Ricoh and IBM to Deliver Expanded Services to Customers via Hybrid Cloud

Expanding AI Advertising Suite to Strengthen Brand, Publisher and Consumer Value Exchange in a Privacy-Forward Future NEW YORK, Oct. 5, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced three new products to add to its growing suite of AI solutions for brand and publishers. The new capabilities are privacy-forward and designed to allow brands to reach consumers while considering user privacy. IBM intends to work with industry leaders, including Xandr/AT&T, Magnite, Nielsen, MediaMath, LiveRamp and Beeswax to help scale the use of AI across the industry. The announcement was made this morning at Advertising Week's digital-first virtual event #AW2020. "While the advertising industry strives to re-emerge strong from the global economic and societal issues we faced this year, it's also deep in the throes of a major transformation with changes to mobile identity, certain elimination of third-party cookies, compliance and regulatory shifts and increased demand for trust and transparency," said Bob Lord, SVP, Cognitive Applications and Blockchain, IBM. He added: "We believe AI will be the 'backbone' of the new era as the industry prepares for the next generation of advertising. We're using AI to help solve problems across the advertising industry, just like IBM has in countless other industries like Healthcare, Financial Services and Retail. Our work will be a step forward in our evolution to meet the advertising industry's upheaval, and we are proud to help the advertising industry advance with the value of AI." The IBM Watson Advertising suite of solutions leverages AI to help clients make informed, data-based decisions. Expanding on recent additions to the suite, including Watson Advertising Accelerator, Watson Advertising Social Targeting with Influential and Watson Advertising Weather Targeting among others, the planned AI-enabled capabilities include: Extensions for IBM Watson Advertising Accelerator: Enhanced video and OTT capabilities available in the coming months that are expected to leverage Watson Machine Learning, to help enable marketers to pivot video advertising creative based on individual user reaction.  IBM Watson Advertising Attribution: Beta Solution available in the coming months that leverages Watson Machine Learning, which allows marketers to accurately quantify the efficacy of their advertising spend while understanding intent and performance drivers. IBM Watson Advertising Predictive Audiences: Solution leverages Watson Discovery, to help enable marketers to progress beyond 'look-alike' to 'do-alike' segments in a privacy-forward format to reach consumers that exhibit similar behaviors.    A New Ecosystem to Accelerate AI Adoption and in Advertising IBM plans to bring its toolset to industry leaders including Xandr/AT&T, Magnite, Nielsen, MediaMath, LiveRamp and Beeswax to help make it accessible across the advertising ecosystem. The companies will have an opportunity to drive the next generation of IBM advertising technologies to help reinstate trust in the marketplace. IBM Watson can offer increased AI capabilities for businesses across language, automation and trust. The planned capabilities from IBM Watson Advertising will be designed to help infuse trust and transparency into the advertising ecosystem. IBM is negotiating definitive agreements with Xandr/AT&T and Magnite. "We're currently leveraging IBM's AI through The Weather Channel, an approach that helps us use data to create meaningful and respectful experiences with consumers in the moments they need us most," said Rand Harbert, Executive Vice President and Chief Agency, Sales & Marketing Officer, State Farm. "IBM has evolved from an advertising partner to an AI partner, enabling us to help our customers and prospective customers better prepare and respond during life events." "The advertising industry is undergoing rapid change and we're infusing AI into our platform to better equip independent publishers in a sea of walled gardens," said Tom Kershaw, CTO, Magnite. "We're proud to stand with IBM, a company rooted in advanced technology, to deliver on the promise of an open web and solve the mounting challenges facing independent publishers."  "Across WPP, we are committed to helping our clients navigate the disruptive trends that have been building for some time," said John Dunleavy, Global President, Eightbar. "We've seen firsthand the important role AI can play in mitigating bias and making data useful so that every constituent - brands, content owners and most importantly consumers - can have authentic, relevant and meaningful interactions." "The opportunities for AI are immense--and we're already seeing real value within the retail and consumer packaged goods (CPG) industry," said Arun Ramaswamy, Chief Technology Officer, Global Consumer Business, Nielsen. "AI algorithms have vast potential to reinvigorate the brand-consumer trust dynamic by leveraging mathematical techniques that remove biases in the data consumers provide before they lead to improper results and interpretations. And within an open, cloud-based ecosystem, having the right, robust, high-quality data fueling AI is paramount to better understand and predict purchasing habits, and thereby inform marketing and advertising efforts." "AI technologies are transforming organizations and freeing up employees to do higher-value work," said Victoria Petrock, Principal Analyst, Emerging Technology, Insider Intelligence. "For marketers and advertisers, AI is already disrupting core functions, including ad targeting, media buying, content creation and propensity modeling." "Data is the key to increasing engagement across platforms that deliver premium content," said Grant Ries, SVP of Marketplaces & Emerging Business at LiveRamp. "We're thrilled to connect our Marketplace with IBM AI to deliver actionable insights, at scale, across the ecosystem in order to help partners thrive in an undefined future. As the digital marketing industry evolves, it's more essential than ever to rely on trusted partners to preserve the integrity of the open web." "AI is no longer an emerging technology, it's here, now and the digital ecosystem must lean in to realize its full value