Open-Source Intelligence to Boost Your Business: ESPY's Guide

One of the best ways to better understand your business landscape is through open-source intelligence (OSINT). While being a valuable source of industry, customer, and competitor information, OSINT also takes some effort to implement correctly. 

ESPY, a global expert in developing OSINT investigation solutions, shares a step-by-step guide on how to get started with OSINT tools. Let’s dive straight in. 

Set your business goals

As obvious and straightforward as it sounds, this step can’t be underestimated as it lays the foundation for the entire project and determines further steps. Putting enough thought into your actual business needs will help you grasp the overall direction of your business flow. When speaking about OSINT, you need to decide what kind of data you need and for what purposes. Here are a couple of examples:

• Competitive intelligence. By keeping an eye on your competitors, you can tailor and adjust your strategy and spot new market trends and opportunities. Additionally, the competitor data can be used to develop and improve your products and services. 

• Risk assessment. Open-source intelligence can help you monitor and detect potential threats and vulnerabilities. Scanning the web for brand mentions can prevent a reputation crisis and preserve your brand’s good name. 

• Market research. Market research operations, fueled by OSINT, can help understand your target market better, identify opportunities and recent market developments, as well as to gauge public opinion towards your brand.

Pick the right OSINT tools

Depending on your business goals and needs, you might look into the following OSINT tools:

• Web monitoring tools. These tools can help you scan the web for potential threats and brand mentions. 

• Web scraping tools. Scraping software helps extract public data from e-commerce  websites, search engines, and other web platforms. 

• Data analysis tools. After the data is gathered, data analysis tools come into play to help process the data and draw conclusions. 

Come up with a strategy

After defining your data-gathering goals and selecting the most suitable OSINT tools, you should develop a strategy. It includes choosing the data sources you’d like to monitor and collect data from, implementing data security infrastructure, arranging management processes, as well as assigning tasks and responsibilities to your team members.  

Train your personnel

To effectively utilize OSINT tools, you need to train the personnel on data analysis, web scraping, and other related skills. Only when you have a qualified team can you make the most of open-source intelligence. 

Asses your results

And the last yet not the least important step is to come up with the metrics and processes to measure the success of the OSINT implementation. Tracking the performance will provide valuable insights into whether everything’s working the right way and what to improve upon. 

Wrapping up

Open-source intelligence is a goldmine for businesses seeking to gain valuable information from publicly available web data to build an accurate picture of the market and make data-driven decisions. If you’re still in doubt about whether OSINT is something your business needs, contact us at support@oxylabs.io or reach out to ESPY directly. Also, don’t miss the opportunity to get a 10% discount on purchasing any IRBIS API package using the OXB39307 promo code.