Global digital signature market predicted to grow to USD 16.8 billion by 2026
A study by MarketsandMarkets projects the international size of the digital signature industry to greatly increase from USD 4.0 billion in 2021 to USD 16.8 billion by 2026.
According to this market research firm, the primary driving factors for this growth would include “fast growth in investments in electronic documents by governments and enterprises, upgrade in end-to-end customer experience and enhanced security with a controlled and seamless workflow.”
During this six-year forecast period, the industry that is projected to have the biggest market size is Banking, Financial Services and Insurance (BSFI) due to the increasing use of online monetary services including internet banking, mobile banking, and stock trading.
North America is expected to have the largest growth in the digital signature market. Companies in this region have been observed to provide considerable budget to the security of their data, particularly small to medium enterprises. US and Canadian governments have also been rolling out laws and regulations that further legitimize the use of electronic documents and digital signatures.
Senate Bill to require digital signatures for court documents
A bipartisan legislative motion is pushing for a more secure method of sharing sensitive court documents through the use of digital encryption.
As stated by co-author Senator Ron Wyden, “criminals have created counterfeit court orders which they have used to trick telecommunications and technology companies into performing illegal wiretaps and removing online content (e.g. unflattering online reviews). These criminals have been able to copy and paste a judge’s signature from a scan of a valid court order into the counterfeit order.”
The need to verify the authenticity of legal documents shared online is becoming increasingly important in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic where government and business transactions have turned to the internet in one form or another.
Digital signatures provide the assurance that an electronic document such as a signed Word or PDF file has not been tampered with while in the process of being sent to the recipient.
Research shows 75% of retail businesses possibly at risk of ransomware attacks
With the start of the holiday shopping season, cybersecurity ratings company Bitsight warns that 75% of retail stores could be vulnerable to highly-damaging ransomware attacks because of poor management of their TLS/SSL certificates.
As stated by BitSight, “many lack an organization-wide framework for discovering, cataloging, and managing TLS/SSL configurations. Instead, management is conducted on an ad hoc basis, usually at a departmental level.” The big retail companies have more at stake in this issue because the number of TLS/SSL certificates released to them number in the hundreds or even thousands.
BitSight includes the 3 following tips to provide solution to this problem:
- 1) Establish and maintain a single inventory of all TLS server certificates
- 2) Provide an effective user interface to view and manage certificates
- 3) Eliminate errors associated with manually requesting, installing, and managing large numbers of certificates.
Understandably, cybersecurity is not the expertise of retail companies that is why acquiring a hosted PKI service from a Certificate Authority like SSL.com is a viable strategy in safely managing SSL certificates. SSL.com’s hosted PKI solution allows companies to manage the life cycle of TLS/SSL certificates directly through the CA web interface or API, or optionally through the Enterprise RA system. With a Hosted PKI solution, there is no need to purchase separate hardware resulting in significant cost savings and increased cybersecurity.
SSL.com offers eSealing as a digital signing service
eSealing levels up digital signature technology by allowing an individual to sign a document on behalf of a whole organization. With eSealing, a certificate is issued to the organization and even just one authorized individual can sign thousands of documents with it.
An organization-validated signing certificate can be useful for often-used templated agreements where the company, not an individual, is who should be represented. However, signing such documents at scale individually can be inefficient and time-consuming when using hardware tokens and OTP codes for authentication, especially when signing large batches of documents such as end-of-month invoices.
With eSealing, a high-volume of documents can be “sealed” with the organization’s identity, providing the security benefits and legally-binding digital signatures available with an SSL.com document signing certificate.
To be eligible for our eSealing service, organizations must obtain an Organization Validated (OV) certificate from a Certificate Authority like us. Those with an existing OV certificate should contact support@ssl.com to have it converted to an eSealing certificate while those who are getting new eSealing signing solutions should contact sales@ssl.com.