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Digital Maturity: Building Customer Trust Drives Success

Ari Weil

Balancing digital innovation with security is critical to helping businesses deliver strong digital experiences, influencing factors such maintaining a competitive edge, customer satisfaction, customer trust, and risk mitigation. But some businesses struggle to meet that balance according to new data.

The data comes from a survey conducted by Akamai and Forrester that gathered the opinions of 350 global IT leaders. These findings showed that companies that meet the standards of being "digitally mature" — that is able to balance innovation and security — experience faster growth than their competitors. The most digitally mature companies more frequently report double-digit revenue growth than their peers.

Customers are actively seeking strong digital experiences driven by high performing websites and applications personalized to their needs. Critical to making that happen is leveraging real customer data to inform the direction and creation of new products and services that power future growth. The most mature companies succeed by putting customer data at the center of both experience and security strategies.

Building Customer Trust

Customers will not sacrifice their privacy for strong digital experiences

The real key to success in the digital era is building customer trust. Customers will not sacrifice their privacy for strong digital experiences and are more willing to share personal data with brands they trust. In fact, mere suspicion of a company's negative data use practices can cut revenues by up to 25 percent.

When firms fail to deliver on security, the damage is three-fold. Data breaches can cause damage to brand reputation, customer trust, and revenue. Customers are willing to share more data with companies they trust; in turn, their data creates rich opportunities for companies to deliver more relevant experiences. On the other hand, lost trust negatively impacts the evolution of digital experiences that drive revenue growth. Trust is the glue that binds customers to a brand.

Fortunately, this survey found that many executives understand the importance of building trust in their customers, as 75 percent say trust will be critical to their business in two years. And more than 50 percent of executives believe they already have a high level of trust from their customers. On the other hand, a significant percentage of executives are not as confident, with 36 percent reporting that they have only a moderate level of trust from their customers.

Balancing Security with Digital Experience

It's troubling that executives do not draw a strong connection between customer data and future revenue

Unfortunately, many companies are struggling to balance security with digital experience. While the average respondent scored high in agreeing a breach would have a catastrophic impact on their business, they scored lowest in making the connection that revenue is secured when customer data is secured. Since customer data is critical to improving products and experiences, it's troubling that executives do not draw a strong connection between customer data and future revenue.

In order to succeed in delivering both strong digital experiences and maintaining customer privacy with security, companies should adopt a Zero Trust framework to better deliver on the shared imperative. Zero Trust networks accomplish the dual tasks of deep, continuous data inspection across the network and lean operation and oversight. It puts the focus of enterprise security on the data itself and requires businesses to continuously assess what is trustworthy activity.

Customer data is key to success in the digital era, so businesses need to treat customer data as a valuable asset to be defended against outside threats. To maintain the trust of their customers, businesses must protect their customers' data as if their company's future depends upon it — it most likely does.

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Application performance monitoring (APM) is a game of catching up — building dashboards, setting thresholds, tuning alerts, and manually correlating metrics to root causes. In the early days, this straightforward model worked as applications were simpler, stacks more predictable, and telemetry was manageable. Today, the landscape has shifted, and more assertive tools are needed ...

Cloud adoption has accelerated, but backup strategies haven't always kept pace. Many organizations continue to rely on backup strategies that were either lifted directly from on-prem environments or use cloud-native tools in limited, DR-focused ways ... Eon uncovered a handful of critical gaps regarding how organizations approach cloud backup. To capture these prevailing winds, we gathered insights from 150+ IT and cloud leaders at the recent Google Cloud Next conference, which we've compiled into the 2025 State of Cloud Data Backup ...

Private clouds are no longer playing catch-up, and public clouds are no longer the default as organizations recalibrate their cloud strategies, according to the Private Cloud Outlook 2025 report from Broadcom. More than half (53%) of survey respondents say private cloud is their top priority for deploying new workloads over the next three years, while 69% are considering workload repatriation from public to private cloud, with one-third having already done so ...

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Back in March of this year ... MongoDB's stock price took a serious tumble ... In my opinion, it reflects a deeper structural issue in enterprise software economics altogether — vendor lock-in ...

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Zero-day vulnerabilities — security flaws that are exploited before developers even know they exist — pose one of the greatest risks to modern organizations. Recently, such vulnerabilities have been discovered in well-known VPN systems like Ivanti and Fortinet, highlighting just how outdated these legacy technologies have become in defending against fast-evolving cyber threats ... To protect digital assets and remote workers in today's environment, companies need more than patchwork solutions. They need architecture that is secure by design ...

Traditional observability requires users to leap across different platforms or tools for metrics, logs, or traces and related issues manually, which is very time-consuming, so as to reasonably ascertain the root cause. Observability 2.0 fixes this by unifying all telemetry data, logs, metrics, and traces into a single, context-rich pipeline that flows into one smart platform. But this is far from just having a bunch of additional data; this data is actionable, predictive, and tied to revenue realization ...

64% of enterprise networking teams use internally developed software or scripts for network automation, but 61% of those teams spend six or more hours per week debugging and maintaining them, according to From Scripts to Platforms: Why Homegrown Tools Dominate Network Automation and How Vendors Can Help, my latest EMA report ...

Cloud computing has transformed how we build and scale software, but it has also quietly introduced one of the most persistent challenges in modern IT: cost visibility and control ... So why, after more than a decade of cloud adoption, are cloud costs still spiraling out of control? The answer lies not in tooling but in culture ...

