Latest DigiCert Study Reveals Widening Gap Between Organizations Benefiting from Digital Trust and Those Losing Out 

Enterprises doing “good, but not great” when it comes to implementing digital trust, according to the annual State of Digital Trust survey.

Lehi, Utah–February 21, 2024 —DigiCert, Inc., a leading global provider of digital trust, today released its 2024 State of Digital Trust Survey that checks in on how enterprises around the world are managing digital trust in their organizations. While digital trust overwhelmingly remains a critical focus for all enterprises, the latest report shines a light on the growing divide between the "leaders"—those who are getting it right, and the "laggards"—those who are struggling.

The difference between leaders and laggards revealed some clues and potential best practices when it comes to digital trust. The top 33% digital trust leaders enjoyed higher revenue, better digital innovation and higher employee productivity. They could respond more effectively to outages and incidents, were generally better prepared for Post Quantum Cryptography and were more readily taking advantage of the benefits of the IoT. Meanwhile, the bottom 33% laggards performed comparatively poorly in all those categories and found it harder to reap the benefits of digital innovation. In addition, the leaders were more likely to centrally manage their certificates, more likely to employ S/MIME technology, and generally employed more mature practices in digital trust management.

The 2024 survey included a series of questions to determine how well (or poorly) each respondent was doing across a wide range of digital trust metrics. After the scores were totaled, the respondents were split into three groups: leaders, laggards, and those in the middle. Comparing the results between leaders, laggards, and those in the middle, notable differences emerged:

Leaders exhibit far fewer issues related to enterprise trust (no outages, few data breaches, and no compliance or legal issues) and experienced NO compliance issues due to IoT & Connected Device trust, whereas half (50%) of the laggards did so. Leaders also have significantly fewer issues due to software trust mishaps—for example, none of the leaders experienced compliance issues or software supply chain compromises, compared to 23% and 77% of the laggards, respectively.

"As the threat landscape continues to expand, so does the gap between organizations who are leading the way in digital trust and those who are falling behind,” said Jason Sabin, CTO at DigiCert. "Those who fall within the leaders group and those who are a laggard are well aware of who they are. The danger, however, is those organizations who fall in the middle and are not taking action due to a false sense of security.”

"For organizations to be champions of digital trust, they must understand and actively implement the structure, processes, and activities that make it possible,” said Jennifer Glenn, Research Director, Security and Trust Group, IDC. “This includes keeping up with changes to industry standards, maintaining compliance with regulatory requirements in each geography, managing the life cycle of digital trust technologies, and extending trust into digital ecosystems. Companies that focus their efforts on digital trust—and make it a strategic imperative for the business—the benefits are notable, including reliable uptime, reduced risk of data compromise, and improved user trust.”

About Research Methodology

Dallas-based Eleven Research administered the survey to 300 IT, Information Security, and DevOps senior and C-level managers from enterprises with 1,000 or more employees in North America, Europe, and APAC. See full report at https://www.digicert.com/campaigns/digital-trust-survey.

About DigiCert, Inc.

DigiCert is a leading global provider of digital trust, enabling individuals and businesses to engage online with the confidence that their footprint in the digital world is secure. DigiCert^® ONE, the platform for digital trust, provides organizations with centralized visibility and control over a broad range of public and private trust needs, securing websites, enterprise access and communication, software, identity, content and devices. DigiCert pairs its award-winning software with its industry leadership in standards, support and operations, and is the digital trust provider of choice for leading companies around the world. For more information, visit www.digicert.com  or follow @digicert.