The past always informs the future, so it would be hard to discuss the Future of Trust without, at first, acknowledging the significant impact that the COVID-19 pandemic has had on computing. Pushed into supporting remote and hybrid work models, organizations scrambled to set up the necessary infrastructure to continue operating, while people incorporated more technologies and digital identities into their everyday experiences.

In the Future of Trust, we see the push and pull of digital services. With the growing prevalence of cloud-based services, greater volumes of data are collected and analyzed, driving the need for more automation to provide insights into the data, as well as artificial intelligence innovations that promise to alleviate pain points experienced by organizations and their customers.
All of this uncertainty is prompting organizations to turn to "the certainty of data." In our top 10 Future of Trust predictions, we see the thread of data-driven insight running through privacy, security, compliance, risk, and ESG – the elements comprising the Framework of Trust. This relationship between data-driven insight and Trust is cyclical. Customers confer Trust onto organizations that transparently share data driven insights, but Trust is a prerequisite to overcome consumer reluctance to share the personal data required to generate high quality organizational insight.