Lack of leadership buy-in biggest obstacle to digital trust: report

New research from ISACA shows that many organisations believe digital trust will become more important, but budget, strategy and skills are still lagging.

As organisations pursue digital transformation, they urgently need to prioritise digital trust to achieve their goals and prepare for future opportunities, legislation and regulatory compliance. ISACA’s State of Digital Trust 2024 report reveals new data and insights around the areas of familiarity, priority, confidence, maturity, obstacles and responsibility related to digital trust from more than 5800 global digital trust professionals.

Despite perceived importance, prioritisation not keeping up

The report finds that 78% of respondents agree that digital trust is important to digital transformation and 82% say digital trust will grow in importance over the next five years, yet strategies and action to address these challenges are lagging, with only 20% planning to increase budget for digital trust.

Only 27% say increased revenue is a current benefit of digital trust, which may indicate organisations are missing opportunities to improve revenues by prioritising digital trust practices. The report identifies other top benefits of high levels of digital trust, including:

• Positive reputation (71%)
• More reliable data for decision making (60%)
• Fewer privacy breaches (60%)
   

Jo Stewart Rattray, Oceania Ambassador, ISACA, said investing in digital trust is not just a defensive strategy but a proactive approach to business growth and resilience.

“Organisations must recognise that digital trust is foundational, expected and increasingly non-negotiable when it comes to securing customer loyalty, safeguarding data and ensuring regulatory compliance,” he said. “ISACA’s new report is a wake-up call: despite recognising the importance and value of digital trust, many organisations are lagging in their efforts to allocate sufficient budget and resources towards it.

“The accelerating pace of data breaches and increasing privacy concerns mean businesses investing in robust digital trust practices are better positioned to mitigate risks and enhance their reputational capital. However, this requires a concerted effort from all levels of an organisation, starting with leadership buy-in and extending to comprehensive staff training and the adoption of effective frameworks.”

Few measuring digital trust maturity

Understanding and measuring trust is paramount to gaining actionable insights into what drives customer and stakeholder actions. In fact, 94% of survey respondents who measure digital trust consider it extremely or very important to their organisation and 93% feel it is extremely or very important to measure the maturity of their organisation’s digital trust practices.

Still, only 23% say their organisation measures digital trust maturity.

One expected growth area is independent third-party digital trust assessments, which contribute to building customer loyalty from a reliable and transparent evaluation. According to the survey, 70% believe it is extremely or very important for organisations to be independently graded on digital trust practices and that the results should be available publicly. This increases to 83% among those who currently measure digital trust maturity.

Eighty-one per cent of respondents agree that organisations that demonstrate their commitment to digital trust — for example, with a high score rating from an independent third-party assessment — would ultimately be more successful.

When looking at confidence levels, only half (52%) of respondents are confident in the digital trustworthiness of their organisation. Respondents from Oceania had significantly less confidence in the digital trustworthiness of their organisations (38%) compared to those representing other regions. Additionally, respondents from the technology services/consulting and financial/banking industries expressed significantly more confidence in their organisations — 59% and 58% respectively — than those associated with the government/military sector (46%).

“This is a time of extraordinary potential because digital trust decides whether someone is going to trust a business; give it their money or personal information for products and services; and continue to work with it if (or more likely, when) the business experiences an outage, breach or other adversity. Improving digital trust presents a significant opportunity to increase revenue,” said Rolf von Roessing, Partner and CEO, FORFA Consulting AG, and ISACA Evangelist.

Facing obstacles

To achieve high confidence and strong maturity in digital trustworthiness, organisations often have to overcome obstacles that may limit or prevent them from pursuing digital trust. The State of Digital Trust 2024 survey finds that lack of staff skills and training is the biggest obstacle at 53% and is the same across all geographic regions and industry sectors. Additional top obstacles include:

• Lack of leadership buy-in (44%)
• Lack of budget (44%)
• Lack of alignment of digital trust and enterprise goals (43%)
• Digital trust not a priority (39%)
• Lack of technological resources (37%)
• Insufficient processes or governance practices (37%)
   

“When executive leaders actively advocate for digital trust, it gains stronger buy-in, which then cascades into priority, alignment, budgets, training and technical resources, overcoming many of the key challenges that can hold them back in realising strong levels of digital trustworthiness,” said Karen Heslop, VP Content Development at ISACA.

Leveraging tools and frameworks to advance trust

According to the survey, only 18% of respondents’ organisations currently used a framework for their digital trust practices, but 55% believed it was extremely or very important for an organisation to have a digital trust framework. The top three benefits of using a framework include:

1. Saving time and effort.
2. Enabling benchmarking with other organisations in a cost-efficient way.
3. Providing added credibility and third-party validation in support of budget and staff requests.

The State of Digital Trust 2024 report is available here.

Image credit: iStock.com/olm26250