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Cloud and cyber threats pushing European IT spending to $1 trillion next year

960 640 Stuart O'Brien

IT spending in Europe is projected to total $1.1 trillion in 2024, an increase of 9.3% from 2023, as businesses allocate more funding to cloud solutions and heading off cyber threats.

That according to the latest forecast by Gartner, which says that despite a conflated economic situation, IT spending in Europe continues to be recession-proof.

John-David Lovelock, Distinguished VP Analyst at Gartner. “CIOs in Europe who pursued the “growth at all costs” strategy for over a decade, are now shifting the emphasis of ongoing IT projects toward cost control, efficiencies and automation, while curtailing IT initiatives with longer ROIs.”

Although artificial intelligence (AI) is a priority for CIOs this year and next, it is not yet a spending priority. There are other factors such as revenue generation, profitability and security fueling IT spending in Europe next year. “Maintaining a healthy profit margin has become pivotal for European corporations and this has ushered in a new wave of pragmatism,” said Lovelock.

Software and IT services are the two segments where CIOs in Europe are expected to increase their spending the most in 2024.

While there is sufficient spending within data center markets to maintain the existing on-premises data centers, new spending continues to skew toward cloud options (including infrastructure as a service [IaaS]), which is expected to grow 27% in Europe in 2024. CIOs in Europe are also shifting their priorities internally, including enhancing cybersecurity spending in the cloud and planning for AI and generative AI (GenAI).

“AI has also added a new level of concern around security ensuring that their systems are wrapped before hackers get near their sensitive data,” said Lovelock. Gartner forecasts spending on security and risk management in Europe to reach an estimated $56 billion in 2024, a 16% increase from 2023.

Table 1. Europe IT Spending Forecast (Millions of U.S. Dollars)

  2022 Spending 2022 Growth (%) 2023 Spending 2023 Growth (%) 2024 Spending 2024 Growth (%)
Data Center Systems  

44,804

 

13.8

 

46,177

 

3.1

 

49,894

 

8.0

Devices       146,391 -13.3        125,483 -14.3        131,301 4.6
Software        184,362 2.6        211,182 14.6        241,837 14.5
IT Services        347,425 2.3        382,306 10.0        427,350 11.8
Communications Services  

272,854

 

-6.1

 

285,269

 

4.6

 

297,749

 

4.4

Overall IT        995,836 -2.2     1,050,417 5.5     1,148,131 9.3

Source: Gartner (November 2023)

Some of the growth in IT services is due to talent shortages in IT departments in Europe. “There is a migration of IT skills away from the enterprise IT department toward technology and service providers (TSPs),” said Lovelock. “CIOs do not have the employees nor the talents to do all the work required and turn to IT services firms to fill in the gaps.”

Inflation continues to impact consumer purchasing power, and while businesses and consumers are expected to increase their spending on devices in 2024, the level of IT spending on devices is not estimated to go back to 2021 levels until 2027. In Europe, Austria, Ireland and Finland are projected to record the biggest bounce back in consumer spending in 2024.

The top three most mature countries in Europe will represent 51% of total IT spending in Europe in 2024. IT spending in the U.K., Germany and France is projected to total $588 billion in 2024, up 9.8% from 2023.

Among the international monetary fund (IMF) developing countries (Hungary and Poland), IT spending is estimated to total $32.3 billion in 2024, up 9.2% from 2023.

Investment in cloud is a key differentiator between mature and developing countries. Not all cloud application, platforms and services are offered in emerging countries which impairs adoption. “The lack of cloud specific skills available to deploy, maintain and run cloud is a significant barrier in developing countries Mature countries are large enough to attract cloud providers and IT talent,” said Lovelock.

Gartner’s IT spending forecast methodology relies heavily on rigorous analysis of the sales by over a thousand vendors across the entire range of IT products and services. Gartner uses primary research techniques, complemented by secondary research sources, to build a comprehensive database of market size data on which to base its forecast.

The Gartner quarterly IT spending forecast delivers a unique perspective on IT spending across the hardware, software, IT services and telecommunications segments. These reports help Gartner clients understand market opportunities and challenges. The most recent IT spending forecast research is available to Gartner clients in “Gartner Market Databook, 3Q23 Update.”

