Next Peak’s Intelligent Cyber Research (ICR), inspired by co-founder Greg Rattray’s vision to merge geopolitical intelligence with cyber insight, is ready to empower organizations to make informed, forward-looking decisions. On September 19, 2025 Next Peak officially launched ICR, announcing a series of offerings designed to help global organizations secure against geopolitical cyber risks and uplift their strategic thinking.
Among these offerings is the Geo Cyber Risk Index (GCRI), a comprehensive framework built on 49 indicators that assess the risk of a company operating in a given country, based on the nation’s geopolitical and cyber environment and customized to a company’s unique profile.
WHAT IS GCRI?
The GCRI, first launched in 2022, has undergone an in-depth refresh to better reflect rapidly evolving risks, enhance comparability, and integrate new data sources. Next Peak refined the Index to 49 indicators in four core categories—state cyber risk, criminal cyber risk, socioeconomic & geopolitical risk, and commercial capabilities & cyber literacy gaps risk—to create a comprehensive index that assesses the intersection of cyber and geopolitical risks for organizations. The Index encompasses similar publicly available indices while adding a layer of dynamic changes through news sources, in-depth analysis of ongoing events, and Subject Matter Experts’ inputs. ICR’s combination of quantitative open-source and expert-provided qualitative inputs creates a contextualized and validated data-driven GCRI that matches the nuances of the global environment.
HOW DOES IT WORK?
Building on a foundation of strategic expertise, the unique strength of the GCRI lies in its ability to customize its indicators while weighing them dynamically based on a client’s industry, home country, and business profile. Each indicator, subcategory, and category contributes to a final composite score through a weighting system tailored to the client’s unique context to ensure that the GCRI reflects the most relevant factors for an organization’s operational, sectoral, and geopolitical environment.
The following three sample maps demonstrate the GCRI in action, illustrating the geo cyber risk in 10 selected countries customized to three organizations in different industries and home countries: 1) a British financial sector company; 2) an American manufacturing company; 3) a Chinese online retail company. These sample maps are only a selection of the 20 countries—comprising over 85% of the global GDP—that the GCRI currently covers.
Geo cyber risk is not uniform for all organizations, and the approach to mitigating these risks must also be tailored. While the maps provide a high-level overview of what GCRI can offer, clients can also receive comprehensive reports for specific countries to gain a deeper understanding of their operating environment based on their country profile, risk outlook, and current events.
GCRI’s outputs enable organizations to quickly assess and compare customized risk levels across regions and industries, helping leadership teams make informed strategic decisions, anticipate potential challenges, and prepare for emerging threats before they materialize.
To learn how the Geo Cyber Risk Index and Intelligent Cyber Research can help your organization operate securely and strategically in an increasingly complex global landscape, reach out to us at ICR@nextpeak.net.
