A robust security framework can help organizations improve customer confidence and bolster revenues streams from the rapidly growing digital channels.
Building trust is one of the most complex and never-ending processes for any organization. Although trust is at the core of any business relationship, once lost, rebuilding it is far more complicated than maintaining it.
Digital trust is the evolution of traditional trust models. In this era of digital transformation, while customers are rapidly embracing digital technologies, they are witness to the rising data breaches, hence the digital trust approach is vital to businesses of all sizes. It serves three distinct purposes for businesses:
1. Enables the whole-of-transformation approach
2. Delivers a safe, secure, and seamless virtual experience for their customers
3. Eliminates potential security breaches and circumvents any negative impact on revenues and consumer confidence
With the remote working environment at its peak, the ongoing mapping of risk aspects has become all the more critical. There are significant risks to information security, and without a robust digital-trust framework, it is difficult to retain existing customers and even more challenging to attract new customers.
Effective risk management, unified identity, and access management solutions can help organizations provide user-friendly authentication to secure digital identities and build confidence.
Making the most of the digital architecture
As a result of the current pandemic, companies worldwide are rushing to accelerate their digital transformation projects. Consumers are moving to a virtual environment, and companies are swiftly relying on emerging technologies to speed up their performance and growth.
This major transformation has resulted in higher cybersecurity risks and demands a greater focus on safeguarding consumers’ digital assets.
Simply put, digital trust implies the trust of all those involved in an organization in protecting and securing personal data and privacy. It is the cornerstone of modern-day business operations in today’s world, enabling organizations to boost consumer retention and generate new revenue streams.
Organizations are turning to the zero trust security solution that enables the digital trust model to secure digital infrastructure and continuously monitor the different behaviors, networks, and devices through which data gets accessed. The protection of customer information is paramount, and it becomes essential for a company’s digital architecture to be well adapted to secure data.
At the same time, organizations need to ensure that a digital-trust implementation is not a put-off for the customers or jeopardize their overall experience, which must remain frictionless while being secure. Moreover, the implementation should be well aligned with the organization’s digital architecture and conform to compliance requirements so that it does not hold back or disrupt any ongoing cloudification and digital transformation efforts.
These goals can be achieved by reducing manual controls and tapping into the power of emerging tools for intelligent and analytical automation controls. By leveraging such next-generation tools and technologies, organizations can greatly speed up authentication and login processes across multiple user devices.
It matters to be holistic and transparent
As digital initiatives and cloud ecosystems have grown, organizations have become vulnerable by exposing their user interfaces and APIs to a broad range of stakeholders.
According to PwC’s recent report Global Digital Trust Insights 2021, a new set of risks is emerging due to new technologies and business models. To address the issue, most businesses (96% of the 3,249 executives surveyed) are adjusting their cybersecurity strategy amidst the COVID-19. The survey also highlighted that over 50% of respondents now consider cybersecurity in every business decision, compared with 25% last year.
Mitigating threats, with an eye on a digital-trust implementation, therefore requires a comprehensive approach. It needs to be implemented as part of a wider and holistic information security framework while addressing the following:
- Ensuring security governance, including information privacy, third-party risk, and IT regulatory compliance needs and gaps, against the business challenges
- Smart integration of identity and access management (IAM) solutions, leveraging automation and machine-learning tools
- Deployment of appropriate fraud detection tools, policies, and solutions that identify real users concerning fraudsters
It is critical to note that building trust is more than about making precise security decisions and establishing identity. It is an amalgamation of detailed analysis and understanding of the unique needs of both businesses and their customers. The digital-trust vendors and solution providers therefore need to take proactive steps and create a strategy that is not just sharp and agile but also fully transparent. In other words, they should be able to build the digital trust with the clients, which the clients in turn will be building with their end customers.
The clients should be able to discover and realize the actions being taken to secure their information. There should be also be transparent processes to provide users with an idea of what will be done with their data and its potential impact.
Find out more on how digital-trust solutions work for your business and what you can accomplish by implementing them.
To hear from experts, join the webinar Cloud IAM: Your Key to Digital Transformation
Also, download The Forrester Wave™: Risk-Based Authentication, Q2 2020