Photo by Carlos Muza on Unsplash

Majority of customer data resides with IT teams

960 640 Stuart O'Brien

Seventy-eight percent of organisations report centralising customer data management within information technology (IT) teams, with a survey of 405 marketing leaders conducted in May and June 2023 finding 59% of them agreed with the statement that “our IT policies and/or strategy constrains our use of emerging technologies.”

That’s from a new Gartner report, which asserts that collaboration between IT and marketing has traditionally been focused on selecting applications with their own data stores, such as a marketing automation solution which stored contacts, leads, and content.

Benjamin Bloom, VP Analyst in the Gartner Marketing practice, said: “Diversification of the usage of customer data, beyond marketing, forces marketers to re-evaluate how their applications interact with enterprise-wide data. Successful CMOs should seize the opportunity to re-focus and leverage a new class of cloud-based IT resources, unless they fall short of marketing’s needs.”

Marketing’s autonomy over their own technology choices is also shifting based on the vital role that data and cohesive workflows play in productivity: 78% of respondents said they must select their solutions from pre-approved vendors and platforms.

The survey also found that across key martech activities, IT is on average taking greater ownership, and the frequency of marketing teams with sole ownership is receding. This shift spans both business-centric work such as acquisition of budget for martech, and driving adoption and utilization to support customer journeys, to more technical work such as configuration and deployment of new martech, and managing vendor relationships and contracts; management of all of these shifted toward IT year-over-year.

Overall, while martech teams were open to letting marketing and IT play to each others’ relative strengths, the share of respondents stating IT had sole responsibility or was leading with marketing in support increased across every activity for which there was year-over-year data between 2022 and 2023.

“In a perfect world, marketers lead more business-focused work, and IT leads more technical and integration activities. The focus should be on getting the work done, not a territorial battle,” said Bloom. “Many marketers will welcome this shift given the dependence of many technical activities on underlying data warehouse infrastructure owned by IT, but just as encouraging is the increasing business-savvy from IT teams which can drive the ultimate goal of productive martech stacks.”

Cyberattacks on major organisations ‘highlight AI vulnerabilities’

960 640 Stuart O'Brien

The cyber landscape continues to evolve as major organisations like British Airways, Boots, and the BBC face the aftermath of a crippling cyber attack.

The battle against cyberattacks seems to have been lost, with vulnerabilities in AI becoming a potential future target for those trying to steal personal data, according to analysts at GlobalData.

David Bicknell, Principal Analyst, Thematic Intelligence at GlobalData, said: “The ingenuity behind these attacks is beyond the capability of most enterprises to prevent occurring. They can only take steps to be as resilient as possible. These attacks are tried and tested perhaps more than many realize.”

Analysis by Kroll suggests the Clop ransomware gang has been looking for ways to exploit a now-patched zero-day vulnerability in the MOVEit Transfer managed file transfer (MFT) solution since 2021.

Bicknell added: “The battle to prevent these sorts of attacks from occurring has already been lost. What is important now is for security specialists – companies, researchers, security vendors, and governments –to put their best efforts into limiting as far as possible the use of artificial intelligence (AI), including generative AI, by hackers for offensive purposes.

“Events this week demonstrated that security researchers can too easily break through so-called guardrails instituted in AI software and manipulate the software into ignoring safety restraints and then revealing private information. If they are not controlled, these vulnerabilities will lead to future AI-driven cyberattacks.”

Rajesh Muru, Principal Analyst, Global Enterprise Cybersecurity Lead at GlobalData, said: “This is a classic case of insufficient risk management posture across company supply chains. Risk management compliance guidelines like NIST go some way to address supply chain cybersecurity risks. However, both user and supplier initiatives around cybersecurity are just not sophisticated enough to drive visibility across the complete supply chain.

“This often leads to end-user enterprises not having visibility on the security posture across the complete supply chain and, more importantly, sufficient time to react.

“The irony of all of this is that Progress very much sells on the premise of secure transferability of sensitive data with MOVEit. The product itself has strong security features, covering cryptographic tamper-evident Logging, Regulatory/Compliance Support (PCI, HIPAA, SOC2, GDPR), and Gateway Reverse Proxy.

