You must have heard about digital signatures as a productive and savvy approach to deal with the “paper issue” and the procedure for signatures, so you choose to support digital signature solution in your association to supplant the old procedure of scanning, mailing and faxing of the documents. You have endorsement to actualize the solution for e-signature but the question is how to choose a reliable vendor to get digital signature certificates? The digital signatures have gained a lot of ubiquity but it has not creates equal solutions. Before you actually implement this solution, you need to understand how the technology will help in the needs of the signature procedure?
Here mentioned are some of the important tips that you should follow to apply digital signature certificate from a reliable vendor.
- Identification and Authentication– Just like the way the users have to prove their identity as to who they are, in the same manner the vendors need to provide authentic information like- i) does the users have to provide identification proofs before applying a electronic signature to the document, ii) what is the gravity of the authentication process, and iii) will you get the right to use the documents after signature even without authentication?
- Audit trail– Audit trail can be defined as the feature which helps in the tracking of the signer’s documents and actions after every transaction to deliver full confirmation of the complete transaction that took place. Here are certain things that you should make a note of: i) First thing is that you need to check whether the signature solution tracks all the events in the process of signature, ii) secondly, the details of the information of each events that are being stored, iii) Whether these information’s are secured from tampering. Get digital signature if all information’s are being given to you.
- Notice and Consent– A notice should be given to the users that they will be involved in the process of electronic signature and they should be able to determine it. You need to check whether the vendor gives: i) a proper notice on using the digital signature, ii) has the user been denied to use the services, iii) has the consent of using digital signatures being given clearly iv) whether the permission given to the user is being traced as a noticeable action or not. These are all the things you should check out!
- Signature and intent– An action needs to be taken by the users to clearly give an indication on the purpose of signing the documents electronically. You need to ensure that the intent is clearly communicated to you.
- Association– Another major aspect to look out for is whether the signature is linked to the records or the data being signed to verify the association between them. You need to make sure that how the signature is associated with the documents that you have signed.
Last but not the least; before you apply digital signature, you need to make sure that the signatures need to be based on certain standards that can be validated not only for short time but for the years to come.