I don\u2019t believe there is any digital business or consumer that can be 100 percent secure 100 percent of the time, unless they opt to abandon technology and live in an obsolete analog world. It\u2019s as simple as that.\u00a0<\/p>\n
As we continue the shift from the legacy, analog economy of the last century towards a still emerging 21st<\/sup> century digital economy, new opportunities abound. Brands that couldn\u2019t have existed 20 years ago now dominate our global economy. Facebook and Google are almost totally digital, while others such as Uber, Amazon, and Apple blend the physical and digital to perfection. These are among the most recognizable, but there are countless more that make up a marketplace of brands and consumers that function in a totally different way that we did a decade ago\u2014and the change is unlikely to stop any time in the near future. As rapidly as the human race embraced the digital wave, we\u2019re just barely beginning the transition.<\/p>\n But for all the opportunity, there is tremendous risk. Our human existence has been shaped for millennia by the analog experience. It\u2019s where we learned to live, learn, and trust the world\u2014and the people\u2014around us. It\u2019s also where we learned not<\/em><\/strong> to trust.<\/p>\n For modern-world youngsters born in the \u201890s and \u2018aughts, the digital world is all they know. My kids and their friends have never known a world without smart, mobile phones and online shopping, or where homework was not assigned online (and the homework dropped into a teacher\u2019s shared Google drive), or where friends\u2014that they\u2019ll never meet face-to-face\u2014are found and relationships built.<\/p>\n But for most others, this has been a period of transition that has brought both significant challenges and even more significant risks (from the challenges of shifting from paper to electronic bills to having your personal data stolen and sold on the open market).<\/p>\n The same is true for businesses. As my children are digital natives, so too are many brands, but far more are struggling to change\u2014to reinvent themselves digitally as quickly as possible and shed old analog roots in favor of digital opportunities. But the most important, and common, issue that we all face is one of trust. It\u2019s difficult to trust the company you can\u2019t see, the bank you never visit, or the online contact you\u2019ve never met. It\u2019s even more difficult to protect, and leverage, your assets now that they\u2019ve shifted from the mattress to the great cloud in the sky.<\/p>\n When we talk about protecting assets, we\u2019re talking about employing cybersecurity to protect our digital assets against the threat-actor who would hack, steal, or destroy all that is ones and zeros. This is the dark side of digital, driven not by the greater good, but by personal, or state, gain\u2014the world of the cyber threat.<\/p>\n In the analog world, we know how to counter, or at least avoid, most threats. We know how to learn to trust a friend, or a brand. Digitally, however, it\u2019s a different story. The markers we used to look for to create bonds of friendship and trust simply don\u2019t have direct analogues in the digital world. The business processes that we used to rely upon are also no longer the same, as technology has given us a powerful tool to rethink not just what we do, but how we do it, and why.<\/p>\n In this blog (In Digital We Trust?), we\u2019ll be exploring a number of themes, primarily from an enterprise, provider, and consumer perspective\u2014themes that share a common focal point: digital trust. As cybersecurity is core to securing our information and our brands, expect a healthy dose of that. But we\u2019ll also be taking a hard look at the way we use digital today, from the technology to the processes that keep our corporate and our personal data both safe and accessible.<\/p>\n Some of the questions we\u2019ll be discussing include:<\/p>\n We won\u2019t shy away from controversy, and we certainly won\u2019t shy away from sharing a strong opinion or two. Where providers and enterprises are doing it right, we\u2019ll give them props. And when they miss the mark, we\u2019ll let you know as well.<\/p>\n\n