“Therefore, it just shows that, even now, with developments in AI and the sheer volume of use cases for it, the question is, is the world moving into a darker place with the potential for adversarial machine learning attacks through vulnerabilities?”

Amy DeCarlo, Principal Analyst, Global IT Hosted and Managed Services at GlobalData, noted: “Clop allegedly exploited a vulnerability in the file transfer software MOVEit to tap personal identifiable information (PII) including names, addresses and banking information.

“This doxware incident, in which instead of cybercriminals encrypting data and demanding ransom in exchange for a decryption key, they threaten to publish the information, is one of a steadily increasing stream of similar incidents.

“Prevention is critical. Organizations need to make sure they are running the most current anti-virus software. Another important defense is end-user education. Attackers often use phishing and other social engineering tactics to breach an enterprise.”

Customer experience benefitting from IDP automation

960 640 Stuart O'Brien

ABBYY has released its Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) Global Trends & Outcomes Report highlighting document challenges and opportunities driving enterprise intelligent automation initiatives.

The report provides innovation leaders with key insights into how businesses are optimising document-centric processes to achieve operational excellence, improve the customer experience, and accelerate business value.

“Enterprises continue to be driven by the ever-changing digital needs of their customers. At the heart of meeting customers’ expectations is making operational improvements that impact engagement and deliver measurable value,” commented Gabrielle Lukianchuk, Chief Marketing Officer at ABBYY. “Various global market factors noted in our report highlight the need for faster access to and a better understanding of customer-centric data to achieve more exceptional customerexperiences. The goal of sharing our insights is to foster mutual learning and enable today’s organisations to reach their intelligent automation milestones faster.”

Analysis of three key regions reveals priorities to improve workforce agility, customer experience, and overall operational efficiency. According to ABBYY data, the key driver is the need to improve how they process the data and related documents. Most notable by region include:

North America

  • Tax forms (IRS 1040)
  • Financial documents (bank statements, invoices)

Europe

  • Documents for international travel and commerce, such as customs declarations, identity documents, and waybills

APAC

  • Forms related to international shipping (air and sea waybills)
  • Identity documents
  • Financial documents (bank statements, invoices)

Despite their varying priorities, all three regions are focused on streamlining accounts payable operations by improving and decreasing cost of invoice processing, as well as elevating the customer experience for both consumer and business customers through automated processing of identity-related documents, and documents used within transportation and logistics.

Enterprises in all regions also had similar priorities to augment their intelligent automation platforms with connectors to more advanced IDP capabilities that have better accuracy in reading, extracting, and classifying unstructured and semi-structured data. Connecting to high-end IDP solutions with their existing platforms enable organisations to cost effectively scale their technology investments. ABBYY data notes the most common connectors requested are for the following platforms:

  • Microsoft Power Automate
  • UiPath
  • Blue Prism
  • Automation Anywhere

Based on initial data from January through March 2023, ABBYY anticipates continued growth of IDP adoption for use cases accelerating workforce agility, improving the customer experience, and streamlining supply chain and logistics business processes.

2023’s top 10 data and analytics trends identified

960 641 Stuart O'Brien
A Gartner study has identified what it says are the top 10 data and analytics (D&A) trends for 2023 – stating they can guide D&A leaders to create new sources of value by anticipating change and transforming extreme uncertainty into new business opportunities.

“The need to deliver provable value to the organization at scale is driving these trends in D&A,” said Gareth Herschel, VP Analyst at Gartner. “Chief data and analytics officers (CDAOs) and D&A leaders must engage with their organizations’ stakeholders to understand the best approach to drive D&A adoption. This means more and better analysis and insights, taking human psychology and values into account.”

Gartner analysts presented the top 10 D&A trends business and IT leaders must engage and incorporate into their D&A strategy  at the recent Gartner Data & Analytics Summit.

Top 10 Trends in Data and Analytics for 2023

Source: Gartner (May 2023)

Trend 1: Value Optimisation

Most D&A leaders struggle to articulate the value they deliver for the organization in business terms. Value optimization from an organization’s data, analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) portfolio requires an integrated set of value-management competencies including value storytelling, value stream analysis, ranking and prioritizing investments, and measuring business outcomes to ensure expected value is realized.

