Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
We believe that this is not just a test case of seeing how to make security more simple,
as we believe that digital signatures are an important technology in themselves. Digital
signatures are increasingly important and we believe that in the next few years digital
signatures are going to be crucial in most of the systems that you will be using. We have
seen digital signatures developed in academia in the 1970's; we saw the technology move
to various industry companies like AR in the 1980's when implementation of the
technology began. In the 1990's we started seeing the technology move to legislation
and nowadays you see almost everywhere various digital signature laws such as the E-
sign bill in the US and various EU directives. Almost all countries in the West have
passed a digital signature law of one form or another, which basically says that one can
go to Court and present a document or a transaction and this document will be viewed by
the Court as legally binding. In other words, if I present a paper document signed by
someone or an electronic document signed by someone, these have equal standing in
front of the Court. What we have been seeing recently is a move from academia to
industry to legislation of digital signatures in various regulations. Regulations are
particularly true in the US, for example, in the Health Care market. In the Health Care
market nowadays digital signature regulations are being enforced on various electronic
systems used in this market and I believe that in a few years it will not be a question of
whether digital signatures are good or bad, whether they save you paper or whether they
are secure or not. You are going to be forced to digitally sign transactions because the
regulations say so.
In the US, the IPA, the DA, the FDA are all organisations that are responsible for the
various regulations which force you to sign. The same sort of process will take place in
other industries. Certainly the finance industry will be involved and hopefully when this
is true we will be able to provide the technology that actually makes it usable and makes
it practical because in today's technology while you can force hospitals to use digital
signatures, you will not see a single hospital actually deploying the current technology
because it is too complicated.
Search WWH ::
Custom Search