The marketing leaders survey found that while businesses are showing a strong rebound from two challenging years, they are very mindful of how privacy can and will affect their future digital marketing success. The good news is most leaders recognize the importance of investing in aligning each marketing discipline, shoring up solid data practices, and bolstering their arsenal of branded content and communications channels.

2021 Proved Most Businesses Have Recovered Economically
Businesses, for the most part, are bouncing back to pre-COVID levels, but marketing leaders are more mindful of where dollars are spent. Last year, only 42% of leaders were optimistic that economic recovery was within reach. Now, 63% report their budgets and priorities reflect pre-COVID levels. Priorities are shifting in that advertising and wide-net marketing efforts like social media marketing are too much of a gamble for organizations. Instead, they are investing in building out content and branding, which points to organizations knowing the value of investing in themselves.

• 91% of leaders say their team has been successful this year, signaling changes brought on by the pandemic have allowed marketing teams to prioritize budget and energy to their benefit.
• Consistently positive performance is good news for business: 71% of businesses have grown their marketing teams in the last year, reflective of a strong industry landscape, prioritization of marketing to the business, and appetite for good talent.
• 70% report business performance as better overall compared to last year. In 2020, only 42% of leaders said their businesses were performing better than the previous year.
• Comparatively, in 2020, 32% of leaders said business performance was worse. Fast forward one year, and that figure shrunk to 15%.

Budgetary spend has shifted in the last year, with 2021 ranked budget priorities: 1) Branding, 2) Content Marketing, 3) CRM and Email Marketing, 4) Digital Advertising, 5) Social Media Marketing, 6) Demand Gen, 7) Website. In 2020, the top three areas of spend were (in order): Digital Advertising, Content Marketing, and Social Media Marketing.

Email Marketing Continues to Perform as a Trusted Channel, Delivering Against the Bottom Line
In years past, email marketers have been viewed as siloed parts of the marketing organization, but the tide is turning in a major way. Alignment across all marketing channels has skyrocketed in importance to marketing leaders in the last year, with 95% of leaders noting email marketing specifically is more tightly aligned with the marketing ecosystem compared to last year.

• The effort is paying off, with 76% of leaders saying their email marketing program has made a positive impact on the business in 2021, compared to 58% in 2020.
• 52% of marketing leaders deem their teams as “highly efficient,” due in large part to bringing the email campaign production and management work in-house.
  • Globally, 63% of leaders say everything is done in-house. This is mostly true in North America, where 76% of leaders have taken the work completely in-house.
• With returning budgets alongside bigger objectives and goals, workload is also on the rise – 69% of leaders say their teams are “busier than ever” (compared to 48% in 2020); 77% of North America leaders say there is a significant workload increase.

Privacy-Related Changes and Challenges Continue to Worry Marketers
The overall fragility of privacy – regulations, consumer behavioral shifts, and big changes coming from the likes of Apple and Google – are having both short- and long-term implications on business. Changes in privacy regulations and a shift in consumer perception of personal data are a big factor in marketing leaders’ commitment to invest in earned and owned marketing channels.

Email continues to grow in importance for CMOs, as many audiences have leaned on it for information and connection throughout the pandemic. The boom of email in the early stages of the pandemic shows no signs of slowing in 2021 and beyond. As such, marketing teams are prepping now for changes that are expected to come, with an overall approach of proactively respecting customer privacy.

• 82% of leaders are actively preparing for privacy changes.
• 67% of practitioners say they’re concerned with how privacy changes will affect their ability to perform.
• 59% of leaders report their organization’s email engagement data has “taken a hit.”

Specific changes that are keeping leaders up at night: Apple’s iOS 15 changes are of most concern (81% rank it medium to high concern), followed by Google’s third-party cookie tracking (77%), government regulations (72%), and deprecation of app tracking data (72%).

Future of Work Success and Employee Happiness Hinge on Improved Collaboration and Communication
Globally, nearly half (49%) of companies are still fully remote; 41% are hybrid. When asked if they love it, hate it, or are indifferent to working remotely, 85% of marketing leaders say they love it; 90% of practitioners agree. Despite significant workload increases, it’s clear most companies have rebounded financially, and the increased investments in hiring and collaboration tools is allowing workers to succeed, mitigating frustrations, bottlenecks in work, and redundancy. For those fully remote:

• 98% actually say their collaboration is either the same (16%) or better (82%) compared to being in-office.
• 96% say communication is the same or better.
• 95% say productivity is the same or better.
• When gauging how changing work situations have impacted happiness: 95% of fully remote workers say it’s the same or better, compared to 89% of hybrid workers and 89% of those in the office full-time.