“D&A leaders must optimize value by building value stories that establish clear links between D&A initiatives and the organization’s mission-critical priorities,” said Herschel.

Trend 2: Managing AI Risk

The growing use of AI has exposed companies to new risks such as ethical risks, poisoning of training data or fraud detection circumvention, which must be mitigated. Managing AI risks is not only about being compliant with regulations. Effective AI governance and responsible AI practices are also critical to building trust among stakeholders and catalyzing AI adoption and use.

Trend 3: Observability

Observability is a characteristic that allows the D&A system’s behavior to be understood and allows questions about their behavior to be answered.

“Observability enables organizations to reduce the time it takes to identify the root cause of performance-impacting problems and make timely, cost-effective business decisions using reliable and accurate data,” said Herschel. “D&A leaders need to evaluate data observability tools to understand the needs of the primary users and determine how the tools fit into the overall enterprise ecosystem.”

Trend 4: Data Sharing Is Essential

Data sharing includes sharing data both internally (between or among departments or across subsidiaries) and externally (between or among parties outside the ownership and control of your organization). Organizations can create “data as a product,” where D&A assets are prepared as a deliverable or shared product.

“Data sharing collaborations, including those external to an organization, increase data sharing value by adding reusable, previously created data assets,” said Kevin Gabbard, Senior Director, Analyst at Gartner. “Adopt a data fabric design to enable a single architecture for data sharing across heterogeneous internal and external data sources.”

Trend 5: D&A Sustainability

It is not enough for D&A leaders to provide analysis and insights for enterprise ESG (environmental, social, and governance) projects. D&A leaders must also try to optimize their own processes for sustainability improvement. The potential benefits are enormous. D&A and AI practitioners are becoming more aware of their growing energy footprint. As a result, a variety of practices are emerging, such as the use of renewable energy by (cloud) data centers, the use of more energy-efficient hardware, and the usage of small data and other machine learning (ML) techniques.

Trend 6: Practical Data Fabric

Data fabric is a data management design pattern leveraging all types of metadata to observe, analyze and recommend data management solutions. By assembling and enriching the semantics of the underlying data, and applying continuous analytics over metadata, data fabric generates alerts and recommendations that can be actioned by both humans and systems. It enables business users to consume data with confidence and facilitates less-skilled citizen developers to become more versatile in the integration and modeling process.

Trend 7: Emergent AI

ChatGPT and generative AI are the vanguard of the coming emergent AI trend. Emergent AI will change how most companies operate in terms of scalability, versatility and adaptability. The next wave of AI will enable organizations to apply AI in situations where it is not feasible today, making AI ever more pervasive and valuable.

Trend 8: Converged and Composable Ecosystems

Converged D&A ecosystems design and deploy the D&A platform to operate and function cohesively through seamless integrations, governance, and technical interoperability. An ecosystem’s composability is delivered by architecting, assembling and deploying configurable applications and services.

With the right architecture D&A systems can be more modular, adaptable and flexible to scale dynamically and be more streamlined to meet the growing and changing business needs and enable evolution as the business and operating environment inevitably change.

Trend 9: Consumers Become Creators

The percentage of time users spend in predefined dashboards will be replaced by conversational, dynamic and embedded user experiences that address specific content consumers’ point-in-time needs.

Organizations can expand the adoption and impact of analytics by giving content consumers easy to use automated and embedded insights and conversational experiences they need to become content creators.

Trend 10: Humans Remain the Key Decision Makers

Not every decision can or should be automated. D&A groups are explicitly addressing decision support and the human role in automated and augmented decision making.

“Efforts to drive decision automation without considering the human role in decisions will result in a data-driven organization without conscience or consistent purpose,” said Herschel. “Organizations’ data literacy programs need to emphasize combining data and analytics with human decision-making.”

EU businesses fined over 830m euros for GDPR violations in 2022

960 641 Stuart O'Brien
As of December 2022 companies based in the EU paid a total of €2.83 billion in 1,401 cases for violating various data protection laws. Out of that, GDPR fines in 2022 total €832 million, which is 36% lower than the €1.3 billion paid in 2021.
However, according to the latest data analysed by Atlas VPN last year stands out not in the total sum fined, but in the severity of the charges imposed on a single entity — Meta.
The data for the analysis was extracted from Enforcementtracker, though not all cases are made public.
While the heftiest sum charged for violations was recorded in Q3 of 2021, the third quarter of 2022 was also significant, as businesses were penalized €430 million.
The Data Protection Commission (DPC), an authority for GDPR enforcement in Ireland, imposed a €405 million fine for Meta Platforms Ireland Limited (Instagram) on September 5th, 2022.
Two issues were found with the processing of personal data pertaining to child users of Instagram.

