43 Percent of Businesses Sharing Customers' PII to other Companies; Reveals CA Technologies' Recent Global Survey

CA Technologies, one of the world’s leading software development companies, recently sponsored a global study to determine the businesses and industry experts’ views on Digital Trust. Titled ‘Global State of Digital Trust Survey and Index 2018’, the survey revealed the Digital Trust Index for 2018 to be 61 points out of 100, indicating that the consumers have significant trust on the ability of organizations to fully protect their user data.

Conducted by Frost & Sullivan, the respondents to this survey comprised of 990 consumers, 336 security professionals, and 324 business executives across 10 countries, each holding senior business and IT positions at public and private enterprises across nine industry sectors. Also, the trust index was calculated taking into account a diverse array of metrics that significantly affect the concept of digital trust.

Sharing more industry insights, Mordecai Rosen, General Manager – Security, CA Technologies, says, “In today’s digital world, consumers expect security and privacy to go hand-in-hand with a great user experience. The study clearly shows that trust is fleeting if organizations don’t do their due diligence to protect consumer data from getting into the wrong hands. Now, more than ever, organizations need to understand that success in the digital economy requires that they embrace a security-first mindset – a key tenet in our Modern Software Factory model. A loss of digital trust has implications on all aspects of a business and brand perception, so organizations owe it to their customers and shareholders to get it right”.

The key findings of the survey reflected that only half of consumers (49 percent) are willing to provide their personal data in exchange for digital services, 48 percent consumers report that they currently use or have used in the past, services of organizations that were involved in a publicly disclosed data breech. But surprisingly, only 48 percent among them have stopped using the services of an organization because of a breach. Also, the survey showed a 14-point gap between the Digital Trust Index of consumers (61 percent) and the perceptions by business decision-makers & cybersecurity professionals (75 percent), highlighting the mismatched perceptions among these audiences in a measurement of perceived consumer trust versus actual consumer trust.

Although 90 percent of the organizations claim to have fool-proof measure in place for protecting consumer data, nearly half (48 percent) of business executives admitted that their organization has been involved in a publicly disclosed consumer data breach in the last year. Shockingly, 43 percent of business executives admit to selling consumer data such as Personally Identifiable Information (PII), while only 15 percent of cybersecurity professionals surveyed knew that their company was selling data containing PII.

“We are at a crossroads in the information age as more companies are being pulled into the spotlight for failing to protect the data they hold. So with this research, we sought to understand how consumers feel about putting data in organizations’ hands and how those organizations view their duty of care to protect that data. What the survey found is that there is certainly a price to pay – whether you’re a consumer or you run a business that handles consumer data – when it comes to maintaining data privacy. Respect for consumer privacy must become an ethical pillar for any business that collects user data,” adds Jarad Carleton, Industry Principal – Cybersecurity, Frost & Sullivan.

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