Growing your business in a permacrisis: why trust is now a powerful asset

Today’s chaotic environment requires a fundamental shift in your strategy if you want your business to survive and thrive. Business growth is still possible, and MEA remains a region full of opportunity, but the actions you must take to achieve growth have changed. The state of permacrisis has become an active influence that constantly reshapes how you must think and operate.

Digital borders are expanding, and MEA is home to increasingly complex data sovereignty, regulatory, and compliance requirements. Cybercrime has become an industry in itself, driven by a growing “crime-as-a-service” economy. Furthermore, AI has become ubiquitous and embedded throughout your technology estate, in your cloud, edge, and networks. Together, these factors have redefined the role of technology: it is both a powerful and essential growth engine and, at the same time, one of your biggest sources of risk.

It’s a situation that directly impacts trust. Your customers and partners want to know if they can rely on your systems, whether they can trust how you manage their data, and if you can guarantee business continuity in an unpredictable world. It means that if you want to plan for growth, you must start designing around uncertainty. Which all begins with trust.

In a January 2026 report from S&P Global Market Intelligence, MEA was predicted to be the only major global region to experience economic growth in 2026 . In light of recent events and the continuing uncertainty in the region, that situation has obviously become more challenging. So it is perhaps time for business leaders to consider new tactics to drive growth. Engendering trust can be one of them.

Many executives are beginning to recognize that the previously nebulous concept of trust is becoming a key factor in business performance. Research by PwC  found that companies that invest in digital trust recover faster from disruption and outperform competitors. Furthermore, 93% of business leaders believe building and maintaining trust improves bottom lines, and companies that focus on trust achieve around 9% higher shareholder returns than those that don’t.

But you don’t build trust on promises alone. It must be earned through proven reliability, transparency, and performance through all your systems and operations.                 

Customers want to trust the businesses they buy from, something that is particularly relevant to sectors like banking, retail, and travel, where trust drives loyalty and repeat business. If you want to give customers a trusted digital experience, trust must run throughout the whole digital journey.

That starts with your digital infrastructure. A trusted digital environment is built on platforms that enable consistency, control, and resilience by design. This means taking steps like ensuring robust cybersecurity across all your networks, cloud, and applications, and not treating cybersecurity as an afterthought. You must also have end-to-end observability that gives you real-time insights into how your systems are performing, and where any risks might occur. And it means leveraging trusted AI tools to anticipate and mitigate threats before they really impact your business.

Furthermore, a multicloud approach that incorporates strong sovereignty controls enables you to adapt more quickly, shift workloads as needed and avoid overreliance on a single provider. In a world of permacrisis, being able to move, adapt, and respond rapidly helps you drive both operational continuity and customer confidence, and engender greater trust.

Approached correctly, trust can become more than a marketing exercise or a checkbox in your annual report - it can become a genuine catalyst to help you grow your business. For example, trusted AI can help you deliver more personalized and predictive customer experiences, automate workflows, and improve decision-making. All of which help you improve efficiency and also strengthen relationships with both your customers and employees.

Trusted cybersecurity, enhanced by AI, gives you the protection you need to grow your business with confidence, while also preparing you for emerging threats like quantum-enabled attacks. Ultimately, trust can position you to scale more effectively, make smarter investments with greater certainty, and innovate more quickly.

However, trust is not built in isolation or from a position of “tech nationalism”, such a fragmented approach only leads to instability. Implementing a platform-based model can help you integrate connectivity, cloud, cybersecurity, and AI into a unified, consistent environment. It’s a route to lower complexity, improved governance, and greater agility through scalable, pay-as-you-go models.

Your ecosystem is vital to building trust, too. You must work with the right platform partners who bring not only technology solutions to the equation, but also expertise, reliability, and shared accountability.

At Orange Business, we see trust as the foundation of everything we do. We work in line with the Orange Group “Trust the Future” initiative, through which we are committed to being a trusted partner across every area of digital life.

We combine trusted infrastructure with a world-class ecosystem of partners and solutions, across multicloud connectivity, sovereign cloud services, AI and advanced cybersecurity, all designed to help you grow your business with confidence in an uncertain world.

In a world in a state of permacrisis, trust is no longer optional or a nice-to-have. It can be a powerful business enabler that can give you greater resilience, improves your competitiveness, and helps you unlock new opportunities..