Overcome Hiring and Talent Challenges to Get Ahead of the Competition in 2023

Article

Overcome Hiring and Talent Challenges to Get Ahead of the Competition in 2023

Hiring and retaining staff is going to be the most difficult task facing CFOs for much of 2023. This is particularly true for IT departments. In today’s economy, highly skilled IT and data experts are a scarce and expensive resource. The mid-market organization requires another option that provides access to the right tools, resources, and support.

Overcoming Hiring Challenges in 2023
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Overcome Hiring and Talent Challenges to Get Ahead of the Competition in 2023

Article

Overcome Hiring and Talent Challenges to Get Ahead of the Competition in 2023

Hiring and retaining staff is going to be the most difficult task facing CFOs for much of 2023. This is particularly true for IT departments. In today’s economy, highly skilled IT and data experts are a scarce and expensive resource. The mid-market organization requires another option that provides access to the right tools, resources, and support.


Customer Intelligence Insights are Reliant on Accurate Data

It’s 10pm, do you know where your customer data is?

Jokes aside, is your data organized in a form that you can easily use, review, and make critical business decisions from? Or is disorganized data slowing down your decision-making and preventing your organization from utilizing customer intelligence to enhance the customer experience and grow your business?

Customer intelligence data (3)
Improved Enterprise Data Management Enables Customer Intelligence Analytics

In many organizations, heaps of data are coming in from multiple sources, into and out of multiple clouds and departments, with varying degrees of accuracy. This makes decision-making based on customer intelligence difficult. When your data is not cleansed, you may have multiple records for the same person, spread across your databases. It is essential for your digital maturity process to include optimizing enterprise data management—finding all disparate data, cleansing, and aggregating it, and creating a single, correct client record—your single source of truth.

With enterprise data management and a robust data analytics platform working together, your customer data and prospect lists become more reliable, you save money on marketing materials, and, with the right analytics platform, can more easily implement AI solutions to send the right offer to the right customer at the right time. An analytics platform can mean taking your client records and improving them, their data, and your ability to make data-driven decisions about your prospects’ and customers’ needs.

A Customer Intelligence Analytics Database, like Aunalytics’ Daybreak Analytics Database, not only provides daily insights, compiled overnight and ready for you first thing in the morning, but also gives you access to a robust data platform and actionable industry-relevant smart features to enable various analytics solutions, helping you create a strategy that will lead to positive outcomes for your customers. With a streamlined system for your organization to find, access, store, and manage your data, along with an analytics platform bringing data to your fingertips, you don’t have to worry about which version of a client record you will find today, which version of the client’s name is what she prefers to go by, or what the correct version of her address is.

A side-by-side approach with a technology partner is the best way to access tools like Artificial Intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), predictive analytics, and a team of experts by your side to provide support and assist you every step of the way. Look for a provider who supports an end-to-end process, making sure you don’t get stuck in the middle and left hung out to dry when making your journey to better enterprise data management, analytics, and, ultimately, digital maturity.


Launch 2023: The Carolinas Credit Union League

Aunalytics to Present at LAUNCH 2023, a Premier Event for the Carolinas’ Credit Unions in February

Leading Data Management and Analytics Company Will Feature Its Aunalytics Daybreak for Financial Services and How Credit Unions Can Expand Wallet Share by Gaining Member Insights and Increasing Engagement

South Bend, IN (January 31, 2023) - Aunalytics, a leading data management and analytics company delivering Insights-as-a-Service for mid-market businesses, announced today that Aunalytics Relationship Manager Brad Thien will deliver a talk at LAUNCH 2023, an event for the Carolinas’ credit unions. Thien’s talk, Insights Hiding in Your Data Can Increase Customer Engagement and Expand Wallet Share, will take place on February 10, 2023. The company will also showcase its DaybreakTM for Financial Services advanced data analytics solution and demonstrate how credit unions can use artificial intelligence (AI)-powered data analytics to increase business wins and compete more effectively.

Daybreak for Financial Services enables midsize financial institutions to gain customer intelligence and grow their lifetime value, predict churn, determine which products to introduce to customers and when, based upon deep learning models that are informed by data. Built from the ground up, Daybreak for Financial Services is a cloud-native data platform that enables users to focus on critical business outcomes. The solution seamlessly integrates and cleanses data for accuracy, ensures data governance, and employs artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) driven analytics to glean member intelligence and timely actionable insights that drive strategic value.

