Page 63 - Cyber Defense eMagazine June 2024

Digital trust remains top of mind

The State of Digital Trust survey sought to determine why enterprises remain so focused on digital trust.
The most important drivers included:

• The emergence of more remote workers as part of today’s increasingly hybrid workforce
• More networks, including additional devices at the network edge connecting to partners and
customers
• Escalating customer expectations for digital trust

Survey participants also cited drivers like the increasing pace of business; increasing threat surface,
escalating network and application complexity; and growing threats from bad actors and exploits.

Despite their understanding of the need for digital trust, organizations still contend with real challenges
in achieving it. Many face a lack of staff expertise, since not all staff have the expertise needed to govern
digital trust in a centralized, scalable way given the many stakeholders involved.

The scope of what enterprises need to protect is also daunting, as the number of connected users and
digital assets grows. Organizations also cited a lack of management support, as the economic
environment has become more challenging, and resources are more limited.

How well are organizations doing?

Although the new survey showed that most enterprises are fully engaged with the digital trust issue, their
success varied, depending on certain areas of focus. To better understand the differences between digital
trust “leaders” compared to “laggards,” the survey also tiered the results, and compared organizations
based on their responses.

Enterprise trust practices

Enterprise digital trust is usually managed by IT, and includes initiatives like certificate management,
identity and access management, and endpoint or email security. Most enterprises have had these
initiatives in place for years, so it was surprising that only 1 in 100 enterprises describe their enterprise
digital trust practices as “very mature.”

More than 90 percent reported outages, brownouts, and data breaches, while most reported limited agility
to respond to outages and security incidents. However, organizations identified as digital trust leaders
performed much better. These organizations exhibited fewer issues related to enterprise trust, with no
outages, few data breaches, and no compliance or legal issues.

Cyber Defense eMagazine – June 2024 Edition 63
Copyright © 2024, Cyber Defense Magazine. All rights reserved worldwide.