Global tech leaders share their perspectives on the future of data security in latest trendbook 

Immuta^®, a data security leader, today announced the release of its 2024 Data Security Trendbook, an annual compilation of insights and predictions about data security from global technology leaders. This year's trendbook includes insights from experts and industry leaders at companies including Snowflake, Hakkoda, VMware, SanjMo, Cummins, NTT Data, Seattle Data Guy, phData, and AstrumU.

From artificial intelligence (AI) to distributed architectures and resource reprioritization, experts in the trendbook forecast a year of increased data use, the adoption of AI, and the reassignment of resources to support those trends:

• Expansion of distributed data architectures – Nearly a quarter of data professionals say that their organization is prioritizing data architecture modernization in 2024. This includes adopting concepts like data mesh due to its promise to provide secure, self-service, scalable data use on top of a distributed architecture. Experts predict that the industry will see changing data governance, management and security demands, large cultural shifts within organizations, enhanced data democratization, and more.
  
  
• Adoption of AI – In less than one year, generative AI went from buzzword to business-driving technology, and it's not slowing down anytime soon. In fact, research shows that 88% of data leaders believe that employees at their organizations are already using AI, whether or not it has been officially adopted by leadership. With the rapid development and adoption of AI continuing into 2024, experts predict that new forms of AI control systems and different approaches to LLM development will emerge, new laws and regulations will be introduced to address privacy and data security concerns, and AI data governance will continue to evolve.
  
  
• The reassignment of resources – Data and governance teams recognize the need for sustainable, data-driven success in a changing world, and many companies are reassigning resources to meet that need. Experts predict that more data teams will prioritize platform consolidation, data-centric architectures, data governance and compliance, data security and privacy enhancements, and advanced analytics in 2024.

"In 2022, organizations focused on automating and innovating their tech stacks, and streamlining accessibility and security for their growing cloud data ecosystems. In 2023, we saw even more emphasis on both democratizing and securing data access as organizations quickly realized just how big the impact of AI would be in the near future," said Matthew Carroll, Immuta CEO. "As the pace of change quickens in 2024, it's critical that data and security teams consider how to secure data for all of the varied use cases – whether it's AI or traditional BI and analytics."

Industry’s largest and most comprehensive analysis of advisor marketing data highlights best practices for SEO, video content, email marketing, and more

Snappy Kraken, the marketing technology (martech) innovator serving financial advisors, today previewed the results of its “State of Digital 2024” report. Based on an extensive analysis of some 250 million data points from campaigns sent by 10,000 advisors, the report offers unprecedented insights into the most effective digital marketing strategies for this cohort. In particular, the findings underscore the impact of search engine optimization (SEO), email marketing and video content on advisors’ growth trajectories. 

Snappy Kraken last conducted this analysis in 2021. Since then, the firm has expanded its dataset through enhancements like the Convos compliant text messaging platform and the acquisition of Advisor Websites. These enhancements have contributed to a more robust and detailed report, which offers key findings such as:

• SEO sets advisors’ websites apart. The report highlights the integral role of SEO in attracting new website visitors. The report's data reveals that advisors investing in SEO experienced a 94 percent uptick in unique new visitors to their websites. Additionally, there was a notable 93 percent increase in the number of visitors who initiated sessions, denoting enhanced engagement and interaction with the site on a monthly basis. Effective strategies include the use of long-tail keywords, maintaining an up-to-date Google Business profile, and adding a “text me” widget to drive email opt-ins.

• Email reigns supreme, but quality matters. Email remains the top-performing marketing channel. According to Snappy Kraken's data, advisors utilizing their services report that 55 percent of traffic to their websites and landing pages is driven by email marketing. However, its success is heavily dependent on the quality of subject lines. An unopened email equates to an unread message, making open rates crucial. These rates are determined by three main factors: the caliber of the email list, the effectiveness of the subject lines, and a consistent emailing frequency, ideally at least once a week.

• Video transforms email engagement. The report finds that including videos in email campaigns may lead to a 117 percent better open rate and a 120 percent higher click rate compared to text-only emails. As video consumption continues to grow, incorporating video content into digital marketing strategies is no longer optional but necessary for advisors seeking to maintain relevance and engagement.

