With quantum computing and new advancements in artificial intelligence on the horizon, digital trust is more important than ever before.

DigiCert Inc., which provides public key infrastructure and digital verification, aims to secure its customers’ digital assets for the future, according to the company’s chief trust officer, Lakshmi Hanspal (pictured).

“As someone who’s led security, privacy and aspects of trust at scale in companies like Amazon, Box and SAP, I’ve had the privilege to view firsthand the journey of trust more from a compliance checkbox to a strategic imperative,” she said. “We are going to see 2025 and beyond more companies invest in this critical role because they’re dealing with complex regulatory landscapes.”

Hanspal spoke with theCUBE’s John Furrier about the role of a chief trust officer and what quantum computing and generative AI mean for the future of digital trust and security. (* Disclosure below.)

Cultivating digital trust from the ground up

The role of chief trust officer, or CTrO, will become indispensable, Hanspal believes. She compares it to the role of chief information security officer, suggesting that a CISO’s scope is more internal while a CTrO works on a wider spectrum.

“A CISO primarily focuses on the technical and the security aspects … such as cybersecurity infrastructure, incident response, operations and compliance with security standards,” Hanspal explained. “A CTrO takes a broader view of trust. It encompasses privacy, encompasses ethics, reputation management and stakeholder relationship.”

DigiCert ensures greater trust with its customers by employing a customer zero standard and testing its own technology before it releases to customers. This allows the company to solve customer concerns before they arise and maintain what Hanspal calls “institutional operational excellence.”

“We can have use cases for our customers in terms of the optimization and efficiency that they need to aim for,” she said. “I call that term institutional operational excellence. When we think about customer zero, it helps us understand where we need net new SKUs, where we wrote something to fill a gap. Now, is it just a gap that we need or do we anticipate our customers needing it? Then that becomes a product conversation.”

Facing a future of quantum computing and AI

Hanspal compares digital trust priorities to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, placing institutional operational excellence at the base, followed by software trust, which encompasses a customer’s software bill of materials and code signing, then content trust, which includes knowing the provenance and authenticity of your content.

The final component is quantum compute readiness. Because quantum computers can bypass traditional cryptographic algorithms that would normally take longer than a human lifetime to solve, cybersecurity practices will have to adapt.

“When we think about quantum compute with mechanisms like super positioning and entanglement, that helps to reduce that complexity and solve problems in minutes,” Hanspal said. “Now, this has a number of implications. Think about Microsoft, Google, IBM, all thinking about drug discovery and the harder problems to solve in terms of aspects of doing good for humanity. Now, the same compute can cause an existential risk problem to existing cryptographic standards.”

Fortunately, there are steps customers can take to ready themselves for quantum and gen AI-fueled cyberattacks. DigiCert helps businesses discover and inventory their cryptographic assets and prioritize the most important ones, as well as prepare for quantum-resistant ciphers and institute new monitoring mechanisms.

Gen AI will also be a component in digital security, though Hanspal emphasizes that companies will have to contend with multiple trust issues because of gen AI’s tendency to hallucinate or produce inaccurate results.

“Our focus is to enable secure gen AI with each one of our customers wherever they want to [be],” she said. “But to do so in having that institutional operational excellence, that trusted framework that again preserves the cyber hygiene and the content trust and the software trust, because gen AI is going to write software.”

Here’s theCUBE’s complete video interview with Lakshmi Hanspal:

(* Disclosure: DigiCert Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither DigiCert nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE