Hello everyone, and welcome back to the Cognixia podcast. We are back with another interesting episode today. Every week, we get together to discuss a new topic from the world of emerging digital technologies – from new developments to hands-on guides, from things you should know to what you can do to embrace new tools and best practices, and so much more.
In today’s episode, we talk about something that has become increasingly important in recent times. Today, we will talk about digital trust and digital trust technologies. The topic might make it sound like just another boring session on ethics in the current fast-evolving digital world we live in, but trust us when we say this, it is not that. Hear us out for a few.
So, let us first understand what is digital trust. According to the World Economic Forum, digital trust is an individual’s expectation that digital technologies and services, as well as the organizations that provide them, would protect the interests of the stakeholders, and do their bit to uphold societal expectations & values. Now, we agree, that that is a very heavy definition. Let us try to break it down and simplify it a little bit. According to TechTarget, digital trust is the confidence the users have in the ability of the people, technologies, and processes to create a secure digital world. Now that’s much simpler and easier to comprehend, isn’t it? So, by extension, when an individual or a business decides to use another individual or business’ digital products or services, they confirm that they have digital trust in the business.
Why is it important for businesses? Well, the more digital trust a business receives, the more users it is likely to gain, and the more robust would be its top-line numbers. We all understand the importance of online data security at the current time. Protecting digital privacy and safeguarding the users as well as the businesses against cybercrime is indispensable. This necessitates state-of-the-art trust technology that can keep everyone safe and ensure that the valuable digital trust does not break.
According to a recent report by the IDC, with digital trust emerging as a paramount concern for organizations and consumers, business leaders and technology suppliers must expand their understanding of trust and its importance to success in the new digital economy. Customers increasingly want to know the companies that they are doing business with or whose products
and services they are using, are authentic and worth the trust they are putting in them. Businesses also need to constantly be on their toes to demonstrate their digital trustworthiness and authenticity in business, and one of the most important means to do that is by relying on the best-in-class digital trust technologies.
Now that we have a fair idea of what is digital trust, let us also understand what are digital trust technologies. To put it very simply, digital trust technologies are the range of technologies, tools, and platforms that aid in protecting and securing digital information and systems. This could include technologies like encryption, authentication, tokenization, captcha codes, access control systems, identity access management systems, digital risk management systems, cybersecurity best practices, data security safeguards, etc. The goal of digital trust technologies is to ensure that the digital systems and data in an organization are safe and secure and that the digital trust that has been placed in the organization by the users does not break. To simplify this further, we can say that digital trust technologies encompass all those technologies that enhance, propagate, and maintain digital trust in personal, social, as well as business settings. These technologies ensure a secure exchange of data, assets, transactions, agreements, etc.
In recent times, digital trust has also evolved significantly. Online transactions have become more secure, personal data is a lot safer than it used to be, sharing things on social media is not as unsafe as it once was, the police and the authorities are also keeping vigil, and our understanding of loopholes and vulnerabilities has improved, and many other developments have taken place in the past few years. At the same time, threats and exploits of vulnerabilities have also evolved. For example, earlier, if someone tried to access your account unscrupulously, you would get a notification, you would reset the password, and answer that secret question you had set up like your mother’s maiden name or the name of your first pet or the city you grew up in or the name of your first school, and done, everything was secured. However, nowadays, passwords are no longer relevant. The world moved on to two-factor authentication a while back, and now slowly, newer technologies are set to replace two-factor authentication too. In earlier times, our cell phones had no locks on them, then we could set a PIN to lock our phones, then we evolved to fingerprint locks, and then we had facial recognition step in, so you can see that technologies keep evolving.
One of the most used digital trust technologies would be the Public Key Infrastructure or the PKI. PKI commonly uses cryptographic keys to verify user identity and prevent tampering. However, PKI also comes with some glaring loopholes that often get exploited by unscrupulous elements.
Blockchain technology can be regarded as another popular digital trust technology involving a decentralized network of computers used to verify user transactions and prevent data tampering. However, in recent times, even blockchains have been known to get hacked and data thefts have taken place.
Despite the best of our efforts, data breaches are becoming increasingly commonplace and they make a big dent in the digital trust. Banks, payment gateways, social media platforms, and organizations across industries have faced the brunt of data breaches. Some of these data breaches can be attributed to human error or a weak security protocol, however, in a lot of cases, despite the strongest security measures in place there have been security breaches and companies have incurred losses to the tune of millions of dollars, and an unimaginable amount of digital trust is lost in the process. This does not mean that investing in digital trust technologies and top-notch cybersecurity measures is all in vain. It is important to not just invest in digital trust technologies but also to keep updating them regularly to ensure everything is current and relevant. Essentially, there is no 100% foolproof solution to the problem of cybercrimes, but that should not stop anyone from doing their best to take the right safety measures. This is exactly what data trust is all about.
To put it all in a nutshell, as the use of data grows exponentially with time, the need for robust and scalable data trust technologies is skyrocketing. These data trust technologies have the potential to make a real difference in our lives by playing a valuable part in protecting our privacy, preventing online fraud, and facilitating innovation as well as collaboration globally.
Hope that helps understand what the big deal is about data trust and data trust technologies.
With that, we come to the end of this week’s episode of the Cognixia podcast. We hope you found it useful and it will inspire you to learn something new. To start, we would highly recommend visiting our website – www.cognixia.com where you can check out the complete list of our live online instructor-led courses and their upcoming schedules. For any questions you might have, you can connect with us directly over the chat function there and our team will respond right away to help you out. We will be back next week with another interesting and insightful episode of the Cognixia podcast.
Until we meet next week then.
Happy learning!
