At the CIO/CISO Interchange event in San Francisco on April 16 2018, Forrester VP Principal Analyst Julie A. Ask considered the key trends in digital business transformation and the impact they are having on security.
She summarized the key trends in customer digital experiences:
- Mobile will persist as the most important digital platform and will become an orchestrator of experiences. The role of the smartphone will continue to evolve and it will sit at the center of the ecosystem of all digital experiences
- Smart experiences will shift the cognitive load away from the consumer. Currently the cognitive load sits on the consumer, but smartphones will start to order and organize these experiences. Consumers will expect technology to anticipate what they want
- Immersive experiences built with augmented-, mixed- and virtual reality are evolving but nascent
- Conversations are a key element of future digital experiences, but one of many channel choices. Smart speakers are currently mainly used for basic things like turning on music and setting alarms. Consumers don’t actually want conversations, they want peace of mind and they want to get stuff done. They want the least path of resistance
- The future of digital experiences will be an orchestration of dynamically assembled experience components based on real-time context
Forrester’s Ask explained that “whenever we think about security or risk professionals, we think of them as inhibiting what we do. They need to be part of the conversation from the beginning,” she said. “Customer expectations are moving very quickly. Your customer experience, marketing and digital business teams are quickly assembling relationships with third parties that involve the sharing or transfer of customer data to serve customers on many touchpoints. Security professionals must get involved in these conversations early,” she advised.
“What’s worrying security and risk professionals the most is that people that don’t understand security and risk are using tools to build automatic work-flows without considering the security and privacy implications, let alone the liability associated with it.”
Ask recommended that security professionals need to ensure they can handle the collection of consumer data in real-time to “enable these experiences on a host of connected devices and the deletion per customer requests and GDPR requirements at all points of presence.
“New digital business models will force you to collect and use data in real time to conquest and set prices,” she continued. “”But how will you think through the ethics of these tactics and the long term implications on risk without slowing down business?”
With machine learning, she concluded, you need to ensure the integrity of the data and algorithms.