Compliant, practical, good: digital signing at home

The breath-taking boom in home working has transformed many areas of business life. But while everyone is eager to use video conferencing and work collaboratively, approval and signature processes are often still a laborious affair, even in the new world of work. Hardly any order or release can do without a signature, as it is required for the validity of legal transactions.

In the analog world, this means printing out digitally created documents, signing them, sending them by mail to other business partners, and then digitizing them again for documentation purposes. The media break sends its greetings, and the only thing missing from the "Goldfinger" scenario is "digitization" on microfilm.

Rapid increase due to corona pandemic

But seriously: What sounds like a "James Bond" from 1965 is happening just as much every day in countless companies today. And that's despite the fact that it's 2021, smartphone penetration has reached Orwellian dimensions and buzzwords like mobile, cloud and integrated services are on everyone's lips. And yet the demand for legally compliant digital signatures has risen rapidly since the outbreak of the corona pandemic.

Heise Online reports considerable business growth for Bundesdruckerei, Post and Deutsche Telekom, after all three of the largest certificate providers for qualified electronic signatures (QES) in Germany. There is talk of a threefold increase in the number of signatures and a doubling of customer and sales figures in the past year.

Not least because of the increase in cybercrimes in the home office, companies are making a virtue out of necessity and are now actually tackling the digitization of their documents and approval processes. The good news is that there are simple solutions that also work optimally with SAP.

The topic itself is not simple, but it is not overly complex either: It is about the trustworthy and secure exchange of data between suppliers, customers, employees and other parties such as authorities. What is needed is a high degree of legal certainty and traceability.

To this end, all persons and companies involved - both natural and legal - must be clearly identifiable. In the business environment, it is advisable to use a unique and verifiable corporate identity such as Trust2Go, which is provided by the provider Globaltrust.

eIDAS provides framework for digital signatures

The required security level and thus the appropriate signature method must be selected according to the required level of legal security. Starting with the manual signature on a SignPad (biometric signature) via software certificates stored in the Windows Keystore (advanced signature), the signature via smart card up to the mobile signature (qualified electronic signature, QES).

The legal basis for this is the eIDAS Regulation of the European Parliament and the European Council. It has regulated the use of trust services and electronic identification throughout Europe since 2014 and was subject to a review last year. The EU member states have adopted the regulation into national law and Switzerland has also based its corresponding federal law on eIDAS.

So the legal frame of reference is in place. What remains is the integration into existing workflows and systems. With solutions such as the digital signature folder, established providers offer the appropriate technology for signing documents digitally, regardless of time and location - in a legally secure and traceable manner.

Many years of experience with digital signature, verification and encryption allow for easy and secure connection to existing back-end systems - besides SAP also to Microsoft Sharepoint, Confluence from Atlassian and others.

Together with the e-Sign 4 and e-Sign Agent applications, this provides a modular system with flexibly combinable tools for user-friendly execution of all types of digital signatures. In addition to individual signatures, batch signatures - and thus an increased degree of automation - are also possible within the established workflows.

The year is 2021, and digital approval and signature processes will be simple, comprehensible and legally compliant even in the home office if the digital transformation is finally tackled in a sustainable manner.

With the right partner, they can be implemented quickly and efficiently in companies of any size. Optionally in the cloud or on-premises and at moderate costs based on different price models - from single workstations to group solutions.