Every second matters for property owners caught in disaster situations. Timely notices of incoming severe weather or other disasters can help leaders make impactful decisions for their facilities.
Cotton’s Business Intelligence Center, or simply the BIC, delivers the details you need for the moments that matter. With data-driven and hyper-localized insights, the BIC has the power to improve your business’ emergency preparedness and disaster response.
Cotton’s BIC is a 24/7/365 operation that gathers, operationalizes and disseminates intelligence about disruptive events. Using data-scraping resources, news stations, social media, emergency dispatch calls and proprietary techniques, the BIC compiles and contextualizes data to support more informed business emergency preparedness.
The BIC tracks disturbances expected to interrupt business, from severe weather to manmade disasters. Tracked events can include impactful phenomena like:
Hurricanes
Tornadoes
Blizzards
Wildfires
Floods
Hailstorms
Earthquakes
Nor’easters
Each year, the BIC identifies thousands of business interruption events, tracking more than 100,000 in 2026 alone. Equipped with meaningful data, the BIC can deliver critical benefits to property owners, shifting how organizations understand and respond to business interruption risk.
After clients provide their commercial property list to the BIC as members of FirstAlert! (a free program available to those with a Master Service Agreement with Cotton), they unlock location geoplotting. The expert team at Cotton monitors locations with advanced tools and thorough processes. Clients are then able to receive notices when severe events are expected to impact their buildings.
Ian Marshall, BIC Manager, shares that only the most relevant events warrant notices for clients. The event “has to be reasonably likely to produce business interruption.” Advance notice can help clients take critical steps to protect their property and mitigate damage ahead of the forecasted disaster.
Property owners further benefit from alerts of unexpected, facility-specific disruptions like building fires or sprinkler head breaks that lead to internal floods. In some situations, hours before clients realize they have a disaster ongoing, the BIC may have already identified the event through their highly developed tactics. Cotton can proactively call the client and notify them of the disruption.
How It Improves Your Business Emergency Preparedness:
While local weather stations provide broad coverage for a region, the insights of Cotton’s BIC are focused on your exact commercial property locations. The BIC’s data is targeted, driven by purpose and packaged in a way that answers your “so what?” questions.
The BIC looks for tools and processes that make a meaningful impact when addressing disruptive events. Ian notes that the tools have to be “fast and accurate because it doesn't matter if I tell you the moment it happens if what I'm telling you is wrong. And it doesn't matter if I tell you exactly what happened a week after it happened.” He notes that “the standard that we look for is: Can we tell our client [about a business interruption] with accuracy, before they're aware they even have that issue?”
Notices from the BIC go beyond numbers on a page. Their alerts integrate client-focused impacts that help make sense of potentially disruptive situations like tropical cyclones, uncontained wildfires and winter storms.
Looking to the future, the BIC is primed to continue improving. “We're trying to get as close to real time as possible,” Ian says. With a focus on tool development and leading-edge approaches, clients and Cotton can be even better informed to prepare for and respond to interruption events.
How It Improves Your Business Emergency Preparedness:
When the BIC says they’re a 24/7/365 operation, they mean it. Their around-the-clock availability means clients can reach a live person, even after hours and during holidays.
When the 2:00 a.m. crisis occurs, a member of the BIC will answer the phone and engage internal teams to provide Cotton’s services. Ian calls out that, for the caller, “you're not talking to a third-party call center,” but rather someone who likely knows and understands the customer relationship.
Members of the BIC are informed and deeply connected to the organization. “We have long-tenured people here that every day touch all of our client accounts, so they know them in and out,” Ian shares. The BIC team knows “the accounts, they know how your company operates,” he says. “After we get off the phone with you, we're calling… whoever we need to call to get that whole process going.”
How It Improves Your Business Emergency Preparedness:
What disruptions are about to impact your facility? Do you know how to get the information you need before disruptive events? If you want comprehensive tracking to improve business emergency preparedness for your properties, Cotton’s BIC is ready to support you.
Sign up today for Cotton’s FirstAlert! Program and share your locations with the BIC to have your locations geoplotted. Peace of mind is priceless, so get connected with Cotton and the BIC today!