Tag: Digital Trust

Digital Trust – the Key to Secure Customer Engagement and Stickiness | Blog

In an age of pervasive cyberthreats and attacks, enterprises increasingly realize that ensuring trust and privacy is vital in the customer journey. In fact, CXOs now view cyber risks as business risks that can prevent them from establishing strong customer relationships, and they are proactively trying to find ways to address privacy or security gaps in their customer engagements.

In this context, the goal of digital trust is to instill confidence among enterprise customers, business partners, and employees in an organization’s ability to maintain secure systems, infrastructure, and perimeters, as well as to provide a secure, reliable, and consistent experience. Today, digital trust underpins businesses’ success directly by creating confidence among customers and other stakeholders.

Users at the core of digital trust

Establishing digital trust goes beyond the creation of a secure application or enforcement of stringent regulations to avoid cyberattacks. It is about leveraging the right combination of tools and technologies to create a superior digital experience for users that not only protects their privacy but also exceeds their service expectations.

To create such an unparalleled and smooth user experience through their digital transformation initiatives, enterprises should ensure and embed digital trust seamlessly in their processes and systems. Organizations need to understand that they can achieve 360-degree trust only if they keep the user at the center of digital transformation initiatives and build enterprise security controls around user attributes such as device, data, applications, and user environment.

To make digital trust a reality, enterprises should comply with privacy regulations to have the right data security controls across environments, employ usage-based security controls across the IT estate, provide secure access to user devices, understand user behavior through behavior and entity analytics, and monitor user activity to create secure access across applications, devices, and networks.

Building digital trust the right way

In a 2019 Everest Group survey of 200 CIOs, about 71% said they believe that they lacked centralized visibility across their IT estate, almost 42% said they were unable to measure and quantify end user experience, and 53% were unable to leverage essential technologies to improve end-user experience. About 70% of enterprises still lacked the capabilities of a unified threat detection system to prevent, detect, and manage unknown threats. These figures point to the glaring gaps in enterprises’ IT security infrastructures and understanding of their users’ experiences.

The concept of digital trust ties together business objectives and business resilience goals and ensures that the right user with the right intent is granted the right set of access and permissions for the right purpose. To build digital trust among users, organizations need to consider specific action items for different cybersecurity segments to create 360-degree digital trust, as outlined in the exhibit below.

Instead of implementing discrete security controls across the organization, enterprises need to take a holistic, outcome-oriented approach to cybersecurity. When organizations approach cybersecurity with the objective of creating a seamless user experience, it facilitates a sense of mutual and complete trust.

Digital trust in the age of COVID-19

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to a massive shift from offline to online channels. Such digital business extensions have created unprecedented security concerns worldwide. Users are concerned about the security of their private data and how organizations handle it. To build trust, enterprises must focus on building an empathetic and secure organization. If they can get this right, they will be able to win customer loyalty and trust, thereby laying the foundation of a future-proof sustainable business. As the world fights the pandemic, digital trust could well be the glue that binds customers to them.

To learn more about the need to think of IT security as the key enabler of digital trust among users and customers, please see our latest report, Digital Trust – The Cornerstone of Creating a Resilient and Truth-based Digital Enterprise. You could also reach out to us directly at [email protected] or [email protected] to explore this concept further.