Digital ID Roams Safely

Arcot's SignFort now supports use of SAFE-BioPharma Association's digital identity and signature standard. This enables SAFE user credentials to be stored centrally on a network for anytime-anywhere access. SAFE-BioPharma includes the world's largest biopharmaceutical companies.

Digital signing technology

SignFort allows signing electronic documents with SAFE digital signatures from any location without tokens, smart cards or software stored on desktops. The application provides strong authentication of the user before it allows access to the SAFE credential.

"Arcot has a long history of working with the pharmaceutical industry and SAFE," said Mollie Shields-Uehling, president and CEO, SAFE BioPharma Association. "By supporting use of SAFE signatures, Arcot is helping SAFE member companies ensure the veracity and legality of digitally signed documents and is streamlining business and regulatory approval processes and operations."

The benefits

By relying on SAFE digital credentials, the pharmaceutical industry can take advantage of roaming digital IDs to move away from paper-based business processes rapidly. By going digital, they reap huge potential savings by replacing the inked signatures on paper documents. The pharmaceutical and biotech industry estimates that it spends about 40 percent of annual research and development costs on paper-based processes. This represents $9 billion in the United States.

"The SAFE model defines a technical and legal framework for establishing trust in digital identities and signatures, and Arcot's SignFort offers a convenient and secure way to apply SAFE signatures to electronic documents," said R. "Doc" Vaidhyanathan, vice president of product management for Arcot. "With SignFort, individuals only need to have Adobe® Acrobat® or Adobe Reader® software to be able to apply SAFE-compliant digital signatures."

Powerful partnership

Arcot SignFort and Adobe Reader streamline the process of digitally signing documents allowing employees, partners and customers to sign documents in an easy, scalable and cost-efficient manner. SignFort strengthens audit capabilities of signature operations by keeping detailed logs. Arcot's patented authentication technology embedded into Adobe Reader 8 provides increased security for signing electronic documents.

For further information about Arcot's software-based security solutions, visit www.arcot.com or call 1-866-99-ARCOT.