Can Today’s Providers Deliver the Elements of Digital Trust?

The role of the service provider has changed considerably as digital technologies and shifting user/consumer behavior have disrupted traditional business models and B2B/B2C models. Our recent discussions this past May at the HfS Working Summit in Dallas reinforced the idea that as we shift into the As-a-Service Economy, enterprises and brands must ensure outsourced operations and technology be viewed as part of the overall business ecosystem and operate with the same level of collaboration and partnership that was available when all business functions were fulfilled in-house.

For BPO and IT managed security providers (MSPs), this means offering security solutions that not only “secure” but also support enterprise and brand outcomes that directly reinforce and improve the customer experience (CX) and digital trust of users and consumers.

This represents a challenge as outsourced functions in the traditional legacy model have been viewed as discrete functions, with their own set of performance metrics that are often as silo’d as the contractual relationships that govern them. For managed security providers, security is a cross-functional capability that must move beyond legacy cyber-security and be woven throughout the enterprise ecosystem, including internal enterprise operations, shared services providers and other outsourcing partners.

To enable a high level of B2B and B2C CX and digital trust in the emerging As-a-Service Economy, managed security providers must support eight fundamental “must have” security elements, spanning both technology and behavior:

• Data Integrity: ensuring end-to-end data integrity and security across all platforms.
• Device Security: monitoring and preventing intrusions at the device level, including firewalls, virus detection, management, etc. designed to prevent device hijacking and unauthorized access.
• Application Security: providing traditional security (e.e.g, encryption, VPN support, web filtering, user authentication, etc.) for all applications.
• Platform/Performance: measured from both the ability to secure the underlying infrastructure (PaaS, SaaS, etc.) and the ability to ensure ongoing operations (resiliency, continuity of operations, processing/network performance, data recovery, etc.).
• Identity/Privacy: shifting beyond the legacy user identification and protection of personal data to a more user-centric perspective that includes data ownership, user-aware provisioning and use of data, and the ability for identity and privacy policies to be negotiated across an increasingly omni-channel environment.
• Governance/Compliance: supporting the necessary incident management and reporting tools to measure performance and guarantee cross-device/cross-provider awareness and compliance.
• Business Alignment: ensuring security elements are properly aligned with the various business goals that weave throughout an organization (and their internal/sourcing partners), including the ability to fluidly adapt specific security elements to match changing or dynamic user channel/engagement programs.
• User Engagement: a focus on actively monitoring user/consumer usage patterns, identifying emerging behavior-related risks, the identification of usage/adoption inhibitors (not just to security-related tasks but across all user/consumer touch-points), and the means to shape and reinforce positive user/consumer behavior (including feedback mechanisms that take into account the impact on overall digital trust).

Businesses that fail to properly leverage security and work towards achieving end-to-end customer experience (#CX) will be increasingly unable to survive, let alone thrive in this market. Addressing only a few of the enablers of Digital Trust is like delivering a partial agenda for a meeting – ineffective at best, and disruptive at its worst.

Service providers, and enterprises, need to ask some hard questions: How do providers realign both their enterprise client’s expectations in KPI’s, not to mention their internal processes, to address improved digital trust and CX as an outcome? How does a service provider gain access or insight into a user/consumer they may never interact with directly? And what type of partnerships and collaborative arrangements are required, or even feasible, to both gain consumer insight and be able to shape or reinforce consumer behavior?