Providing Trusted Identities for Cloud Digital Signatures with GlobalSign

Image source: Adobe Stock / Saktanong.

Meeting the online identity needs of billions of services, devices, people and things is a big task, but GlobalSign, a trust service provider (TSP) and part of our Adobe Approved Trust List (AATL) program—a list of TSPs and certificate authorities (CAs) that enables people around the world to digitally sign documents in Adobe Document Cloud solutions using the world’s most trusted digital IDs—is a leader at providing trusted identity and security services to companies and people needing to conduct secure online business, whether it be communications, digital identities or authentication and encryption.

Now GlobalSign is joining Adobe in lending its identity expertise to the Cloud Signature Consortium (CSC), a group of industry leaders committed to advancing open standards for digital signing designed to work across multiple devices and surfaces. Together, we’re helping to bring fully compliant, cloud-based digital signatures to signing processes that have been traditionally tied to desktop computers.

At the heart of GlobalSign’s offering is their Digital Signing Service that eliminates the need for additional security hardware and provides trusted and compliant digital signatures. Based on a cloud public key infrastructure (PKI) platform—a set of rules and procedures needed to create digital certificates and manage public-key encryption—their solution delivers CSC-compliant digital ID services on a truly global scale across the Americas, Europe and Asia.

“Our Digital Signing Service is a true ‘game-changer’ as we are making it very easy and cost-effective to add publicly trusted digital signatures to any document workflow solution,” said Lila Kee, Chief Product Officer, GlobalSign.

Their identity and security solutions enable businesses and enterprises in healthcare, financial services, and manufacturing around the world to meet the highest levels of compliance and assurance for signer authentication.

Getting started with digital signatures in the cloud

Before a signer can digitally sign a document in Adobe Sign, their identity must be verified. After verifying their identity, GlobalSign issues a certificate-based digital ID that’s uniquely the signer’s. Every time they sign, they’ll use their own certificate and multi-factor authentication to validate their credentials and prove their identity.

It’s easy to get started digitally signing documents. Just follow these steps.

  1. Click here to get a test digital ID from GlobalSign.
  2. When responding to a request for signature sent from Adobe Sign, select Cloud Signatures, then GlobalSign as your digital ID provider.
  3. You’ll be prompted to log in with your GlobalSign account ID and password to access you digital ID.
  4. Choose your digital ID to begin digitally signing documents in Adobe Sign.

Ensuring long-term document preservation with time stamps

Adobe Sign works with time stamps from GlobalSign, too. Time stamps add extra protection to your documents, establishing the date and time a document was signed and making it possible to verify that it wasn’t altered after the timestamp was applied. To ensure the highest levels of compliance, qualified time stamps are also set up to handle Long-Term Validity (LTV), which means your documents can be verified for up to 10 years after they’re signed. This makes it easy to meet the most stringent regulatory requirements that require multi-year document archival.

Work with the leader in open, cloud-based digital signatures

At Adobe, we have a long history of developing true technical standards and working with leaders across the industry to turn them into open standards adopted by international standards organizations like ISO, ETSI, and OASIS. Adobe’s leadership with the Cloud Signature Consortium, an industry-wide effort to build a technical standard for cloud-based digital signatures, is breaking down barriers to digital transformation, bringing web and mobile simplicity to business processes that require the highest levels of assurance and compliance. Today, we’re leading the way as the first global company to deliver solutions based on this standard—so your employees and customers can work with high-assurance digital IDs and time stamps that are easy to use, easy to deploy, and internationally compliant.