The fields in which ISACA’s professional community works – such as audit, risk, security, privacy and governance – feed into the more encompassing realm of digital trust.
In an ISACA Live episode this week, Mark Thomas, president of Escoute Consulting and a member of ISACA’s Digital Trust Taskforce, and Karen Heslop, vice president of content development at ISACA, provided their perspectives on what digital trust means and why it has become a focal point for ISACA.
“This is much deeper, much more broad, than just security,” Thomas said.
Added Heslop: “This is really much more of a business concept than an information and technology concept.”
ISACA considers digital trust to be “the confidence in the integrity of relations, interactions and transactions among providers and consumers within an associated digital ecosystem.” Successfully building and sustaining digital trust allows enterprises to operate more efficiently and nimbly while developing deeper relationships with customers.
“With higher trust, we have a better relationship (with customers), and we may have more repeat business and lifetime customers that might result from that,” Thomas said.
Thomas said that in addition to technology professionals, product and service owners play prominent roles in organizations’ ability to advance digital trust. Similarly, added Heslop, functions such as HR and marketing need to be aligned in understanding how their areas of the organization are critical to building digital trust.
“What ISACA is trying to do is say, hey professional, hey enterprise, start thinking about your practices and how they impact digital trust, and where you can develop new practices or activities that will enhance your trustworthiness, and therefore, ideally, enhance your revenues and your operations,” Heslop said.
Tapping the input of its professional community, ISACA is developing a digital trust framework, slated to be available in the fourth quarter of this year, that will include mappings to prominent industry frameworks such as COBIT, NIST and ISO, serving as a complement to those frameworks with a sharper and more encompassing digital trust focus.
View the full ISACA Live episode here, and find more ISACA digital trust resources at www.isaca.org/digital-trust, including an upcoming digital trust course that will be free for members.