IDC Introduces the Enterprise PC Trust Perception Index

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The Enterprise PC Trust Index, International Data Corporation’s (IDC) first independent study of PC vendors in the trust space, was issued. The research comprised 1,029 enterprise PC decision makers and buyers across 15 industries, who were surveyed on their perception of the trustworthiness, strengths, and weaknesses of their selected enterprise PC vendors. This study was independently conducted and published by IDC as part of its ongoing Trust Perception Index research series. No external sponsorship or vendor funding was involved. In the IDC Trust Perception Index report, Dell commanded the highest trust score among their customers which indicates that Dell evidenced strong performance across each of the four pillars of trust: Security, Privacy, Compliance, and ESG.

“We hear repeatedly how important trust is, but most of the available guidance focuses on organizational leadership, transparency, and other hard-to-measure efforts, which can stall out conversations about brand trust or confine efforts to increase brand trust to marketing and sentiment analysis,” said Grace Trinidad, PhD, research director, AI Security & Trust. “The IDC Trust Perception Index for Enterprise PCs helps us understand exactly which offerings within security, privacy, compliance, and ESG make the biggest impact on customer trust and how customers perceive the trustworthiness of their enterprise PC vendors. This information enables vendors to focus their efforts to increase brand trust and trustworthiness on their high impact offerings or by addressing gaps in available offerings as well as clarify how vendors can and should broadcast their trustworthiness to their customers.”

The study focused exclusively on vendor performance, reporting that the greatest security weakness across all vendors was log and event management. The most often cited reason for this weakness was “excessive automation” that was “detrimental.” This finding comports with the rapidly increasing volume of data collected from servers, network devices, applications, and endpoints and the attendant challenge of maintaining necessary oversight over opaque log and event data. Compounding this challenge, systems logs are often in inconsistent formats which makes necessary analysis across all data sources challenging. The potential of AI in improving log and event management cannot be overstated, but organizations are signaling the need for navigable transparency into their increasingly complex systems.

The IDC Trust Index, IDC’s newest survey tool, is intended to evaluate an organization's perceived trust position relative to their marketplace peers. The research explores brand trust and trustworthiness through examination of four components critical to trustworthiness: Security, Privacy, Compliance, and ESG. The study was conducted in ten languages worldwide via web survey, resulting in a total of 1029 responses from Enterprise PC customers. Survey respondents are asked to identify their selected enterprise PC vendors as well as those vendors that were considered but not selected. The vendor results presented in this report are derived from the responses provided by their own customers. Detailed results of the Enterprise PC Trust Perception Index are provided in this IDC Survey. Detailed study demographics and survey methodology can be found in the Appendix of this report.

IDC runs the Trust Perception Index yearly on specific markets. Previous areas covered by the IDC Trust Perception Index include Public Cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Database Management Systems (DBMS).

“Disclaimer: The IDC Trust Perceptions Index score is based on normalized survey data of customer perceptions. While the scores offer directional insight into relative trust across vendors, differences in scores may not reflect statistically significant gaps due to variations in sample size and score distribution. These results should be interpreted as indicative rather than an absolute measure of trust.”