Trusted technology: the key to ensuring successful transformation

In the face of growing public concern over privacy and trust in digital technology, organizations are putting greater focus on security, with security-by-design seen as vital to transforming with intent.

Our annual technology survey discusses the importance of security in digital transformation and finds that by taking a security-by-design approach; businesses can be sufficiently confident to accelerate their digital transformation efforts, reduce the risk of security breaches and protect the interests of their customers and business partners.

Cybersecurity and privacy concerns ranked highly in our survey, with 40 percent of companies saying that enhancing security has become a key goal in their XaaS projects. Seventy-one percent of businesses say they have to become more proactive at integrating trust, security, privacy and resilience into technology rollouts. And more than half (51 percent) of cybersecurity teams are focusing on how to automate, streamline and embed security into the core of the business.

The adoption of new technologies, along with greater connectivity and dependence on digital services, open up new attack surfaces and new routes for exploitation of systems. Wise organizations invest to manage these risks as an integral part of their transformation program.

Proactively managing security risks has other advantages, including improving the success rates of transformation projects, building trusted relationships with a wide range of stakeholders including customers, clients and an increasingly complex and interdependent ecosystem of suppliers. All of which increases confidence in the organization’s digital future.

Our survey shows that security is being recognized as a key commercial imperative. Businesses that perform strongly on security will secure long term competitive advantage: 63 percent of the organizations say that improving cybersecurity and privacy helps them to provide a loyalty-winning customer experience.

The challenge for companies is to enhance resilience and trust without making security a hindrance and an overhead. Security done right can help streamline customer interactions, make it easy for employees to do the right thing, and ultimately protect the organization and the data it holds in trust for others.

Security-by-design embeds security into the core of the business and is becoming an accepted principle: 62 percent of businesses are managing risk in the early stages of projects with security and control by design to increase the success rates of transformation programs. In some countries, this security-by-design approach is far higher: 74 percent in Brazil, 83 percent in China and 88 percent in India.

However, integrating security as part of the product itself across a wide range of software and platforms is not always easy: it calls for specialized skills, which can be difficult to find during a skills shortage. Building more varied technology teams at the outset can help by bringing different perspectives to digital transformation, as well as source more diverse talent. Investing to create the right tooling and processes within the development environment early on helps build secure and trustworthy foundations in tech stacks so that organizations are empowered to accelerate achievement of their digital ambitions. Retrofitting security has always been costly and high risk.

For more information, read the full KPMG global tech report 2023, or speak to one of the team below.