eMudhra: Providing Innovative Solutions Towards Enabling A Digital Society
The benefits of going digital are many. Reduced cost, improved efficiency, greater convenience and increased customer satisfaction to name a few. No wonder, 85% of CIOs across the globe are planning to spend up to a quarter of their total budget on digital transformation going forward. But what is the success rate of such kind of lengthy and costly endeavor? A mere 16% say a recent IBM survey.
But what is the reason for this unfortunate condition? As per Mr. V Srinivasan, Chairman, eMudhra, this trickles down to two main reasons. “One is that most businesses, owing to the breadth of implementation, often end-up incorporating only the ‘digital skins,’ i.e., only the front-end that the customer sees and interacts is digital, whereas the backend that is supposed to be driving engine isn’t really digital with still a large reliance on paper, which is unacceptable.
The other is that CIOs across the globe are used to delinking security and digital transformation. As a result of this, not enough effort is put into designing or implementing a comprehensive security system that can augment digital transformation and ensure that they reap in all the rewards. The fact that 31% of companies have already experienced cyber-attacks on operational technology infrastructure in one form or the other is a vindication of this notion,” he explains.
Born out of an idea to bridge the digital divide, eMudhra has taken upon itself to plug these gaps and aid in seamless and most importantly, secure digital transformation. Through their innovative suite of PKI powered solutions, eMudhra strives to help companies take care of the authentication woes and implement a complete digital ecosystem.
AN OCEAN OF DIGITAL SOLUTIONS
As a licensed Certifying Authority with presence across multiple countries, eMudhra has positioned itself uniquely to drive digital transformation across the globe. With innovative offerings such emAS, emSigner and emCA, the company is adding wings to the ‘Secure Digital World’ dream.
emAS, eMudhra’s identity and authentication engine, is the answer to authentication woes that is haunting businesses across the globe. The innovative offerings supports over 15 modes of authentication including digital signature, allowing banks and other enterprises to quickly and securely place centralized identity, access, single sign-on and authentication system that promotes secure logins into various online applications. eMudhra’s flagship signature and digital workflow management solution, emSigner, is driving complete paperless transformation of enterprises. This solution uses legally valid electronic and digital signatures to help enterprises to quickly go paperless and save up to 80% on operating costs.
Finally, there is emCA, which is a robust, standards compliant, fully scalable policy driven digital certificate issuance and management solution. Leveraging latest asymmetric cryptography technology, this innovative offering supports seamless provisioning, deployment and management of Digital Signature Certificates for individual users, companies and devices, thereby facilitating secure identity, access and authorization management.
The company also provides eSign 3.0 services, which offer users a new and innovative way to quickly sign documents using electronic signatures generated relying on an offline e-KYC mechanism. In fact, eMudhra is one of the first licensed e-Signature Service Providers (ESP) in India to roll out the new eSign services.
A REAL-LIFE EXAMPLE
A combination of the above solutions can empower many interesting use cases. One such use case revolves around the use of eMudhra’s stack to digitize and streamline the end-to-end process of managing, signing and storing the Employment Eligibility Verification Form, also known as I-9 forms, for a leading IT company operating in the US.
The current process of completing Section 1 and Section 2 of the Form I-9 was very complicated, paper intensive and time-consuming. To complete Section 1, the newly hired employee had to take a print out of the I-9 form, manually fill in all the details, attest all the supporting documents, and physically add a signature in all the pages of the I-9 form as well as the supporting documents. To make matters worse, they had to complete the entire process within the first day of joining the new job. Same was the case with the HR department of the IT company.
They only had three days to thoroughly verify all the details presented by the employee, manually fill Section 2 of the I-9 form as per the details provided by the employee and add signatures in all the pages of the form to validate their authenticity. Also the fact that they had to deploy additional resources to scan and upload documents into the electronic employment confirmation system — E-Verify — operated by United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) to run employment eligibility checks was not helping the cause.
The IT company thus wanted to take the complexity out of this process by digitizing the entire process and providing provisions to electronically sign all the documents using US eSign Act complaint e-signatures (both with regards to the newly hired employee and the HR department of the employer) and approached eMudhra in search of an answer.
“We went about devising a two-step process to help the IT company achieve their objective,” says Mr. Saiprasad, VP – Enterprise Products & Delivery. “The first part involved setting up of an Enterprise CA for issuing US eSign Act complaint e-Signatures when a Create or Generate Signature request is raised by the newly hired employee or the HR department of the company. eMudhra used their proprietary PKI solution, emCA, for this process and stored all the generated e-Signatures in a secure DB for later use. The second part involved digitalizing the entire workflow and including provisions to sign documents using electronic signatures generated in the above process.
emSigner, eMudhra’s new age paperless solution, met this need to the tee. Using this innovative paperless office solution, the IT company was able to seamlessly digitize all the documents and enable the newly-hired employees as well as the HR team to not only add legally valid e-Signatures but also time-stamp all the documents without any fuss. It helped ensure the client reduce the turnaround times associated with the process by over 60%. Further, it also helped the client save a lot of money on document storage, retention, and associated liabilities,” he explains.
THE KEY DIFFERENTIATOR
The reputation of eMudhra is not built in a day. The growing list of clientele, which has leapfrogged to reach over 2000 SME’s and large enterprises — which includes 20+ government organizations (state level, central level, and international), 45+ banks including top 20 banks in India, 30+ MNCs, several Fortune 100 companies — is a testament to their passion and commitment to deliver the best.
Talking about the same, Mr. Srinivasan says, “We are unlike another company in the industry.” “Focused on excellence and innovation, we have now reached a point where we can see the results of our efforts and hard work from the recognition of digitization initiatives in India and eMudhra as an enabler. Further, our team members occupy reputed positions in global association such as the Asia PKI Consortium, India PKI Consortium, UN CEFACT, Associate FIDO Alliance, and Cloud Signature Consortium,” he concludes.
GLOBAL VISION
Continuing their upward trajectory of growth, the company aims to expand their reach and venture into new territories. To this regard, eMudhra has already laid the foundation through 5 global offices and a channel network spanning nearly 40 countries. Further, some of the products have also undergone relevant upgrades to support multiple languages and regional business nuances. The company is planning to strongly focus on expanding their footprints in Latin America and Europe in the coming year.
With an aggressive global agenda, strong solution suite, and optimal positioning, eMudhra is one of the few Indian product companies making an impact in the global digital transformation space.
