, intelligence has played a vital role in detecting and thwarting malicious activities. For such situations, speed, accuracy and relevance are essential. Successful intelligence operations need to leverage data from multiple sources such as the social universe, citizen data, historic data, and signal information and so on. Big data analytics empowers government organisations to leverage mission-critical data in its totality, derive insights, forecast patterns and predict potential threats. Insights and foresights extracted from data are strategic assets. Forward-looking analytics can help government organisations to make better decisions, make accurate predictions, prevent cyber-attacks, reduce uncertainty and select the best alternatives.

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