• Texting is the best tool for immediate response. Text messaging is identified as the most efficient mode of communication, boasting a 97 percent faster response rate than email. The immediacy and personal nature of text messages make them an excellent tool for engaging clients and prospects, with shorter, more straightforward texts proving most effective.

“Our latest State of Digital Report is packed with actionable insights designed to help financial advisors drive growth through digital marketing,” said Robert Sofia, chief executive officer at Snappy Kraken. “This year's findings highlight the success of advisors who prioritize SEO, building a quality email list, and using video content to regularly engage their audience. Their commitment to consistently nurturing connections, providing value and building trust is driving outsized results. At Snappy Kraken, we take pride in equipping these advisors with the necessary tools and insights to convert marketing efforts into measurable growth.”

The report also compares the marketing activities of all Snappy Kraken-utilizing advisors to the top 20 percent performers, offering valuable insights for success. The top 20 percent are those who generate the highest email open rates, click rates, conversion rates and leads. On average, these top 20 percent of advisors manage an email list of nearly 5,100 clients and prospects, while the average list size for other Snappy Kraken users is almost 800. Additionally, they consistently run approximately four marketing campaigns per month, indicating a correlation between campaign frequency and increased lead engagement. This underscores the significance of maintaining a substantial and engaged email list while adhering to a consistent and active marketing approach.

“The results of the top advisors using our platform showcase the power of sustained strategic marketing efforts,” added Angel Gonzalez, chief marketing officer at Snappy Kraken. “What’s more, these benchmarks can serve as a roadmap for others to follow. By analyzing what works best, every advisor on our platform can refine their strategies to achieve greater results. The power of data-driven insights can elevate marketing practices across the board."

Snappy Kraken's Freedom360 solution, launched a year ago, streamlines marketing for advisors by taking care of key aspects like SEO strategies and email marketing content creation, freeing up advisors to prioritize client service while still enjoying the same marketing benefits as their top-tier peers. The release of Snappy Kraken's 2024 State of Digital report also comes on the heels of the firm’s recently strengthened partnership with Carl Richards of Behavior Gap. Together, they have developed a 10-day email-based course that advisors can utilize to engage prospects, all while building trust and credibility.

The Snappy Kraken State of Digital 2024 report will be available on February 5, 2024, with a preview available for attendees of the T3 Technology Conference 2024.

Announces Fully Portable Bot Defense for Any Web Application Firewall and New Bot Defense Data in ThreatScope™ Mobile XDR 

Appdome, the mobile app economy's one-stop shop for mobile app defense, announced extensions to its groundbreaking MOBILEBot™ Defense product, making it fully portable to any web application firewall (WAF). These extensions save mobile brands millions of dollars, extend the useful life of existing WAF infrastructures and drive down the cost to extend bot defense to the mobile channel.

Appdome's MOBILEBot Defense product is the industry's only comprehensive anti-bot defense solution built-from-the-ground-up for mobile apps. It offers mobile brands multi-layered bot detection, intelligence and defense all in one solution, easily protecting the mobile channel from 100+ attack vectors including fake apps, weaponized apps, malware-controlled apps, bot attacks, credential stuffing, DDoS and account takeovers (ATOs). It requires no SDK, no coding, and no added servers to deploy, and is fully compatible with all coding languages and frameworks used in mobile app development. With the new line up of extensions announced today, Appdome's MOBILEBot Defense product now works seamlessly with any WAF used in a mobile brand's network.

"Most mobile brands have heterogeneous WAF environments or are looking to change, add or upgrade only part of their WAF environment," said Tom Tovar, CEO and co-creator of Appdome. "By combining no-code, no-SDK and no-server value proposition with full portability for bot defense, brands now have the operational flexibility to extend bot defense to the mobile channel without forklift upgrades to the entire WAF environment."

Unlike other anti-bot products, Appdome MOBILEBot Defense can be used with any cloud, hosted or on-premises WAF including Akamai WAF, Cloudflare WAF, Fastly WAF, F5 WAF, Radware WAF, AWS WAF and more. MOBILEBot Defense does not require an SDK, mobile app code changes or any servers and offers full support for all mobile languages and frameworks, including Obj-C, C+, Java, JS, C#, C++, Swift, Kotlin, Flutter, React Native, Unity, Xamarin, Maui, Cordova and more.