The children’s email addresses and phone numbers were publicly exposed when using the Instagram business account function, and Instagram profiles of kids were public-by-default.

Another hefty sum of €265 million was penalized to the same entity on November 25th, 2022, when the DPC declared that Meta had infringed two articles of the EU’s data protection laws after details of Facebook users from around the world were scraped from public profiles in 2018 and 2019.

Moreover, the DPC issued a “reprimand and an order” forcing Meta to “bring its processing into compliance by executing a range of specified remedial activities within a specific deadline”.
Meta complied and made the adjustments within the required timeframe. To date, Meta has paid around €1 billion for GDPR violations.

In data we trust: Building customer confidence in a digital economy

960 640 Guest Post

By Richard Menear, CEO, Burning Tree

In the modern, digital world, online shopping is becoming the norm within the retail market. Accelerated by the pandemic, the UK’s proportion of online retail sales soared to the highest on record, reaching 35.2% in January 2021. And with digitisation continuing to evolve the online shopping experience, it is unlikely that we will see a shift back to pre-pandemic norms anytime soon.

So, what does this mean for business-customer relationships in the digital era? Without the experience of in-person shopping, online user experience has a strong influence over consumers’ buying decisions. As a result, brands must define their reputation as trustworthy and reputable providers by shaping their processes around customers’ online behaviours.

‘Digital trust’ is defined as the confidence users have in the ability of processes, people and technology to create a secure digital world, dividing the dependable services from the corrupt ones.

In a world where most people understand that not every online service is legitimate, establishing digital trust helps users decide which companies will keep their personal information safe. So, how can businesses gain the trust of their digital customers — and what will happen if they do not?

Why should businesses build digital trust?

When people make a purchase or interact with an online retailer, they demonstrate their digital trust in that business. However, the quality of the service is no longer defined by how an interface looks or how easy it is to navigate.

Customer expectations have evolved with digitisation. Driven by rapid device proliferation and improved internet connectivity, the modern online shopper expects to encounter seamless digital processes from sign-in to purchase — particularly since the pandemic, which increased the number of people using online services regularly.

Today, customers are more aware of how their data is being used and stored and base their shopping behaviours on a provider’s ability to ensure security. The Okta Digital Trust Index (2021), which surveyed 13,000 office workers, found that 88% of people in the UK were unlikely to purchase from a brand they did not trust. And according to a recent report on the 20 most-trusted UK retailers, 58% of consumers are highly conscious about their safety when shopping online, citing identity theft as a significant concern.

Plus, with most businesses working online in some capacity, the government is introducing more regulations for using technology to use and manage digital identities. A new digital ‘trust framework‘ was announced earlier this year to make sharing digital identities between users easier and safer, allowing more control over what personal information is available to different services and organisations.

There are several ways businesses can generate a loyal digital customer base — from generating positive customer reviews to providing excellent customer service. But when it comes to digital trust, three main factors make people in the UK more likely to trust a brand: its service reliability, good security policies and quick response times — all of which can be facilitated by successful digital transformation.

Building digital trust with digital transformation

Cyber security is an essential consideration for organisations undergoing digital transformation, which involves implementing technology to automate processes, encourage a more cyber-aware business culture, increase security and refine the user experience. As such, retailers must ensure data is protected from a cyber breach to remain compliant and secure digital customers — and keep them coming back.

According to Okta’s survey, 47% of UK people permanently stopped using a firm’s services after hearing of a data breach. As such, IT professionals are harnessing advancements in artificial intelligence and machine learning to support existing traditional threat models and automate risk management to reduce the overall probability of falling victim to a cyber attack.

Many organisations are also taking a ‘zero-trust’ approach to cyber security, which means that no activity within a network is trusted straight away. Every device, service, application or user connected by a network must go through a robust identity and access management process to gain a least privileged level of trust and associated access entitlements. As such, implementing a zero-trust framework helps bolster cyber security and minimises the likelihood of a breach.