beyond media buying and selling," said David Cohen, CEO, IAB. "I am thrilled to see IBM, with its deep roots in artificial intelligence, take on a leadership role to develop CTV and attribution solutions for the next generation marketplace." "It's in our DNA to empower our clients and partners with the tools to establish deep and trusted connections with consumers at scale," said Joe Zawadzki, founder and CEO, MediaMath. "As inveterate champions of the power of math and science in marketing, we are eager to usher in a new era of enterprise applications into our industry and are excited to expand our partnership with IBM to introduce their world-class capabilities to an open web that keenly needs them." "We're thrilled to help power IBM Watson Advertising with our Bidder-as-a-Service™ platform," said Ari Paparo, Co-Founder & CEO, Beeswax. "It's exciting to help IBM Watson unlock AI-driven, predictive dynamic creative for more relevant advertising that gets smarter over time." "As a company that has been integrating IBM Watson into our platform for over five years, our team at Influential has seen, firsthand, how crucial AI is in identifying the right influencers, targeting audiences, and delivering content at scale," said Ryan Detert, Chief Operating Officer, Influential. Statements regarding IBM's future direction and intent are subject to change or withdrawal without notice and represent goals and objectives only.  About IBM Watson:Watson is IBM's AI technology for business, helping organizations to better predict and shape future outcomes, automate complex processes, and optimize employees' time. Watson has evolved from an IBM Research project, to experimentation, to a scaled set of products that run anywhere. With more than 30,000 client engagements, Watson is being applied by leading global brands across a variety of industries to transform how people work. To learn more, visit: https://www.ibm.com/watson. Contact:Megan Levinsonmegan.levinson@ibm.com SOURCE IBM

Customer Personal Data Exposed in 80% of Breaches Analyzed; AI and Automation Significantly Reduce Costs CAMBRIDGE, Mass., July 29, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- IBM Security (NYSE: IBM) announced today the results of a global study examining the financial impact of data breaches, revealing that these incidents cost companies studied $3.86 million per breach on average, and that compromised employee accounts were the most expensive root cause. Based on in-depth analysis of data breaches experienced by over 500 organizations worldwide, 80% of these incidents resulted in the exposure of customers' personally identifiable information (PII). Out of all types of data exposed in these breaches, customer PII was also the costliest to businesses studied. As companies are increasingly accessing sensitive data via new remote work and cloud-based business operations, the report sheds light on the financial losses that organizations can suffer if this data is compromised. A separate IBM study found that over half of surveyed employees new to working from home due to the pandemic have not been provided with new guidelines on how to handle customer PII, despite the changing risk models associated with this shift. Sponsored by IBM Security and conducted by the Ponemon Institute, the 2020 Cost of a Data Breach Report is based on in-depth interviews with more than 3,200 security professional in organizations that suffered a data breach over the past year.1 Some of the top findings from this year's report include: Smart Tech Slashes Breach Costs in Half: Companies studied who had fully deployed security automation technologies (which leverage AI, analytics and automated orchestration to identify and respond to security events) experienced less than half the data breach costs compared to those who didn't have these tools deployed – $2.45 million vs. $6.03 million on average. Paying a Premium for Compromised Credentials: In incidents where attackers accessed corporate networks through the use of stolen or compromised credentials, studied businesses saw nearly $1 million higher data breach costs compared to the global average – reaching $4.77 million per data breach. Exploiting third-party vulnerabilities was the second costliest root cause of malicious breaches ($4.5 million) for this group.    Mega Breach2 Costs Soar by the Millions: Breaches wherein over 50 million records were compromised saw costs jump to $392 million from $388 million the previous year. Breaches where 40 to 50 million records were exposed cost studied companies $364 million on average, a cost increase of $19 million compared to the 2019 report. Nation State Attacks – The Most Damaging Breaches: Data breaches believed to originate from nation state attacks were the costliest, compared to other threat actors examined in the report. State-sponsored attacks averaged $4.43 million in data breach costs, surpassing both financially motivated cybercriminals and hacktivists. "When it comes to businesses' ability to mitigate the impact of a data breach, we're beginning to see a clear advantage held by companies that have invested in automated technologies," said Wendi Whitmore, Vice President, IBM X-Force Threat Intelligence. "At a time when businesses are expanding their digital footprint at an accelerated pace and the security industry's talent shortage persists, teams can be overwhelmed securing more devices, systems and data. Security automation can help resolve this burden, not only supporting a faster breach response but a more cost-efficient one as well." Employee Credentials and Misconfigured Clouds ­– Attackers' Entry Point of Choice Stolen or compromised credentials and cloud misconfigurations were the most common causes of a malicious breach for companies in the report, representing nearly 40% of malicious incidents. With over 8.5 billion records exposed in 2019, and attackers using previously exposed emails and passwords in one out of five breaches studied, businesses should rethink their security strategy via the adoption of a zero-trust approach – reexamining how they authenticate users and the extent of access users are granted. Similarly, companies' struggle with security complexity – a top breach cost factor – is likely contributing to