"In today's challenging economic environment, everybody is looking to do more with less," said Richard Stiennon, Chief Research Analyst, IT-Harvest. "Appdome's breadth of threat signals and attack coverage and its ability to work with any WAF leveraging existing investment, coupled with its no-code, effortless delivery, method enables dev and cyber teams to automate the implementation of all required mobile app defenses, whether it be mobile anti-bot, mobile app security, anti-fraud, malware protection, or threat intelligence – all from a single platform. The best security solutions simplify."

As part of its announcement, Appdome also released real-time visibility of bot attacks in its ThreatScope Mobile XDR. The new bot detection and analytics service allows mobile brands to measure, track, investigate, report, and respond to threats and attacks across the WAF infrastructure, providing SOC-class visibility into mobile bot attacks and threats with full drill-down on attacks against specific apps, devices, OSs, releases, and more, all without a separate analytics package, SDK or device agent.

"Portability and visibility offer a ton of financial advantages for brands with a significant or growing mobile app installed base," said Chris Roeckl, chief product officer at Appdome. "Where other anti-bot products force developers into siloed offerings using SDKs that work only with the SDK vendor's WAF. Appdome's bot defense allows brands to preserve the existing WAF investment, unify visibility and response to bot activity across WAFs and solve bot defense and WAF infrastructure separately."

Versium for Sheets™ integrates robust APIs directly into spreadsheets where customer data lives 

Versium, a leading data technology company, today released Versium for Sheets™, a new Google Sheets Extension that seamlessly integrates powerful data enrichment, cleansing and modeling tools within Sheets workflows to transform marketing data.

With this new extension, marketers can now leverage Versium's robust data APIs as formulas within their spreadsheets where customer data resides to improve campaign performance. By enabling API queries to be applied directly in Google Sheets, Versium empowers marketers to easily enhance their marketing data without leaving their Workspace.

"We believe that empowering marketers with advanced tools should not be limited by technical barriers," said Kevin Marcus, CTO and co-founder of Versium. "Versium for Sheets™ marks the first integration for our suite of tools in a non-technical application. By expanding our offering, we are making our services more accessible with easy-to-use formulas and even more options for enrichment and data hygiene."

Versium’s suite of data tools enhances data quality, simplifies data enrichment and cleansing and provides over 200 data attributes for deeper audience insights. Versium APIs available through the Sheets integration include Data Prep, which leverages Versium’s AI backend for name classification and parsing, location identification, list cleansing and standardization; and robust append functions such as contact, demographic, firmographic, consumer-to-business, IP to domain and hashed email to business domain.

Verkada, a leader in cloud-managed enterprise building security and management, today announced new investments to continue growing its go-to-market function. With the arrival of new leaders in demand generation, field marketing, channel, and product marketing, the company will build on momentum from 2023 to expand and enrich customer and partner relationships in the year ahead.

Richard Rogers joins Verkada to lead Global Demand Gen & Field Marketing; Priyanka Srinivasan as head of Product Marketing; and Adee McAninch as head of Global Channel Marketing.

"Having a strong and seasoned marketing team helps us go above and beyond in all aspects of our business to support our now 20,000+ customers," said Filip Kaliszan, Co-Founder & CEO. "I'm confident Richard, Adee, and Priyanka will play key roles in capturing the growth opportunities that lie ahead as we continue to expand our product offering and reach new customers across the globe."

These investments follow a 69% growth in the marketing team's size in the past two years and a host of new initiatives and programs – from Verkada's inaugural user conference, VerkadaOne, to their reimagined Partner Program.

DRM-protected output of LIVE content enabled in Google Cloud via KeyOS Content Encryption Key API

The new real-time-driven solutions enable enterprises to remain agile and outperform business objectives amid ever-evolving market shifts

Tealium, the largest independent and most trusted customer data platform (CDP), today announced new solutions that allow enterprises to deliver enhanced in-the-moment experiences for customers, including Tealium for AI, Tealium Moments, Tealium’s Cloud Data Warehouse (CDW) Partner Ecosystem, and Tealium Consent Orchestration.