Effective customer identity and access management (CIAM) solutions will also enable organisations to capture and interpret customer profile data to inform customised user experiences whilst controlling secure access to services and applications. A robust CIAM solution may involve implementing multi-factor authentication (MFA), self-service account management and single sign-on (SSO) to minimise friction, increase engagement and develop trust in business processes over time.

Ransomware protection: Back up, don’t pay up  

960 640 Stuart O'Brien

By Pritesh Parekh, Chief Trust & Security Officer, VP of Engineering at Delphix  

It’s hard to ignore the recent spate of ransomware attacks. For businesses all over the world, the problem is only getting bigger. It’s also getting more costly, with many feeling as if they have no choice but to pay up.   

When ransomware shut down the Colonial Pipeline in the US earlier this year, the company paid the $5 million requested just one day after the attack. Meanwhile, JBS – the world’s largest meat processor – paid $11 million after it was hit. In many cases, giving in to cybercriminals and their demands is understandable. Even if an organisation has a backup available, often the associated data loss and wider disruption caused by long restore times are more costly than just paying up. Moreover, sometimes cybercriminals will not only encrypt data but target the backups themselves, leaving organisations with no other option.     

But complying doesn’t always lead to a positive outcome. In fact, recent research found that only 8% of organisations receive all their data back after paying a ransom. On average hackers restore only 65% of encrypted data, leaving their victims significantly worse off. In addition, there’s no knowing what the ransom paid is funding. It could even be another attack, meaning that businesses are just kicking the can further down the road.     

In an ideal world, paying the ransom shouldn’t even be a consideration. Businesses should be able to confidently restore data from trusted backup solutions within minutes of being attacked. But in order to do this, they need a fresh approach to backup.  

The issue with traditional backups  

For many years, backup solutions have been the go-to protection against ransomware. However, the perpetrators have grown wise to this approach and, as a result, modern attacks often target backup files as well. This poses a huge problem because backup files are often written and read by the same operating system the business uses for its day-to-day activities. This means the integrity of the backup system depends on how secure the business’s operating system is. If ransomware attackers can hack a system severely enough to encrypt its production data, then the compromised system also puts the backups at risk.  

The other issue with legacy backups is the recency of their data. Most will only backup once a day but, in order to be as effective as possible, modern solutions need to provide same-day detection, response and correction, whilst tackling a wide variety of threat vectors. Once a day backups leave a whole day’s worth of transactions unprotected. In the digital economy, losing such an enormous amount of data can be detrimental to a business, even putting it at risk of liabilities.     

The time taken to restore the data is also critical. With traditional systems, the whole process can be time and labour intensive, with multiple admins needed to restore the data in a new location, then connect and open a database application. It can often take several hours to days and disrupt business which is simply unacceptable.  

The future of ransomware protection  

As cybercriminals become increasingly sophisticated in their methods, it’s unsurprising that legacy backup solutions are no longer enough to combat them. With technology continuing to advance, businesses need to adopt a more modern strategy – which incorporates “air gaps” and data virtualisation – if they are to effectively protect their data and avoid paying the ransom.  

Firstly, it’s important to isolate the backup network and remove any system-level access to it, creating an “air gap” between the two systems. Doing this will successfully prevent hackers who manage to access production data from reaching the backup files. This “air-gapped” backup system can be thought of as a separate, virtual device that can read and write to the system with the right login credentials. These credentials must be completely independent of the credentials expected by the main system and kept behind locked doors, mostly as read-only data to further strengthen their protection.  

Meanwhile, having a virtualised copy of valuable data means that the backups can be restored in minutes, avoiding any significant downtime. What’s more, the data can also be backed up more frequently or even in real-time, minimising data loss to the business.  

When it comes to ransomware, businesses need to snap out of the “pay up or lose data and time” mindset. Ditching legacy backups will help with this. It’s never been more important for organisations to update and modernise their ransomware strategy and focusing on quick and effective recovery is a great place to start.

Consumers blame banks, retailers and social media for ‘scamdemic’

960 640 Stuart O'Brien

Consumers think banks, retailers and mobile operators need to do more to protect them and their personal information from fraudsters.

