Priorities of C-suite leaders usually focus on growth, security, digital transformation and, more recently, enabling a remote workforce to operate successfully. While all of these aspects are important to keep an organisation profitable, secure and at the forefront of innovation, digital trust underpins every one of these priorities. Without it, every area of the business would cease to function.
Digital trust is a concept no business leader can ignore today. With the shift to remote work, digital trust is vital in order for leaders to ensure employee productivity, business security, and customer satisfaction.
The importance of digital trust
IDC defines trust as the condition that “enables decisions to be made between two or more entities, reflecting the level of confidence between them,” and is an “up-levelling of the security conversation to include attributes such as risk, compliance, privacy and even business ethics”.
The issue of digital trust has presented itself as the central business challenge for organisations in the last year, as we have shifted to a remote working structure.
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In this context, it is crucial for leaders to understand the perimeters around trust, as well as which employees, partners and customers to trust to access data and systems. Vice versa, these employees, partners and customers must trust that an organisation can protect any personal data they share.
To ensure digital trust, effective security policies and tools can help lay a foundation, especially those solutions focused on seamlessly managing the identities of users. In the enterprise it begins with a Zero Trust approach focused around identity, and the ultimate goal of risk-based access policies, continuous and adaptive authentication and frictionless access.
With stringent security measures in place, all stakeholders can trust that each member has authorised access to business systems as required. This symbiotic online relationship between organisations and stakeholders is digital trust.
How organisations can cultivate digital trust
Most importantly, leaders must be transparent about the implemented cybersecurity measures and policies to foster trust and staff buy-in. According to Okta’s Digital Trust Index, 34% of employees admit to not knowing if their employer has done anything to protect them from cyberthreats, indicating that businesses need to do more to communicate and educate employees.
This poses a threat in itself, as user uncertainty around cybersecurity measures puts the business at greater risk. If employees are unclear about what is and what isn’t protected by the organisation’s security platforms, they are unable to apply best practice online, so are less able to identify issues when they arise. Leaders must cultivate a culture of transparency to ensure all stakeholders are effectively educated on the organisation’s cybersecurity measures.
The importance of education
Security must always be the first layer of trust. For employers, partners and customers, it is vital they feel secure sharing their data. And for trust to be cultivated by organisations, education is crucial.
Amidst the need for better education, the cyberthreat landscape is constantly evolving, with new tricks and methods tried out frequently. Leaders need to ensure continuous education is enabled not only for leaders in the C-suite, but employees at all levels of an organisation. Since the shift to mass remote work, many office workers have become victims of phishing attacks, data breaches and new risks such as deepfake fraud.
But businesses must also ensure they are staying ahead of the game as much as they can in order to combat these new threats with new approaches, and engaging in ongoing conversations with employees while doing so.
A Zero Trust approach validates the identity of individuals’ before trusting anyone in the digital realm. This strategy puts identity at the heart of digital security, and invokes risk-based access policies and continuous and adaptive authentication, meaning identity validation is required for user access to be granted.
As enterprises move towards this approach, it is vital that users are kept afoot with the evolving nature of the cybersecurity policies in place. The growth in knowledge across all levels of the business will lead to improved understanding and a stronger belief in the reliability, truth and ability that together form the basis of digital trust.
When applied effectively, this trust from employees, partners and customers will not only mitigate harm, but will ultimately drive loyalty, revenue and value for organisations. Whether they are aware of it or not, digital trust reinforces each priority on leaders’ agendas, and will continue to grow in importance as we delve deeper into a digital world.