Work situations related to on-site, hybrid, and remote work still vary, yet it’s clear that workers are happiest (and most productive) when they have the flexibility to determine their own ideal work-from-home/office routine. For the 41% of companies that have a hybrid work set-up:

• 71% of marketing leaders say they love it; 45% of practitioners agree.
• 94% say collaboration is the same or better compared to being in-office.
• 93% say communication is the same or better.
• 90% say productivity is the same or better.

Download the SparkPost report “Email in 2022: The trends, behaviors, and benchmarks driving email forward”

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Be Aware of These Six Cybersecurity Trends in 2022

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Trend 1 Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare

In the healthcare industry, machine learning is extremely helpful for the development of new pharmaceuticals and the efficiency of diagnosis processes. AI is helping analyze CT scans to detect pneumonia. Mentioning Mental health, MIT and Harvard University researchers have utilized machine learning to track trends and mental health in correlation to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Trend 2 Telemedicine

Telehealth is expected to grow to $185.6 billion by 2026. If you need a dedicated telemedicine app, one of the most important technologies that will be needed is WebRTC, an open-source API-based system.

Trend 3 Extended Reality

One of the most popular and useful forms of this technology is the use of mixed reality headsets like Microsoft Hololens 2 by surgeons. The headset can provide heads up information to the surgeon while allowing them to use both of their hands during the procedure.

Trend 4 IoT

The global IoT medical devices market is projected to reach USD 94.2 billion by 2026 from USD 26.5 billion in 2021. With the healthcare industry becoming increasingly more connected through these technologies, IoT cannot be ignored.

Trend 5 Privacy and Security

Ensuring your organization is HIPAA compliant is an essential first step toward avoiding costly data breaches. If you are serving patients internationally, it may be a good idea to consider the regulations of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in the European Union.

Trend 6 Organ Care and Bioprinting

With the world’s transplantation market size predicted to reach $26.5 billion by 2028, organ transplants are certainly an important part of the healthcare industry. The Organ Care System developed by Transmedics is a great example. Bioprinting has been done in the past but has not yet hit the mainstream.

More detailed information about Healthcare Technology Trends in 2022

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With cyberattacks — especially ransomware — on the rise, IT teams and security professionals must be on the alert as never before. Here are six specific predictions from Ilia Sotnikov, cybersecurity expert and VP of User Experience & Security Strategist at Netwrix:

1. Legislation will increase as security incidents at private companies affect national security. The impact of ransomware and other cyberattacks is no longer limited to just the victim company anymore; attacks are now affecting entire regions. For instance, attacks on companies that supply food or fuel have led to empty shelves in supermarkets and long queues at gas stations. Therefore, we can expect that security requirements for private organizations in critical sectors to become tougher. In particular, notification rules will be affected, as governments need more visibility into the specifics of cyberattacks in order to improve legislation. In some cases, governments may opt to use proverbial carrots as well as sticks, such as tax breaks that reward organizations for investing in cyber defenses.
2. Cyber insurance costs will increase and policies will mandate higher security standards. With insurance payouts becoming both more frequent and more costly, the cost of cyber insurance has already skyrocketed: Prices rose 96% in the US and 73% in the UK for the third quarter of 2021 compared to the same quarter last year. We expect continued increases in 2022. Moreover, insurance policies will require implementation of critical controls that reduce the risk of cybersecurity incidents. With attacks becoming increasingly common, insurance companies will pay in exceptional cases only.
3. More attacks will target MSPs as a path to infiltrate large enterprises or government agencies. Attackers have seized upon a very effective strategy for getting access to large organizations — through the relatively weaker IT infrastructures of SMBs that provide them with services. Accordingly, managed service providers (MSPs) will need to increase both the breadth and depth of their security measures, since many SMBs rely upon them on their security.
4. Quantum computing will begin to disrupt encryption. Most cryptographic algorithms today rely on the premise that there’s no processor sufficiently powerful to crack them in a reasonable timeframe — but quantum computing will allow such a processor to exist. While this technology is still far from any practical application, concern is growing. For example, the U.S. has announced export controls on eight Chinese quantum computing companies because of worries about China’s ability to break encryption. As the technology matures, we can expect more widespread adoption of post-quantum encryption standards.
5. Companies will need to address challenges in machine learning. Well over half (59%) of large enterprises today are already using data science (DS) and machine learning (ML). However, these techniques bring risks as well as benefits. ML algorithms are especially vulnerable in the learning phase because bad actors can poison the input in order to subvert the results, which can break critical processes and even put lives in danger in cases such as healthcare or traffic lights in a smart city. Organizations using ML must understand these threats and redouble their efforts to defend against them.
6. Attackers will use residential home networks as their infrastructure. A home network is much easier to infect with malicious software than a professionally secured enterprise IT environment. With processing power and bandwidth connectivity in residences increasing, home networks will become more attractive to bad actors. For example, by infecting many devices, they will be able to change IP addresses or even domain names dynamically during malware campaigns, thwarting common defenses like IP blocking and DNS filtering. IT teams should keep this new threat vector in mind when reviewing their security strategies and incident response plans. Moreover, the IT industry should seek to increase user awareness and best practices adoption to reduce the number of easy victims.