cloud misconfigurations becoming a growing security challenge. The 2020 report revealed that attackers used cloud misconfigurations to breach networks nearly 20% of the time, increasing breach costs by more than half a million dollars to $4.41 million on average – making it the third most expensive initial infection vector examined in the report. State Sponsored Attacks Strike HeaviestDespite representing just 13% of malicious breaches studied, state-sponsored threat actors were the most damaging type of adversary according to the 2020 report, suggesting that financially motivated attacks (53%) don't necessarily translate into higher financial losses for businesses. The highly tactical nature, longevity and stealth maneuvers of state-backed attacks, as well as the high value data targeted, often result in a more extensive compromise of victim environments, increasing breach costs to an average of $4.43 million. In fact, the respondents in the Middle East, a region that historically experiences a higher proportion of state-sponsored attacks compared to other parts of the world3, saw over 9% yearly rise in their average breach cost, incurring the second highest average breach cost ($6.52 million) amongst the 17 regions studied. Similarly, businesses studied in the energy sector, one of the most frequently targeted industries by nation states, experienced a 14% increase in breach costs year over year, averaging $6.39 million. Advanced Security Technologies Prove Smart for Business The report highlights the growing divide in breach costs between businesses implementing advanced security technologies and those lagging behind, revealing a cost-saving difference of $3.58 million for studied companies with fully deployed security automation versus those that have yet to deploy this type of technology. The cost gap has grown by $2 million, from a difference of $1.55 million in 2018. Companies in the study with fully deployed security automation also reported a significantly shorter response time to breaches, another key factor shown to reduce breach costs in the analysis. The report found that AI, machine learning, analytics and other forms of security automation enabled companies to respond to breaches over 27% faster on average, than companies that have yet to deploy security automation – the latter of which require on average 74 additional days to identify and contain a breach. Incident response (IR) preparedness also continues to heavily influence the financial aftermath of a breach. According to the report, companies with neither an IR team nor testing of IR plans experience $5.29 million in average breach costs, whereas companies that have both an IR team and use tabletop exercises or simulations to test IR plans experience $2 million less in breach costs – reaffirming that preparedness and readiness yield a significant ROI in cybersecurity. Some additional findings from this year's report include: Remote Work Risk Will Have a Cost: With hybrid work models creating less controlled environments, the report found that 70% of companies studied that adopted telework amid the pandemic expect it will exacerbate data breach costs. CISOs Faulted for Breaches, Despite Limited Decision-Making Power: Forty-six percent of respondents said the CISO/CSO is ultimately held responsible for the breach, despite only 27% stating the CISO/CSO is the security policy and technology decision-maker. The report found that appointing a CISO was associated with $145,000 cost savings versus the average cost of a breach. Majority of Cyber Insured Businesses Use Claims for Third Party Fees: The report found that breaches at studied organizations with cyber insurance cost on average nearly $200,000 less than the global average of $3.86 million. In fact, of these organizations that used their cyber insurance, 51% applied it to cover third-party consulting fees and legal services, while 36% of organizations used it for victim restitution costs. Only 10% used claims to cover the cost of ransomware or extortion. Regional & Industry Insights: While studied companies in the U.S. continued to experience the highest data breach costs in the world, at $8.64 million on average, those studied in Scandinavia experienced the biggest year over year increase in breach costs, observing a nearly 13% rise. Responding healthcare companies continued to incur the highest average breach costs at $7.13 million — an over 10% increase compared to the 2019 study. About the StudyThe annual Cost of a Data Breach Report is based on in-depth analysis of real-world data breaches experienced by over 500 organizations worldwide taking place between August 2019 and April 2020, taking into account hundreds of cost factors including legal, regulatory and technical activities to loss of brand equity, customers, and employee productivity. To download a copy of the 2020 Cost of a Data Breach Report, please visit: ibm.com/databreach Sign up for the 2020 Cost of a Data Breach Report webinar on Wednesday, August 12, 2020 at 11:00 a.m. ET here: https://ibm.biz/BdqhMf About IBM SecurityIBM Security offers one of the most advanced and integrated portfolios of enterprise security products and services. The portfolio, supported by world-renowned IBM X-Force® research, enables organizations to effectively manage risk and defend against emerging threats. IBM operates one of the world's broadest security research, development and delivery organizations, monitors 70 billion security events per day in more than 130 countries, and has been granted more than 10,000 security patents worldwide. For more information, please check www.ibm.com/security, follow @IBMSecurity on Twitter or visit the IBM Security Intelligence blog. 1 Report analyzes data breaches occurring between August 2019 and April 2020. Limitations of the report's methodology can be found in the report.2 The 2020 Cost of a Data Breach Report examines the cost of a mega breach, namely breaches involving the loss or theft of one million records or more, based on a separate analysis of a specific sample.3 According to the IBM 2020 X-Force Threat Intelligence Index: https://ibm.biz/downloadxforcethreatindex Press Contact:IBM Security Media RelationsGeorgia Prassinosgprassinos@ibm.com (571) 365-6065 SOURCE IBM