June 15, 2011
Cloud computing increasingly becomes a prevalent IT solution in a variety of markets. According to a recent study done by the application-integration/app-hosting company Hubspan, more than 60 percent of companies surveyed said cloud computing was their strategic direction. Forrester report (April, 2011) emphasized this trend with the prediction that the cloud computing global market will grow from $40.7 billion to more than $241 billion by 2020. 
Signing documents in the cloud firmly reflects this inevitable business shift with the flagship of digital signatures technology that offers significant benefits to users from different types of business and industry. This technological change brings with it certain technical, behavioural, and even emotional challenges. The following will demonstrate how Secured Signing’s User Based digital signatures advanced technology meets them.
Change of Business Processes
- Changes how managers think about their businesses and coordinate tasks and people.
- Gives business-unit leaders and end users a greater role in obtaining and managing technology for themselves and changes the role of IT professionals.
- Changes business operations – Secured Signing’s users’ testimonials highlight the shortened response time, improved efficiency, enhanced cost effectiveness, and the paperless environment
Document Security and Verification
Every business and company is very conscious of security when sending out sensitive documents for signing or other purposes. They want to protect their communications and control and track signed documents. Secured Signing’s digital signature User-based PKI service provides each user with a unique signing key (digital ID) that is accessible only to that user. The signed document is sealed and any changes made to a document will invalidate the signatures. The digital signatures engine stores the signing keys (Private Keys) in a centralised and secure hardware device.
In addition, Secured Signing is the only online signing service that gives users the ability to verify signatures (including all signatories’ digital signature details) at their desktop offline without any link to Secured Signing’s website, or at the Secured Signing free Verification Service. For long-time archiving, a user can keep the PDF document and verify it on his desktop or online at anytime.
Legality
There are some important legal issues of concern to business owners and users who wish to sign documents in the cloud. Meeting global legal requirements and the reliability of technology and service are the primary ones.
Digital signature technology is the only one that uses the following industry standards of cryptography that observe worldwide legal requirements:
- Signatures are created under sole control of the signatory
- Identification of signatory is provided
- There is a link between the signature and signatory
- Change detection for document and signatures
Secured Signing’s user -based digital signature online service complies with ESIGN, UETA, and worldwide Electronic Transactions Acts, and exceeds their comprehensive legal requirements
Trust
In today’s competitive environment, the benefits of this highly scalable technology are too attractive to ignore. However, trust seems to be on everyone’s mind: the customers who have a concern with security, control, and data ownership, and the cloud computing services who work hard and present new advanced solutions to gain it. In a recent University of Cambridge article, “Trust on the wild web” (March, 2011), Tom Simpson said “Trusting provides us with goods beyond those that come with cooperation; but again, for these goods to materialize, the trust must be justified.” And the services described above – do just that.
Till next time,
Cheers, John