“Prioritization is the only way for organizations to manage the risk of cyberattacks in this new era of advanced technologies that can be used for both good and evil,” says Ilia Sotnikov, VP of User Experience & Security Strategist at Netwrix. “Simply put, organizations need to focus on securing their most important and valuable assets from the most likely incidents, and update their policies regularly. It is increasingly obvious that cyber insurance is not a lifebuoy. Risk assessment is first and foremost our own responsibility.”

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“The economic, organizational and societal impact of the pandemic will continue to serve as a catalyst for digital innovation and adoption of cloud services,” said Henrique Cecci, senior research director at Gartner. “This is especially true for use cases such as collaboration, remote work and new digital services to support a hybrid workforce.”

Cloud Ubiquity

Today, the cloud underpins most new technological disruptions, including composable business, and has proven itself during times of uncertainty with its resiliency, scalability, flexibility and speed. Hybrid, multicloud and edge environments are growing and setting the stage for new distributed cloud models. In addition, new wireless communications advances, such as 5G R16 and R17, will push cloud adoption to a new level of broader, deeper and ubiquitous usage. Use cases such as enhanced mobile banking experiences and healthcare transformation will also emerge.

As a result, global cloud adoption will continue to expand rapidly. Gartner forecasts end-user spending on public cloud services to reach $396 billion in 2021 and grow 21.7% to reach $482 billion in 2022 (see Table 1). Additionally, by 2026, Gartner predicts public cloud spending will exceed 45% of all enterprise IT spending, up from less than 17% in 2021.

Table 1. Worldwide Public Cloud Services End-User Spending Forecast (Millions of U.S. Dollars)

BPaaS = business process as a service; IaaS = infrastructure as a service; PaaS = platform as a service; SaaS = software as a service
Note: Totals may not add up due to rounding.

Source: Gartner (August 2021)

“Organizations are advancing their timelines on digital business initiatives and moving rapidly to the cloud in an effort to modernize environments, improve system reliability, support hybrid work models and address other new realities compelled by the pandemic,” said Brandon Medford, senior principal analyst at Gartner.

Regional Cloud Ecosystems

Growing geopolitical regulatory fragmentation, protectionism and industry compliance are driving the creation of new regional and vertical cloud ecosystems and data services. Companies in the financial and public sectors are looking to reduce critical lock-in and single points of failure with their cloud providers outside of their country.

Regions not able to create or sustain their own platform ecosystems will have no choice but to leverage the platforms created in other regions and resort to legislation and regulation to maintain some level of control and sovereignty. Concerns among politicians, academia and tech providers in these regions are increasing, leading to initiatives such as GAIA-X in European countries.

Sustainability and “Carbon-Intelligent” Cloud

Nearly half of the respondents in the 2021 Gartner CEO Survey believe climate change mitigation will have a significant impact on their business. Cloud providers are responding to this growing focus on sustainability by instituting more aggressive carbon-neutral corporate goals, which creates new challenges for infrastructure and operations (I&O) leaders.

“New sustainability requirements will be mandated over the next few years and the choice of cloud services providers may hinge on the provider’s ‘green’ initiatives,” said Cecci.

CIPS Providers’ Automated Programmable Infrastructure

Gartner expects the broad adoption of fully managed and artificial intelligence (AI)-/machine-learning (ML)-enabled cloud services from hyperscale CIPS providers. This will rapidly eliminate the operational burden of traditional I&O roles in the public cloud.