To remain agile and competitive in today’s dynamic environment, businesses must invest in a thoughtful customer data strategy. Enterprises that are proactive about data collection, enrichment, filtering, and activation are better equipped to keep up in an accelerating AI and machine learning-driven world, according to Tealium’s 2024 State of the CDP report. While many models and algorithms will become commoditized, the true differentiation for companies is the quality of their customer data.

“Customer data can be an organization's most valuable asset, but untrusted, ungoverned data is a liability – especially for AI models,” said Bob Page, Chief Product Officer, at Tealium. “Many AI initiatives are moving slowly because teams cannot access consented and accurate data for model training. Our new solutions start with consented data to deliver in-the-moment experiences and inform AI and machine learning models – so it can be acted on.”

Tealium and the new compliance-backed solutions provide a single platform to manage customer data processes at scale with safeguards. The new features include:

Tealium for AI: Equips teams with consented, filtered, and enriched data in real-time for AI models and data activation.

Tealium Moments: Collects, processes, and activates customer data in real-time and leverages zero-party and first-party data to own the moments that matter.

Tealium’s CDW Partner Ecosystem: Improves customer experiences by scaling the value of AI, Customer 360, Analytics, and other data initiatives housed in your CDW.

Tealium Consent Orchestration: Simplifies and streamlines the process of consented data collection and activation. Ensures consent is shared downstream to lessen compliance risk across the organization.

Andrew Marvin, Digital Developer at Crocs, a Tealium customer, says, “As a developer driving our organization's marketing and analytics, Tealium is my cornerstone for constructing and sustaining intricate vendor integrations, ensuring privacy compliance, consent governance, and facilitating real-time data delivery across our diverse sites and brands. The transition to Tealium has notably elevated our operational efficiency.”

Comscore to Provide Currency-Grade Measurement Metrics for Nexstar’s Local TV, Broadcast, Network, and Digital Businesses

Comscore, Inc. today announced that it has reached a comprehensive multi-year agreement with Nexstar Media Group, Inc. on cross-platform audience measurement. Under the terms of the agreement, Comscore will become a key measurement partner for Nexstar, providing it with critical measurement metrics across Nexstar’s local TV, broadcast, network, and digital businesses.

Comscore has provided local market measurement to Nexstar since 2010, but with continued evolution and innovation in its suite of insights and planning solutions across digital, social, CTV, and linear TV, Nexstar now sees unique opportunities to move Comscore into a leading currency provider position. Together, Comscore and Nexstar will be able to deliver more precise audience insights across screens to help advertisers optimize total reach and measure the holistic cross-platform campaign with de-duplicated in-flight monitoring of key metrics such as reach and frequency, incrementality, and co-viewing.

Comscore, a leading provider of currency-grade television measurement for local TV, provides measurement across all 210 local Comscore Markets. Comscore’s National measurement is the summation of all 210 local markets, establishing Comscore as the foremost authority in comprehensive TV metrics. At the core of Comscore's success is a unified methodology, setting the gold standard in the industry. With local market-level data starting at the household level, building to all 41,704 zip codes, and then seamlessly integrating into and elevating national metrics, Comscore continues to redefine excellence in linear TV measurement.

“Comscore is proud to expand its relationship with Nexstar Media Group to empower Nexstar’s advertisers to unlock optimal reach across key markets and platforms. Nexstar will offer unmatched value to advertisers in a critical election year and beyond, by seamlessly validating its true audience reach with market level precision down to the specific region across linear and digital,” said Comscore Chief Executive Officer Jon Carpenter. “Our partnership demonstrates our ability to eliminate costly ‘make goods’ as Nexstar leverages the strengths of Comscore’s cross-platform solutions to ensure ad dollars are optimized across non-linear mediums to complete incremental reach to what is achieved by linear television.”

“Comscore’s ability to provide us with total audience measurement metrics across our local television stations and websites, NewsNation, The CW Network, and The Hill, enables our cross-platform sales team to leverage our unique scale and reach to customize bespoke advertising and marketing solutions for our clients,” said Michael Biard, Nexstar’s President and Chief Operating Officer. “We look forward to offering our advertisers deeper insight into who is watching and interacting with our programming and when they are doing so, enabling them to focus on the audiences they want to reach.”