“Gathering basic information about credit union members is relatively easy, but it doesn’t provide the highest value that can help anticipate their needs and drive greater revenue,” said Rich Carlton, President, Aunalytics. “Capturing more complex data, such as transactional data, and applying AI-driven analytics and predictive modeling to it often reveals significant business insights that guide more strategic decision-making about how and when to approach members, and with the products and services they are more likely to care about. We look forward to meeting with credit unions at LAUNCH 2023 and demonstrating how AI-driven analytics and predictive modeling can generate a 360-degree view of members and deep intelligence that enables highly personalized, more meaningful interactions that accelerate engagement and grow credit union revenue.”

Tweet this: .@Aunalytics to Present at LAUNCH 2023, a Premier Event for the Carolinas’ Credit Unions in February #FinancialServices #Banks #CreditUnions #Dataplatform #DataAnalytics #Dataintegration #Dataaccuracy #AdvancedAnalytics #ArtificialIntelligence #AI #Masterdatamanagement #MDM #DataScientist #MachineLearning #ML #DigitalTransformation #FinancialServices

 

About Aunalytics

Aunalytics is a leading data management and analytics company delivering Insights-as-a-Service for mid-sized businesses and enterprises. Selected for the prestigious Inc. 5000 list for two consecutive years as one of the nation’s fastest growing companies, Aunalytics offers managed IT services and managed analytics services, private cloud services, and a private cloud-native data platform for data management and analytics. The platform is built for universal data access, advanced analytics and AI – unifying distributed data silos into a single source of truth for highly accurate, actionable business information. Its DaybreakTM industry intelligent data mart combined with the power of the Aunalytics data platform provides industry-specific data models with built-in queries and AI for accurate mission-critical insights. To solve the talent gap that so many mid-sized businesses and enterprises located in secondary markets face, Aunalytics’ side-by-side digital transformation model provides the technical talent needed for data management and analytics success in addition to its innovative technologies and tools. To learn more contact us at +1 855-799-DATA or visit Aunalytics at https://www.aunalytics.com or on Twitter and LinkedIn.

 

PR Contact:
Denise Nelson
The Ventana Group for Aunalytics
(925) 858-5198
dnelson@theventanagroup.com


Launch 2023: The Carolinas Credit Union League

LAUNCH 2023 - The Carolinas Credit Union League

February 9-10, 2023

LAUNCH 2023

The Carolinas Credit Union League

Embassy Suites by Hilton Charlotte Concord Golf Resort & Spa, Concord, NC

Aunalytics to present and exhibit as an Ignition Sponsor at LAUNCH 2023, powered by the Carolinas Credit Union League

Aunalytics is excited to attend LAUNCH 2023, powered by the Carolinas Credit Union League as an Ignition Sponsor. On Friday, February 10th, Brad Thien of Aunalytics will be speaking on how credit unions can use AI-driven insights to improve member engagement and increase wallet share. Event attendees can learn more about the Daybreak™ for Financial Services solution at the Aunalytics exhibit booth—Daybreak enables credit unions to more effectively identify and deliver new services and solutions for their members so they can better compete with large national banks.

Launch 2023: The Carolinas Credit Union League

Ransomware Attacks in Manufacturing Pose An Increasing Threat

Ransomware Attacks in Manufacturing Pose An Increasing Threat

Cyberattacks are a constant threat to organizations of all sizes. Manufacturing and production industries may have experienced fewer cyberattacks than other industries, but companies are still at risk from bad actors. To gain a better understanding of the current attack environment and track changes over time in ransomware trends, Aunalytics security partner Sophos commissioned an independent, vendor-agnostic survey of 5,600 IT professionals in mid-sized organizations across 31 countries. Out of all the respondents, 419 were from the manufacturing and production industry. This survey was conducted in January and early February of 2022. While it’s true cyber insurance has been playing a greater role in helping organizations improve their ability to recover from attacks, survey responses clearly indicate the rising threat ransomware poses to the manufacturing industry.

Cyberattacks Are Up From Previous Year

Ransomware attacks have increased significantly over the past year—55% of manufacturing and production organizations surveyed were hit by an attack in 2021, up 36% from 2020. Bad actors are now considerably more capable of attacking businesses and executing harmful tactics at scale. The Ransomware-as-a-Service model is one cause of this year’s increased attacks, as the required skill level for bad actors to hamper the day-to-day operations of an organization has gone down significantly.