“Infrastructure is becoming programmable, and its operation is subsequently becoming automated,” said Cecci. “Modern IT infrastructure, whether deployed in the data center or consumed in the public cloud, requires less manual intervention and routine administration than its legacy equivalents.”

Gartner clients can read more in the reports “Top Four Trends Are Shaping the Future of Public Cloud” and “Forecast: Public Cloud Services, Worldwide, 2019-2025, 2Q21 Update.”

Gartner IT Infrastructure, Operations & Cloud Strategies Conferences

Gartner analysts will provide additional analysis on cloud strategies and infrastructure and operations trends at the Gartner IT Infrastructure, Operations & Cloud Strategies Conferences taking place November 22-23 in London, December 1-2 in Tokyo, and December 6-8 in Las Vegas. Follow news and updates from these conferences on Twitter using #GartnerIO.

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1. Reconfiguring the cloud for analytics
   “Originally the cloud was built for transactional systems. It wasn’t built for analytics. Analytics requires a lot more memory than a traditional application – and faster networks to get to data that is not in memory – in order to make analytics work in real time. Those are things cloud providers didn’t think about because initial applications in the cloud were transactional.”
        –  Tom Fisher, Senior Vice President of Business Development, SAS
2. Decision makers start to trust AI
   “The more visibility that decision makers have into AI results, the more confidence they have in the decisions that are being made by the models. Adding human oversight and explaining the models at each step in a decision process will start to bring acceptance to AI and automated decisioning.”  
        –  João Oliveira, Business Solutions Manager, SAS
3. Smart towns catch up to smart cities
   “As city dwellers flee the city, they expect the same levels of service in the country, including fast broadband, food delivery and digital interaction with government agencies and civic planners. Small towns are catching up with cities using analytics. Now that where you work no longer matters, smaller cities have an opportunity to attract and recruit people to relocate using analytics, driving population growth that was previously unattainable.”
        –  Shaun Barry, Senior Manager, Global Security Practice, SAS
4. The year of the vaccine
   “If 2020 was the year of COVID, 2021 will be the year of the vaccine. Which vaccine will be approved first? Which will get distributed around the globe? Will we rely on multiple vaccines to improve distribution and effectiveness? Analytics will not only play a role in approvals for the vaccine development process but will also be important for planning rollout and tracking distribution, side effects and effectiveness.”
        –  Greg Horne, Global Principal for Health Care, SAS
5. Consumers gain more control with remote everything
   “Consumers are in control when it comes to retail digitization, banking digitization, health care digitization – and more. Work, school, lectures, concerts, book readings, religious services, fitness workouts: If it can go remote, it is going remote. As consumers do more online, businesses are expected to keep up. That means improved digital technologies, more efficient supply chains, online customer service and easy scheduling – all managed and optimized with analytics. The benefit to the business? If you can digitize quickly, you’ll have more data and a better view into who’s interested in your content, products and services.” 
        –  Klaus Kohlmayr, Chief Evangelist, IDeaS
6. Data natives enter the workforce
   “A generation raised on data – from eating and exercising to sleeping and productivity – is beginning to enter the workforce. Their innate abilities to track and understand data will improve the ways we work. They bring data literacy skill sets and a comfort level with data that will help make all aspects of organizations more analytical and more innovative with data.” 
        –  Lucy Kosturko, Manager for Social Innovation, SAS
7. Patient-first pharma saves more lives
   “The data-heavy drug development process continues to improve with advanced analytics – and all of the improvements benefit patients. Due to advancements in analytics, for example, clinical trials are able to bucket multiple drugs into one study instead of only studying one drug at a time. Targeted therapies based on your genetic profile are becoming easier to develop. And results from every phase of clinical trials are coming in faster and faster, giving patients a better opportunity to find the latest treatments that will work for them.” 
        –  Mark Lambrecht, Director of Global Health and Life Sciences, SAS
8. Old-school organizations have new opportunities to reinvent themselves with analytics
   “Data-driven government responses to COVID-19, for example, are changing perceptions of government responsiveness. And banks that implement automated decisions are surprising customers with new investment opportunities. Today, the industry that invented analytics is showing that it can apply analytics in new ways to help citizens.”
        –  Steve Bennett, Director of Public Sector and Financial Services, SAS

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