Digital Maturity: Building Customer Trust Drives Success

Ari Weil

Balancing digital innovation with security is critical to helping businesses deliver strong digital experiences, influencing factors such maintaining a competitive edge, customer satisfaction, customer trust, and risk mitigation. But some businesses struggle to meet that balance according to new data.

The data comes from a survey conducted by Akamai and Forrester that gathered the opinions of 350 global IT leaders. These findings showed that companies that meet the standards of being "digitally mature" — that is able to balance innovation and security — experience faster growth than their competitors. The most digitally mature companies more frequently report double-digit revenue growth than their peers.

Customers are actively seeking strong digital experiences driven by high performing websites and applications personalized to their needs. Critical to making that happen is leveraging real customer data to inform the direction and creation of new products and services that power future growth. The most mature companies succeed by putting customer data at the center of both experience and security strategies.

Building Customer Trust

Customers will not sacrifice their privacy for strong digital experiences

The real key to success in the digital era is building customer trust. Customers will not sacrifice their privacy for strong digital experiences and are more willing to share personal data with brands they trust. In fact, mere suspicion of a company's negative data use practices can cut revenues by up to 25 percent.

When firms fail to deliver on security, the damage is three-fold. Data breaches can cause damage to brand reputation, customer trust, and revenue. Customers are willing to share more data with companies they trust; in turn, their data creates rich opportunities for companies to deliver more relevant experiences. On the other hand, lost trust negatively impacts the evolution of digital experiences that drive revenue growth. Trust is the glue that binds customers to a brand.

Fortunately, this survey found that many executives understand the importance of building trust in their customers, as 75 percent say trust will be critical to their business in two years. And more than 50 percent of executives believe they already have a high level of trust from their customers. On the other hand, a significant percentage of executives are not as confident, with 36 percent reporting that they have only a moderate level of trust from their customers.

Balancing Security with Digital Experience

It's troubling that executives do not draw a strong connection between customer data and future revenue

Unfortunately, many companies are struggling to balance security with digital experience. While the average respondent scored high in agreeing a breach would have a catastrophic impact on their business, they scored lowest in making the connection that revenue is secured when customer data is secured. Since customer data is critical to improving products and experiences, it's troubling that executives do not draw a strong connection between customer data and future revenue.

In order to succeed in delivering both strong digital experiences and maintaining customer privacy with security, companies should adopt a Zero Trust framework to better deliver on the shared imperative. Zero Trust networks accomplish the dual tasks of deep, continuous data inspection across the network and lean operation and oversight. It puts the focus of enterprise security on the data itself and requires businesses to continuously assess what is trustworthy activity.

Customer data is key to success in the digital era, so businesses need to treat customer data as a valuable asset to be defended against outside threats. To maintain the trust of their customers, businesses must protect their customers' data as if their company's future depends upon it — it most likely does.

The Latest

Application performance monitoring (APM) is a game of catching up — building dashboards, setting thresholds, tuning alerts, and manually correlating metrics to root causes. In the early days, this straightforward model worked as applications were simpler, stacks more predictable, and telemetry was manageable. Today, the landscape has shifted, and more assertive tools are needed ...

Cloud adoption has accelerated, but backup strategies haven't always kept pace. Many organizations continue to rely on backup strategies that were either lifted directly from on-prem environments or use cloud-native tools in limited, DR-focused ways ... Eon uncovered a handful of critical gaps regarding how organizations approach cloud backup. To capture these prevailing winds, we gathered insights from 150+ IT and cloud leaders at the recent Google Cloud Next conference, which we've compiled into the 2025 State of Cloud Data Backup ...

Private clouds are no longer playing catch-up, and public clouds are no longer the default as organizations recalibrate their cloud strategies, according to the Private Cloud Outlook 2025 report from Broadcom. More than half (53%) of survey respondents say private cloud is their top priority for deploying new workloads over the next three years, while 69% are considering workload repatriation from public to private cloud, with one-third having already done so ...

As organizations chase productivity gains from generative AI, teams are overwhelmingly focused on improving delivery speed (45%) over enhancing software quality (13%), according to the Quality Transformation Report from Tricentis ...

Back in March of this year ... MongoDB's stock price took a serious tumble ... In my opinion, it reflects a deeper structural issue in enterprise software economics altogether — vendor lock-in ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 15, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses Do-It-Yourself Network Automation ... 

Zero-day vulnerabilities — security flaws that are exploited before developers even know they exist — pose one of the greatest risks to modern organizations. Recently, such vulnerabilities have been discovered in well-known VPN systems like Ivanti and Fortinet, highlighting just how outdated these legacy technologies have become in defending against fast-evolving cyber threats ... To protect digital assets and remote workers in today's environment, companies need more than patchwork solutions. They need architecture that is secure by design ...

Traditional observability requires users to leap across different platforms or tools for metrics, logs, or traces and related issues manually, which is very time-consuming, so as to reasonably ascertain the root cause. Observability 2.0 fixes this by unifying all telemetry data, logs, metrics, and traces into a single, context-rich pipeline that flows into one smart platform. But this is far from just having a bunch of additional data; this data is actionable, predictive, and tied to revenue realization ...

64% of enterprise networking teams use internally developed software or scripts for network automation, but 61% of those teams spend six or more hours per week debugging and maintaining them, according to From Scripts to Platforms: Why Homegrown Tools Dominate Network Automation and How Vendors Can Help, my latest EMA report ...

Cloud computing has transformed how we build and scale software, but it has also quietly introduced one of the most persistent challenges in modern IT: cost visibility and control ... So why, after more than a decade of cloud adoption, are cloud costs still spiraling out of control? The answer lies not in tooling but in culture ...