55% of manufacturing and production organizations were hit by ransomware in 2022

Apart from the rising prevalence of these attacks, the sheer complexity of each attack is also on an upwards trajectory. While the manufacturing and production industry reported the lowest rate of ransomware attacks, but, with over half of all respondents in all surveyed industries reporting that their company was been injured by bad actors, the reality is that every organization is at high risk of attack. In 2021, 57% of attacks in the manufacturing and production industry resulted in important data being encrypted. Additionally, 59% percent of organizations who experienced cyberattacks saw the complexity of the attacks increase, while 61% saw an increase in the overall volume of cyberattacks.

57% had data encrypted in attack
Data Recovery Rates Are Improving

While the increase in cyberattacks paints a bleak picture, there is a silver lining to this dark cloud. 96% of manufacturing and production organizations were able to get some of their encrypted data back. The top method used to restore data was backups, which were used by 58% of organizations whose data was encrypted in an attack. Unfortunately, despite the utilization of backups, a third of the effected organizations still had to pay a ransom to ensure that more their data was restored.

Unfortunately, while paying a ransom typically allows organizations to get some data back, it is proving to be less effective than in years past. On average, in 2021, organizations that paid a ransom only got back 59% of their data, and only 7% of those that paid the ransom got ALL of their data back. This highlights the importance of employing multiple methods to restore data—utilizing backups in particular can improve the speed of recovery and increase the amount of data that can be recovered in the event of an attack.

59% of data restored in manufacturing
7% of manufacturers got ALL data back after paying the ransom
Ransom Payments Have Increased

The average ransom pay-out has seen an exponential increase from what was reported in 2020 data, rising from an average of $147K (USD) to a jaw-dropping $2,036,189 (USD) in 2021.

Ransom paid by manufacturing and production organizations
Ransomware Has a Massive Impact on a Company’s Financial Status and Operational Capacity

Even when some of the encrypted data is restored after a cyber-attack, there are additional costs in the form  of lost productivity and a decline in operational capacity, which can have a considerable impact on your company. Of those hit by ransomware last year, 77% said their most significant attack impacted their ability to operate, while 71% said it caused them to lose business and/or revenue. The average cost to remediate an attack in 2021 was $1.23M (USD), down from $1.52M (USD) in 2020. This was due in part to cyber insurance providers being able to better guide victims through an effective response more rapidly.

Although there have been improvements in total recovery time over the years, it still took, on average, one week for manufacturing and production organizations to fully recover from the most significant attacks.

Impact of attacks on manufacturing and production

Despite the huge economic costs of ransomware attacks, many organizations are continuing to put their faith in defenses that don’t actually prevent ransomware—only more quickly mitigate its effects. Most of the organizations in the survey who weren’t hit by ransomware in the past year and didn’t expect to be hit in the future cited backups and cyber insurance as reasons why they don’t anticipate an attack. It’s important to note that neither of these elements can actually prevent cyber-attacks.

Simply having security mitigation resources in place does not mean that they will be effective against malicious attacks. Despite having ample resources—in both personnel and technology—organizations will not achieve a high return on investment without a combination of the right technology and expertise to use the technology effectively.

Cyber Insurance Drives Changes to Cyber Defenses

Thankfully, organizations do not have to shoulder the burden of ransomware costs all on their own. The survey found that three out of four manufacturing and production organizations had insurance against ransomware attacks. Organizations that had been previously hit by ransomware attacks in the past were much more likely to have cyber insurance coverage against ransomware. However, many respondents indicated that securing coverage has changed or gotten more difficult to obtain in the past year:

  • 56% said the level of cybersecurity they need to qualify is now higher
  • 53% said policies are now more complex
  • 42% said it is more expensive
  • 35% said fewer companies offer cyber insurance
  • 30% said the process takes longer

As a result, 97% of organizations that have cyber insurance have made changes to their cyber defenses to improve their cyber insurance position. 70% have implemented new technologies and services, while 63% have increased staff training and educational activities, and 59% have changed processes and behaviors.

But It Doesn’t End There

The State of Ransomware 2022 survey by Sophos has revealed that ransomware continues to be an imminent threat for the manufacturing and production industry. For many, choosing an experienced partner with expertise in cybersecurity not only improves their chances of getting approved for the right amount of cyber insurance coverage, but can also ensure that companies see an higher return on investment and improved ability to both prevent and mitigate attacks in the future.