Balancing digital innovation with security is critical to helping businesses deliver strong digital experiences, influencing factors such maintaining a competitive edge, customer satisfaction, customer trust, and risk mitigation. But some businesses struggle to meet that balance according to new data.
The data comes from a survey conducted by Akamai and Forrester that gathered the opinions of 350 global IT leaders. These findings showed that companies that meet the standards of being "digitally mature" — that is able to balance innovation and security — experience faster growth than their competitors. The most digitally mature companies more frequently report double-digit revenue growth than their peers.
Customers are actively seeking strong digital experiences driven by high performing websites and applications personalized to their needs. Critical to making that happen is leveraging real customer data to inform the direction and creation of new products and services that power future growth. The most mature companies succeed by putting customer data at the center of both experience and security strategies.
Building Customer Trust
Customers will not sacrifice their privacy for strong digital experiences
The real key to success in the digital era is building customer trust. Customers will not sacrifice their privacy for strong digital experiences and are more willing to share personal data with brands they trust. In fact, mere suspicion of a company's negative data use practices can cut revenues by up to 25 percent.
When firms fail to deliver on security, the damage is three-fold. Data breaches can cause damage to brand reputation, customer trust, and revenue. Customers are willing to share more data with companies they trust; in turn, their data creates rich opportunities for companies to deliver more relevant experiences. On the other hand, lost trust negatively impacts the evolution of digital experiences that drive revenue growth. Trust is the glue that binds customers to a brand.
Fortunately, this survey found that many executives understand the importance of building trust in their customers, as 75 percent say trust will be critical to their business in two years. And more than 50 percent of executives believe they already have a high level of trust from their customers. On the other hand, a significant percentage of executives are not as confident, with 36 percent reporting that they have only a moderate level of trust from their customers.
Balancing Security with Digital Experience
It's troubling that executives do not draw a strong connection between customer data and future revenue
Unfortunately, many companies are struggling to balance security with digital experience. While the average respondent scored high in agreeing a breach would have a catastrophic impact on their business, they scored lowest in making the connection that revenue is secured when customer data is secured. Since customer data is critical to improving products and experiences, it's troubling that executives do not draw a strong connection between customer data and future revenue.
In order to succeed in delivering both strong digital experiences and maintaining customer privacy with security, companies should adopt a Zero Trust framework to better deliver on the shared imperative. Zero Trust networks accomplish the dual tasks of deep, continuous data inspection across the network and lean operation and oversight. It puts the focus of enterprise security on the data itself and requires businesses to continuously assess what is trustworthy activity.
Customer data is key to success in the digital era, so businesses need to treat customer data as a valuable asset to be defended against outside threats. To maintain the trust of their customers, businesses must protect their customers' data as if their company's future depends upon it — it most likely does.
The Latest
On average, only 48% of digital initiatives enterprise-wide meet or exceed their business outcome targets according to Gartner's annual global survey of CIOs and technology executives ...
Artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly reshaping industries around the world. From optimizing business processes to unlocking new levels of innovation, AI is a critical driver of success for modern enterprises. As a result, business leaders — from DevOps engineers to CTOs — are under pressure to incorporate AI into their workflows to stay competitive. But the question isn't whether AI should be adopted — it's how ...
The mobile app industry continues to grow in size, complexity, and competition. Also not slowing down? Consumer expectations are rising exponentially along with the use of mobile apps. To meet these expectations, mobile teams need to take a comprehensive, holistic approach to their app experience ...
Users have become digital hoarders, saving everything they handle, including outdated reports, duplicate files and irrelevant documents that make it difficult to find critical information, slowing down systems and productivity. In digital terms, they have simply shoved the mess off their desks and into the virtual storage bins ...
Today we could be witnessing the dawn of a new age in software development, transformed by Artificial Intelligence (AI). But is AI a gateway or a precipice? Is AI in software development transformative, just the latest helpful tool, or a bunch of hype? To help with this assessment, DEVOPSdigest invited experts across the industry to comment on how AI can support the SDLC. In this epic multi-part series to be posted over the next several weeks, DEVOPSdigest will explore the advantages and disadvantages; the current state of maturity and adoption; and how AI will impact the processes, the developers, and the future of software development ...
Half of all employees are using Shadow AI (i.e. non-company issued AI tools), according to a new report by Software AG ...
On their digital transformation journey, companies are migrating more workloads to the cloud, which can incur higher costs during the process due to the higher volume of cloud resources needed ... Here are four critical components of a cloud governance framework that can help keep cloud costs under control ...
Operational resilience is an organization's ability to predict, respond to, and prevent unplanned work to drive reliable customer experiences and protect revenue. This doesn't just apply to downtime; it also covers service degradation due to latency or other factors. But make no mistake — when things go sideways, the bottom line and the customer are impacted ...
Organizations continue to struggle to generate business value with AI. Despite increased investments in AI, only 34% of AI professionals feel fully equipped with the tools necessary to meet their organization's AI goals, according to The Unmet AI Needs Surveywas conducted by DataRobot ...
High-business-impact outages are costly, and a fast MTTx (mean-time-to-detect (MTTD) and mean-time-to-resolve (MTTR)) is crucial, with 62% of businesses reporting a loss of at least $1 million per hour of downtime ...