New ISACA Research: Many Organizations Believe Digital Trust Will Become More Important, Yet Budget, Strategy, Skills Lagging

As organizations pursue digital transformation, they urgently need to prioritize 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 5,800 global digital trust professionals.

Despite Perceived Importance, Prioritization Not Keeping Up

The report finds that 78 percent of respondents agree that digital trust is important to digital transformation and 82 percent 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 percent planning to increase budget for digital trust.

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

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

"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 adverse event. Improving digital trust presents a significant opportunity to increase revenue," said Rolf von Roessing, Partner and CEO, FORFA Consulting AG, and ISACA Evangelist.

Few Measuring Digital Trust Maturity

Ninety-four percent of survey respondents who measure digital trust consider it extremely/very important to their organization and 93 percent feel it is extremely/very important to measure the maturity of their organization's digital trust practices. Still, in total, only 23 percent say their organization 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 percent believe it is extremely/very important for organizations to be independently graded on digital trust practices and that the results should be available publicly. This increases to 83 percent among those who currently measure digital trust maturity.

Eighty-one percent of respondents agree that organizations 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 percent) of respondents are confident in the digital trustworthiness of their organization.

Facing Obstacles

The survey finds that lack of staff skills/training is the biggest obstacle to achieving digital trustworthiness at 53 percent and is the same across all geographic regions and industry sectors. Additional top obstacles include:

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

"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 realizing 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 percent of respondents' organizations currently used a framework for their digital trust practices, but 55 percent believed it was extremely/very important for an organization to have one. ISACA recently launched its Digital Trust Ecosystem Framework (DTEF), a comprehensive digital trust resource with indicators and controls that can be used and customized for the needs of all organizations.

Learn More

The State of Digital Trust 2024 report is available as a free download at www.isaca.org/state-of-digital-trust. To register for a related webinar on 30 July, visit https://store.isaca.org/s/community-event?id=a33VQ000000PJvVYAW.

About ISACA

For more than 50 years, ISACA^® (www.isaca.org) has equipped individuals and enterprises with the knowledge, credentials, education, training and community to progress their careers, transform their organizations, and build a more trusted and ethical digital world. ISACA has more than 180,000 members who work in digital trust fields such as information security, governance, assurance, risk, privacy and quality, and a presence in 188 countries, including 225 chapters worldwide. Through the ISACA Foundation, ISACA supports IT education and career pathways for underresourced and underrepresented populations.