That’s according to research conducted by Callsign, which says trust in these organisations is eroding fast because consumers say they are drowning in scam messages from fraudsters spoofing brand names daily.

The problem has become so pervasive that consumers don’t trust the technology, processes designed to protect them from fraudsters, and confirm identities with many adamant that users must prove beyond doubt who they are when logging in to use a platform, and that there should be an online identity system to quell the surge of scams.

Stuart Dobbie, SVP, Innovation at Callsign, said: “Our data demonstrates that consumer trust in our digital world has vanished and – rightly or wrongly brands – are being blamed. Yet the sense is that little is being actually done to purposely re-establish digital trust through complete and accurate digital identities.”

The survey of global consumers revealed that over a third (35%) of UK consumers say their trust in businesses such as banks, retailers, mobile network operators and delivery companies, has decreased due to persistent scams spoofing brand names. With UK consumers (44%) asking mobile network operators to do more to stop scammers using their platforms, and over a third (37%) asking the same of banks.

People claim to have received scams through email (76%), SMS (66%), phone (58%), messaging apps (15%) and social media (12%) in the last year. But two fifths (40%) of UK consumers don’t know where or who to report a scam message to, or simply get too many to bother (36%). Almost two thirds (60%) of UK consumers don’t trust organisations to keep their data safe; 44% of UK scam victims react with suspicion wanting to know where fraudsters got their details.

Therefore, it’s no surprise that consumers are calling on businesses to do more to keep them safe and when it comes to stopping fraud and scammers, consumers know what action they want organisations to take. More than a third (38%) of UK consumers think users should have to prove who they are when logging into a platform.

Dobbie added: “With consumers feeling the brunt of perceived inaction by organisations, it’s no surprise that they are asking for more protection. If we continue to be unable to know and trust that the person is who they say they are online, large parts of our society will stop working. Digital Trust is about the confidence we have in the technology, processes and people to secure our digital world. Digital Trust is underpinned by digital identities, and the fact that scams are running wild proves that our digital identities are well and truly broken.”

Students encouraged to consider a career working with data

960 640 Stuart O'Brien

Misperceptions about qualification and skill requirements are hindering UK students from pursuing a career working with data, a new study from Experian has revealed.

The research, which surveyed 2,001 UK adults (16+) in education, found over two thirds of students (68%) believe you require key qualifications in maths and / or science in order to work with data. Almost three quarters (72%) also believe that you need specific data skills in order to apply for a data related job.

However, despite the misperceptions, the research also highlighted that over half (53%) are considering a career working with data, including data analysis (29%), data science (21%) and data engineering roles (16%). Men are considerably more likely to consider a career in a data-related field, with 60% doing so compared to 48% of women.

The study follows on from a recent report published by the Department for Culture, Media, and Sport (DCMS) which highlighted the UK faces a data skills shortage, with up to 234,000 job roles requiring data skills currently vacant. A lack of talent in the field would severely dent the Government’s ambition for the UK to become a world leader in data, as outlined in the National Data Strategy, so it’s encouraging that Experian’s research shows a healthy appetite from students.

Jonathan Westley, Chief Data Officer for Experian UK&I and EMEA, comments: “The pandemic has shown the growing importance of data and the role it can play in overcoming some of societies biggest challenges. The National Data Strategy is testament to this view, but achieving the Government’s ambitions will continue to be an uphill struggle if there’s not enough talent working in the data industry.

“While it’s encouraging to see that a growing number of graduates and apprentices are now considering a career in data, we need to do more by working alongside the Government to educate and create awareness around data roles with a broader, more diverse range of students. Those in education today are increasingly being driven by the idea of finding a career in which they can make a real difference, and we need to showcase the power of data for good in sectors from healthcare to education.”

Experian is calling on businesses and government to work together to entice more students from a wide range of backgrounds into careers working with data. And the demand is there – the research found that one in five students (21%) said that businesses needed to showcase how people can make a difference to society by pursuing a career in data, and one in four (25%) thought that a renewed focus on data skills and training was needed in the education system.

With 67% of students wanting companies to do more to promote data roles, Experian believes businesses have an opportunity to raise awareness to the importance of data and its crucial role.

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