Do You Really Need Digital Assurance?
Do You Really Need Digital Assurance?
In recent years, governments and businesses have prioritized digital assurance, ensuring confidence in the safety and integrity of data within digital ecosystems. With the rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and recent cases of AI misuse—such as deep fakes and counterfeit documents—securing digital assurance has become essential for decision-makers.
But is digital trust truly a necessity for every organisation?
Not Everyone Needs Digital Assurance
When we first embarked on building digital trust solutions, I believed every company could benefit from digital assurance. However, our journey over the past 6 years has shown that digital assurance isn’t universally required. In some cases, it’s a “good-to-have,” not a necessity.
By working with both public and private sectors, we’ve uncovered where digital assurance creates the most value.
Here are real-world challenge statements we’ve addressed with digital assurance solutions, highlighting key commonalities that serve as indicators for whether your organisation needs one.
Challenge Statement 1: Enabling Trusted Talent Mobility
Context
Traditional paper-based and PDF credentials are difficult to authenticate, share, and store, which leads to:
- Inefficient verification: Time-consuming processes for verifiers and institutions
- Inadequate skills identification: Credentials don’t reflect precise competencies
- Untrusted qualifications: Paper credentials are easily tampered with or falsified
Solution
Accredify’s digital trust platform enables educational institutions to issue instantly verifiable credentials with detailed metadata, reducing the burden on verifiers and allowing learners to build trusted portfolios of skills.
Challenge Statement 2: Securing Public Health During COVID-19
Context
Governments needed a scalable way to verify COVID-19 test results, but traditional methods were insufficient:
- Manual, inefficient verification: Overburdened the healthcare ecosystem
- Untrusted records: Test results could be tampered with or falsified
- Lack of data portability: International authorities struggled to verify test results from other countries
Solution
Accredify’s government-notarised, instantly verifiable COVID-19 test results provided a reliable, scalable solution, safeguarding public health and enabling the resumption of business and international travel.
Challenge Statement 3: Ensuring Accountability in Business Ecosystems
Context
Government-issued corporate documents in PDF format are vulnerable to tampering, causing:
- Inefficient verification: Manual, error-prone, and costly.
- Untrusted documents: Easy to falsify.
- Lack of transparency: Difficult to confirm the latest version of a document
Solution
Accredify’s verifiable business profiles and licenses reduce verification burdens and allow stakeholders to instantly authenticate the latest business information.
Indicators That You Need a Digital Trust Solution
Indicator 1: Existing Data-Sharing Challenges
The core value of digital trust lies in enabling easy, secure, & trusted data sharing. If data sharing is difficult for your organisation, it may be useful to consider the role of digital trust in your processes. Here are some common challenges with data sharing:
- Security and Accessibility: Balancing secure data access with operational efficiency can be difficult. Accredify’s project with ACRA enabled external stakeholders to access specific documents securely, without compromising ACRA’s database.
- Unscalable Verification: The process of verification is time-consuming for both issuers and verifiers. In our COVID-19 and education use cases, the verification process created massive operational inefficiencies for clinics, schools, and employers.
- Useable Transparency: Oversharing or undersharing data can either overwhelm or underinform stakeholders. Digital trust helps find the right balance. For example, verifiable credentials allow employers to easily identify specific skills through digital badges or metadata.
Indicator 2: Fragmented Digital Ecosystems
The value of a digital trust solution is in enabling trusted data sharing, but this value is only truly realised when data needs to be shared across fragmented digital ecosystems, i.e. when data needs to be transferred across different digital ecosystems.
All the use cases above faced the same conditions when it comes to data sharing – data sets are being issued and relied upon by disparate stakeholders in various digital ecosystems, without a central trusted issuer with absolute control over the data.
Let’s take the education use case as an example.
Each institution has its own digital ecosystem, i.e. credentials issued by the institution can be trusted by them and their students. If these degrees and certificates are to be used within that ecosystem, and in that ecosystem only, then a digital trust solution is not needed. A solution, as simple as a spreadsheet, will do just fine in ensuring digital trust.
Within this singular ecosystem there is only 1 single issuer (the institution) that acts as the trusted source of truth. While recipients (learners) may tamper with their credentials, it is easy for verifiers (e.g. teachers, admins) to authenticate the credentials since there is only 1 issuer and source data is readily accessible.
It is when learners take this data to apply for jobs, that a transfer of data to a different digital ecosystem happens. Every employer or different institution has its own digital ecosystem. The introduction of alien data into the ecosystem by the learner creates a gap in digital trust. It is this gap that results in significant inefficiencies, costs, and risks to the stakeholder(s) in the receiving digital ecosystem, i.e. the employer or other institutions.
In such fragmented environments, there are multiple issuers (institutions and training agencies) that act as disparate sources of truth. This makes it difficult for verifiers to authenticate credentials as a single recipient may present multiple credentials from multiple issuers, requiring the verifier to request access to different databases owned by these various issuers to authenticate the presented credentials. Imagine repeating this verification process hundreds of times for hundreds of applicants – the inefficiencies are very clear.
Operating, or having your data used in a fragmented digital environment, is quite arguably the most important case for a digital trust solution.
Indicator 3: Impact of Compromised Data
The consequences of compromised data can be significant. To assess your organization’s risk, consider:
- Who would be impacted if your data-sharing challenges remain unsolved (e.g., your organisation, clients, or the broader ecosystem)?
- How would they be impacted?
- How severe would the impact be?
In the COVID-19 use case, inefficient verification threatened public health, business operations, and international travel. In such cases, a digital trust solution is critical.
Indicator 4: New Opportunities Powered by Digital Assurance
A digital trust solution can unlock new value, such as:
- Data Analytics: Accredify’s clients can access data on credential usage, helping them make data-driven decisions to optimize product offerings and forecast demand.
- Partnerships: Accredify’s collaboration with China Credentials Verification (CSSD) is made possible with verifiable credentials, as it can enable the trusted global movement of Chinese talent.
- Branding: In industries like education, verifiable digital badges serve as a competitive edge, helping learners stand out in the job market, driving social marketing, and boosting course conversions.
Evaluate with a Pilot Project
Determining if your organization needs a digital trust solution can be challenging.
Use this simple framework:
- Is the challenge a data-sharing problem?
- Is data sharing taking place across fragmented ecosystems?
- Is the impact of compromised data significant?
- Are there new opportunities enabled by digital assurance?
If you have determined that your challenge can be addressed with digital trust technology, then the next step is finding an appropriate solution.
To this end, we are offering Accredify’s platform to businesses and government agencies that want to address a digital trust challenge. By running a pilot together in partnership, we intend to share our technology with organisations in tackling meaningful problem statements that can make a positive impact on our world.
If you’re facing a digital trust challenge, or even if you’re unsure, let’s have a chat and maybe it could be the start of a more trusted, secure, digital ecosystem, with you leading the change.
What Can We Do For You Today?
Whether you are looking to transform your business, have questions about our solution, or curious to explore new use cases with verifiable information, we are always happy to chat!