Digital Trust Roadmap: Grow Your Business, Cut Your Risks
In Digital Trust: Epilogue and Strategic Roadmap (PDF, 4MB), CSC’s Leading Edge Forum examines the evolution of digital trust in-depth. This volume, the final of an eight-part series, offers updates on topics covered in previous volumes, including identity management, intellectual property (IP) protection and eThreats. It also presents new insights and a “roadmap” for the future of digital trust. Among this volume’s key points:
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Digital trust is real. There are security technologies and services that create enterprise value while still addressing important information risks. There is no longer any excuse for businesses to default their security investment strategies to tools that simply claim to reduce risk.
“We invest billions of dollars every year in risk reduction, and we don’t expect a payoff,” says Ron Knode, the report’s lead researcher and CSC security expert.
“We ask every other member of our enterprise leadership to create value, but we don’t ask or expect our security team to even try! Over time we’ve narrowed our vision of security to only traditional ‘risk management,’ and then we try to justify all actions only as necessary costs, and that’s a shame.”
But,” adds Knode, “we are now seeing the reality of digital trust in a large variety of enterprise efforts, and the payoff is real. A digital trust strategy changes the game.”
Organizations must aim high to see real payoffs. A digital trust strategy that focuses on value creation will usually reduce risk exposure as a natural consequence. On the other hand, focusing on traditional information risk management, or enterprise risk reduction, does not usually deliver a digital trust result.
“If all you’re aiming for is compliance, that’s all you’ll get. Why aim low?” asks Knode. “Aim high. Aim for value creation, and even if you don’t quite get the value payoff you intended, you’ll get the reduction in enterprise risk exposure.”
In earlier volumes, Knode pointed to organizations that were using digital trust technologies not only to create new value through IP, but to improve the IP’s protection at the same time. These include HarperCollins, the Harvard Business School, Nickelodeon Channel and the television networks that broadcast National Basketball Association games.
“We have seen enough to post fundamental digital trust directions and signposts that others can follow. Organizations can accelerate their own value creation and generate the largest possible payoffs without having to explore every pathway for themselves,” Knode says.
However, the report notes that digital trust “travelers” must first adjust the specifics of the roadmap to their own business model, industry segment and business objectives.
“For example, enterprises whose business model depends on monetizing intellectual property (e.g., entertainment companies) generate value with digital trust technologies in different ways than do highly regulated global financial enterprises (e.g., insurance companies). On the other hand, nearly every type of enterprise can generate value with certain categories of digital trust (e.g., converged identity),” the report says.
For this reason, Knode says that multi-enterprise teams will be at the heart of the next steps into digital trust. Because each business is different, there is no one-size-fits-all approach. Simply saying “Let’s apply a digital trust strategy for our enterprise” ignores the basis of value creation.
Partnerships that include business, IT and security are able to resist the seductive “slide” of effort into unproductive information risk management areas that are not the target of digital trust. These partnerships also help keep the focus on value creation.
The speed of digital trust is relentless. As Knode says, “Nothing moves faster than the speed of digital trust.” New circumstances, technologies and digital trust payoffs occur every day, the report says, requiring organizations to stay on top of the topic.
The key is to change the model of security governance. Value creation must fully become a part of the assignment of security leadership, and security teams should be measured and rewarded for value creation in addition to risk exposure reduction.
“The roadmap is a starting point, but we will continue to explore digital trust as it evolves in our Digital Trust blog,” says Knode. “The blog is the perfect place to keep up with the velocity of digital trust as new and evolving security services and technologies create value and deliver payoffs for the enterprise.”